Several People Are Typing

2^nd of January

The Twitter callout account described in a recent entry is essentially imploding, if not in content then in reputability. I’m not sure how this was determined (it seems that they came out and said it themselves) but it seems that the account is being run by a person who was recently banned from the HSD called Phoebe. This person has attracted the ire of just about everyone for various reasons that are largely unknown to me, although they are apparently extremely racist¹. I don’t have any concrete evidence of this personally, so it would be wise to take such information with a grain of salt.

What we do know for sure--as Makin has released the screenshots--is that Phoebe begged to be unbanned from the Discord server shortly before the callout account was created. Since Phoebe runs this account, it effectively destroys any possibility that it might have accomplished anything. All it does is further underscore how far people are willing to exercise petty grudges and try to get us punished. It’s interesting especially to note that the account has completely failed to gain any traction with callouts pertaining to figures who aren’t Makin.

To expound on this, various figures have only latched onto the information in the callout posts that concern Makin, but strangely ignored just about everything else. There’s vague discussion happening about getting Andrew Hussie, of all people, to come out and publicly denounce him, the subreddit, and the Discord server. The idea is that in so doing they might undercut his influence. This is completely preposterous and it only served to increase the entertainment of this entire debacle.

And make no mistake, this has indeed been very entertaining to us. It very swiftly became a meme to say, “Why haven’t I been called out yet?” or to otherwise complain about being left out of the out-of-context screenshots that the callout account has been posting. I believe Misha might have started this, and up to now he still hasn’t featured in any of the callout posts, much to his disappointment. This has been somewhat puzzling, as he’s distinctly one of the least fearful of any “repercussions” of being called out and thus says things that we understand should be causing a stir.

The account in question has also started posting images with names censored, although this is hampered by the fact that literally anyone can join the server at anytime and search through its archives instantaneously. Tera noticed this and discovered it had been included in a post (although it was not actually the subject), celebrating: “THATS ME / IM IN THE CALLOUT” (although it’s since determined that the person in the post was actually Wheals). Others have been similarly irreverent to the criticism, soaking in the ironic glory of being called out.

I haven’t seen this kind of manic energy in a very long time. There are all sorts of people crawling out of the woodwork to mock the callout posts: “remember to spam chat so when tensei says something problematic bigwarnings screenshots parts of your messages,” Carlarc remarked. Makin, of course, also participated: “why can't I get callouted by someone who's competent and not a moron?” There are countless examples of this throughout the day from all manner of people, although it should be noted that it died down at intervals. Then, inevitably, someone would post a new screenshot and the circus would start all over again.

At some point it was brought up that, while Phoebe started the account, it may actually be an old phantom who runs it currently, someone named Voidfire. I briefly described Voidfire back in one of the earliest entries of this document (22nd of August, 2017 for details), but the overall idea is that they were something of a conversational menace, and they were banned all the way back in December of 2016. The fact that they might still have a hand in all of this is bizarre and absolutely hilarious.

As the initial entertainment value began to fade away, more serious aspects of all this were inevitably introduced. Even Cookiefonster came in with an uncharacteristic bout of salience:

… why does Kate support this callout shit / I also don't like that Kate goes ahead and shits on hsd after the "we have no beef" promise from the live panel / … / I'm also confused that the callout account gives infamous banned users who everyone agrees are terrible as examples of why Makin is evil.

These and other issues with the callout posts were considered. Naturally, it’s troublesome to us that people try so hard to discredit this place and the people in it. Yet, it comes back to the fact that ultimately these posts affect us to almost no degree whatsoever. Really, it’s just the principle of the thing that bothers us more than anything.

However, a couple people began to speak out as the discussion ran its course. Speaking to the rampant cajoling taking place over the callout account, Qweq said: “... people's actions here are beyond just trying/wanting being funny. it already reached bad faith.” Such sentiments were mollified for a while, but resurfaced later in the day. A particular low point of the conversation was when Makin jokingly unbanned Archiewhite, who has been barred from mspa-lit for over a year, possibly two at this point.

Archiewhite is clamorously against Makin’s actions and history to the point of irritation, and the conversation immediately turned sour when he was allowed back to talk. He accused me of undergoing Stockholm syndrome for my continued support of Makin and the server, which he backtracked by claiming it was a joke. This only served to piss me off enormously and effectively stopped the fun completely. After much repeated nonsense like this, Archie finally left the conversation to pursue whatever his own devices were. I should hope that he stays far away from mspa-lit so as to spare us of his verbal drubbings².

This unpleasantry aside, the day overall was pretty fun, but in the evening it did take something of a turn. Despite absolutely trashing on the vast majority of the callout account’s posts, it did raise some issues that people in the HSD considered important. To us, this was far more worth discussing than anything the callout account had to say: the opinion of nebulous Homestuck Twitter³ doesn’t matter to us except for what entertainment value we can extract from it at this point, but we’re far more serious when it comes to the matters and concerns of our own users.

Specifically, the issues we talked about involved two age-old problems that have surfaced repeatedly in the past. The first involved “rogue mods,” or explicitly VirtuNat and WoC, who have a tendency to be overly harsh on users in general. Or, I should say, they had this tendency, as it has not really happened in a matter of some months. That having been said, they still operate in a way that makes a series of people uncomfortable: Tera, Andrew, Qweq, Oda, Kratospie, VR, Multivac, Gitaxian, Canis, bellicosePhodopus, and Moonjail⁴ were all among those who professed a distaste for Nat and WoC’s general demeanor.

A huge element of that distaste comes from their casual flair for insulting individual users using derogatory language (which, I must stress again, has not really been an issue for a while). This caused us to review our policy with the usage of the word “retard,” which has been a subject of repeated debate over the last so many years. It’s been massively complicated due to the fact that it’s used liberally within Homestuck proper, and due to a rather pronounced degree of inconsistency in how mods treat the issue. We’re all pretty tired of this debate, and after so long we were somewhat able to obtain a consensus. Despite WoC being at the center of this controversy, Makin followed up on an obtuse tradition and gave him the final say in this matter.

To WoC's enormous credit, as soon as he was made fully aware that he had final say on what was going on, he didn’t just barrel ahead and install his own opinion on what to do. He first extended an invitation for comments from everyone in the discussion. Then, after a period of consideration, he delivered an explanation of his stance that was well-thought out and actually took into account all of the various factors that plague us right now. I’m not at liberty to explain what was said in detail, as this all happened in the modchat, but people on both sides of the issue were fairly satisfied with his reckoning of the situation.

Still, there remains the overall problem of trying to figure out where mods stand in the scheme of things. A huge question that was posed today is whether mods are held to the same community standards as everyone else. The answer is unambiguously yes, but there is intense disagreement as to what those standards should even be. Everyone has a different idea of what it means to be a good user and follow the rules, which is a necessary downside of the more ambiguous rule system we have.

I’m still of the mind that the ambiguity usually plays into our favor when deliberating on matters of a case-by-case basis, but people like Canis and Moonjail both suggest that there’s a lot of hypocrisy present in how mods behave and are treated as opposed to the common user. I’m not comfortable with hypocrisy, although I’m guilty of it myself on occasion. Makin’s rebuttal to all of this is that most of the HSD is perfectly content or else we would hear more complaints, especially in the surveys he does every so often.

Personally, I feel that he makes a mockery of that process too much for it to be strictly effective at allowing people to voice their complaints. There are a lot of systemic issues present in how we do things⁵, but it’s difficult to tell how much of that is our fault specifically versus a fault of how these systems function in general. There is always a faction of people who will be unhappy with what’s going on and seek to change it--the difficulty is in determining the validity of their complaints and weighing it against the opinions of the rest of the people involved. I’m sure we’ll return to this issue many times in the future, but for now there doesn’t seem to be any clear resolution.

Nothing more for today.

---

8^th of January

Part of the content of the callout posts has concerned Cerulean’s involvement in the server, and his work on Aradiabot. This had been a problem even when Ceru was still a mod and worked regularly on stuff here, but since the callout account started up his claims have become more forceful: he now suggests that Makin “tricked” him into doing hundreds of hours of work for free.

This argument automatically doesn’t sit well with me. All of the mods have contributed an unbelievable amount of time to keeping the server going, but literally none of us have been paid for that effort--it’s just not possible to be compensated adequately for it⁶. That having been said, it’s not even necessary. There’s an unspoken expectation that, if you’re a mod, you’re helping out because you like the server enough to dedicate some free time to it.

All of this is to suggest that if you expect to be paid for your effort or otherwise don’t like it on the team, you’re allowed to leave at any time. Indeed, this very thing occurred with Dioxazine⁷ just recently, although they left presumably because they didn’t feel like they could dedicate enough time to keeping up with stuff. They asked to be removed and we obliged without problem. There are literally no hard feelings between us, as it’s mutually understood that sometimes things don’t work out and you’re entitled to do something else with your time.

With this in mind, Ceru’s lamentations seem less valid and are actually somewhat irritating. His regrets about being part of the HSD mod team are being used as ammo against us, which is its own non-issue in the grand scheme of things. However, it was pointed out that we’re still using Aradiabot despite Ceru not being around. This is actually a more interesting detail, and leads to some considerations: if Ceru is bothered about Aradiabot being used without compensation, why hasn’t he manually removed Aradiabot or--if he’s not able to do that--requested that we stop using it? Further, what’s stopping us from making a new bot as a replacement regardless?

The first question is mostly unclear, although I suspect it’s because Ceru doesn’t like confrontation and is afraid of initiating discussion with Makin, regardless of how justified that is. As to the second, the answer is that there’s literally nothing stopping us from making a new bot. So, that’s precisely what we did: Makin charged Nat and WoC, as the resident bot experts, to craft something that performed all of the functions Aradiabot did, with room for more.

From all of this, ArquiusBot was born. It still has some work that needs to be done, but Nat and WoC both put in around 30 hours by their estimate and got it running with almost the full suite of functionality that Aradiabot had, with plans to introduce more features as time goes by or as people request them. Makin was very pleased, announcing it to the server and declaring: “This is why they are still mods, btw.” Indeed, despite all of the recent controversies and discussion of why we keep them around despite how they treat users occasionally, it’ll be nice to have something concrete to point to as evidence of their skill and usefulness.

Nothing more for today.

---

9^th of January

Late at night we somehow got on the topic of discussing gross or otherwise off-putting comics, including “Boys Club.” Boys Club is famous for being where the ubiquitous meme Pepe comes from. The comic in general has a simple premise and doesn’t actually seem to go anywhere, based on the descriptions I’ve heard from other people. It mostly involves a set of people living in apartment and messing around, with rather sophomoric elements.

After hearing an example of Boys Club’s scatological humor, I was reminded of something I discovered many years ago that fit the bill of “gross or otherwise off-putting,” but turned up to 11. This comic is literally called “Electric Retard” and is infamous for being exceptionally vile and offensive; indeed, being disgusting is kind of the comic’s most notable feature. WoC and I have discussed the work a few times in the past, with him describing it as “distilled shock humor.” Everything I’ve said about it thus far only manages to undersell just how horrible it is.

In the course of the discussion last night I made the grave mistake of linking to it--I fully warned everyone in the chat that it was “the worst thing ever,” but after looking at it themselves a bevy of people were immediately rather upset, including Moonjail (“yikes / delete that”), Canis (“there’s cursed, and then there’s this”), Multivac (“oh i dont like this”) and Velikiy (“drew that is just disgusting”). I found this response amusing but completely understandable, and deleted the link after about 30 seconds.

WoC and I continued to discuss it for some time, talking about the overall nature of the comic and its author. However, Moonjail commented some time later, asking if we could stop talking about it. He explained that it probably isn’t a good idea to discuss such things given that there are people literally trawling through the HSD for callout-able comments. All of it hearkened back to a time where the community as a whole was way less conscientious about what was posted and how it was discussed.

Fitting that particular tone, this led to Skyplayer linking some old comics, including a sped-up gif of the infamous NOMW, that were almost explicitly designed to elicit shock and outrage from those that read them. It was determined that this was inappropriate in a larger overall discussion about what sort of content should be allowed, and after a couple of complaints Skyplayer was warned. She was explicitly upset at herself for this and left the conversation to do some self-reflection, but at that point the damage was already done.

Toast and Moonjail assumed opposite sides of an idealistic battle concerning community standards, especially with regard to policing or even censoring content. Toast is an absolute proponent against censoring things, saying that to allow people to express their opinions is always better than to disallow it. He even referenced the concurrent discussion, claiming: “all the people whining about me being mean / kept on doing the thing they were mad i did / yet i dont ban them / why? cause im not a wuss / yet i guarantee if they were in power id be perma'd years ago.” As much as I tend towards actually exercising moderating powers, this point makes sense to me.

Conversely, Mines responded: “sometimes… beliefs can be bad,” in defense of the idea that not everyone actually deserves an equal voice. This point also makes sense to me in certain scenarios: some of our historied discussions in mspa-lit have centered around the idea of what to do with a neonazi spouting their beliefs. Some people are so vociferously against them that they assert violence is an appropriate and necessary response to silence them.

Makin and I (despite his overall resistance to censorship alongside Toast) at the time both agreed that in such a situation, systematically reducing their ability to tell lies or spread misinformation is ideal. For me personally, some discussions in the HSD are like this: sometimes you must simply step in and reduce someone’s ability to speak, for some reason or another. It’s not ideal and we avoid doing it unless absolutely necessary, but the reality of the matter is that sometimes it is necessary.

Toast, for his part, doesn’t agree with this and is adamant against being censored in almost any way. However, Moonjail described that comments which are posted purely with the intent to upset other people should not be permitted. This sort of argument is completely fine and even promotes greater understanding of each other, but before long we noticed Toast getting somewhat rambunctious.

Toast eventually lashed out at Moonjail at what might have been a joke, but was nonetheless worded way too harshly. After backlash from a number of people, I spoke with him in DMs and implored him to reconsider how he was approaching the discussion. Additionally, I asked him to apologize to Moonjail for lashing out.

Toast can be a very stubborn individual sometimes, but ultimately I trust in his ability to accept criticism and think critically about it. He proved my trust to be well-founded by apologizing to Moonjail in short order. He did not proceed without his principles and so fell back to defending his thinking, but even just the fact that he apologized for acting out of line made me feel better about the entire affair. I think there was a noticeable shift in the tone of the discussion after that, being less hostile and more reconciliatory.

Unfortunately, Makin did not share my outlook on the situation. After waking up, Makin reviewed the backlog and made a relatively drastic decision. At around 6 AM EST, he decided that Toast needed to learn there are consequences for his actions (“the fricking frick”) and removed him from the mod team. While not feeling particularly strongly about it, I do understand this decision and think it’s fairly warranted.

Toast, of course, took it a little more hard; to his credit though, he still took it fairly well. He threw out some jokes and witticisms, but after contemplating the idea for a bit, he seemed rather despondent: “i wont leave the server / but i will probably post here less because otherwise i would be less sincere and probably overall less enjoyable to converse with / … / i would probably just be more of a dick if i stuck around.” So at the very least, he’ll probably take a break from participating in the HSD.

This worries me greatly, and makes me sad: Toast was the first person I talked to in earnest from here, and he’s singlehandedly responsible for getting me to participate as much as I have in the last three years. However, Toast is self-aware enough that I think he knows what’s best for him. Despite the incident from last night, everyone in chat bid Toast farewell and voiced that they hope he comes back soon. I echo their sentiments in full, it won’t be quite the same without him here.

Nothing more for today.

---

19^th of January

It’s been an interesting few days, to put it mildly. A wide assortment of things have occurred, including something that has been rather despicable, and then other stuff that was rather amusing. I’ll begin with the depressing stuff first, because I don’t want the good things to be overshadowed by what could ultimately be considered trite nonsense.

The sad news, predictably, is that the callout stuff on Twitter has reached a head. It’s been escalating slightly at times for the last several days, but Kate and Griever themselves kicked it up a notch. Griever pulled a repeat of his stint where he rejoined the community, posted something absurdly derogatory, and then left. Out of nowhere he posted on the subreddit condemning Makin for “putting a minor in charge of an NSFW server,” which is kind of strange.

The reason I say this is strange is because the original claim didn’t involve the NSFW server, it involved the NSFW channels. This is an important distinction for a couple of reasons. First, it seems that they can’t really keep the content of their complaints consistent, which further indicates that they aren’t actually bothering to follow up on information they get or otherwise verify it.

Secondly, MasterEmp was, to our knowledge, not a minor at the time they were responsible for taking care of the NSFW channels. The same follows for Cerulean and the NSFW server (edit: Wheals helpfully cleared this up after this entry was released. He describes that Cerulean lied about his age to get into the NSFW channels when he was still 17, but later by the time the NSFW server was created he was of legal age). If the basis of the concern is that we used to put minors in charge of NSFW content, this alone completely undercuts the validity of what they’re trying to do. None of this is even to speak of the fact that Makin didn’t even want NSFW stuff involved with the HSD, he simply put them up because of popular demand.

Griever wasn’t the only one involved, as I mentioned. Kate also tacked on a response to the post, initially claiming that Makin “oversaw a child porn ring” and then stealthily editing it down to “oversaw the sexual exploitation of minors.” The gravity of this accusation is unbelievably serious, which makes it all the more flabbergasting to me that she would post such a thing. If they genuinely believe that we put minors in charge of NSFW material that’s one thing, but as far as I’m aware this accusation literally came out of nowhere.

Indeed, I think that’s kind of the crux of all this to me now. I don’t even know where some of these claims are coming from. I’m pretty sure the ultimate origin for this current string of accusations is still the Twitter callout account we were dealing with at the beginning of the year, but accusing us of sexually exploiting minors is beyond the scope of anything that was posted on that account. At this point I think what’s going on is that the original accusations have gone through some sort of spite-driven game of telephone, because as the claims go around Twitter, they seem to get progressively worse based on nothing but their own perceptions.

Regardless of how it’s gotten to this level of seriousness, there’s an overarching problem with it all: whenever pressed for evidence, the people pressing these accusations are either unable to come up with any or point to the original callout account, which has been thoroughly debunked at this point. Literally all of the evidence from that account was taken heavily out of context, edited so as to be misleading, or outright fabricated.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, pointing this out hasn’t stopped people from latching onto it. I’m always just a little more sad whenever I witness the bullshit amplification principle at work. Not only that, but I think it’s accurate to say that the bullshit in this case is being solely propelled forward by people who hate Makin (not even the subreddit or Discord even) and want to see him removed.

I understand he’s had his fair share of altercations in the past--I’ve never been one to shy away from criticizing him when I felt he deserved it--but resorting to spreading malicious lies to try and “bring him to justice” is baffling and, I would think, self-defeating. The scale and severity of the claims being levied against him are patently absurd at this point, and I can’t help but scratch my head trying to figure out why.

In the end, there’s really only two explanations that make sense: either they genuinely hate him that much (which is in itself disturbing considering how far they’re going to trash his reputation), or they hate the fact that he’s in charge of communities that are often irreverent of who they are or what they do. The second option makes me a little sick to consider, given how much I’ve wanted to openly associate with the content creators in the past.

Of course, there is what could be considered a “third option,” which I have no doubt certain people reading this will cry out in support of: “perhaps they hate him because everything they’re saying is true.” I’ve already addressed this, multiple times in fact. I’m forced to believe that anyone who continues pressing this kind of thinking is not actually operating in good faith, because the alternative would be that their reading comprehension and critical thinking are poor beyond description. Let this idea and all others like it be put to rest for good.

Anyway, the overall point of all of this is that it fucking sucks. We immediately banned Griever and Kate from the subreddit for being slanderous and hostile, which naturally led to them intensifying their callouts on Twitter. It seems they inspired a bunch of copycats as well, either directly or implicitly: we’ve seen about a dozen people or so from within their personal spheres who have explicitly drawn up plans to try and raid the subreddit, with one person saying “if enough of us do this, maybe we can make the subreddit nigh unusable!” which further adds to the complete absurdity of all of this.

Another one of the claims levied against us is that we make our communities “unsafe for LGBT and minorities⁸,” but truthfully both the subreddit and Discord almost never suffer from people who try to exclude or harass marginalized people--and when such incidents pop up, we appropriately take care of it as soon as we’re aware it’s happening. This is yet another thing I’ve pointed out that doesn’t seem to stick with the people who are trying to make these callouts.

I think that the irony of a group of people claiming we’re unsafe for people and then proceed to try and raid us themselves is lost on them. When I step back and consider all of this together, it’s actually kind of funny in a perverse way: I’ve tried to explain to them that we pretty thoroughly check the subreddit to make sure things are going smoothly, and then of course we end up banning the people from Twitter who are raising a stink. It’s more evidence in the pile to suggest that we actually do our jobs and keep the community safe.

In fact, I would go so far as to call this particular claim insulting given just how much we’ve done to protect our community. I’m not sure if any of these people are familiar with the child porn raids we experienced back in 2017 or 2018. I can’t remember if I’ve explained that situation in depth, but it warrants a revisit here: back when I was first modded, it was because we were getting raided constantly by bands of outsiders who would spam gore and porn, pretty standard fare for online stuff honestly. Some time after that, we got bots and random accounts from people who were spamming actual child porn on the server.

The very first time this happened, we immediately went into overdrive: Makin immediately raised the security level of the server to make it harder for new accounts to post; most of the mods were constantly vigilant, roaming through every channel regularly to make sure that if anything was posted, it was deleted immediately. Ngame and I personally had a few nights where we didn’t sleep because no one else was available to watch for a while; we collected evidence from the intruders, such as message and account IDs, and reported them directly to Discord Trust and Safety; Makin further assisted Discord in catching the people responsible (something he’s done in other circumstances too; there are a few actual pedophile rings in the Homestuck community at least that Makin has helped to dismantle).

With all of this in mind, it’s nothing short of infuriating that people on Twitter are trying to point to us being uncaring for the safety of our users, or even actively harmful to them. It makes my blood boil to hear them spout shit like this, frankly; I have a feeling that if they were in the position we are, they would probably fuck it up enormously or simply quit because it’s too much to handle. Our community has become extremely stable and safe through our concerted efforts over the last few years.

I wonder if any of the people currently engaged in this bother to take a look through the submissions on the subreddit before they do their thing. Enough of them have surely looked at it by now that I wonder what they must think. Taking a cursory glance at our front page, every single one of these posts is utterly benign or outright supportive of Homestuck and its affiliated works.

This contrasts heavily with claims that we are “a stomping ground for bigots and bigotry behavior… literally doing nothing to protect the homestucks in their fucking server” and exhibiting “rampant racism, homophobia, transphobia and genuine shittyness towards anyone who doesnt fit their agenda” (not linking the owner so as to protect their identity). The hypocrisy in that tidbit about excluding people who don’t fit with agendas would be delicious if I didn’t think it was completely unaware of itself.

We’ve deliberated on all of this in the Discord server a bit, and while it’s frustrating to me personally, most other people don’t seem to care too much, or even find it amusing. Makin and Tensei have both commented on the proceedings: the former asserts that the number of people involved is so low that they’re basically unable to accomplish anything of note or cause any serious damage. The latter insists that the only people who are seriously bothered by any of this take things on the internet way too seriously. After some consideration, I think I agree with both of these points, although that doesn’t stop me from being upset about it to some degree.

I was supremely angry about all of this after Griever and Kate performed their spiel on the subreddit, but now that a couple of days have passed I don’t think I have it in me to actually be angry anymore⁹: this is all just too inconsequential, and it’s all happened before to no real effect. However, I’m still rather sad¹⁰ that these things are happening at all. It’s indicative of some really deep schisms in the community that will probably never be healed. What makes it worse this time is that people who have been officially involved in creating Homestuck content are tossing their hats into the ring.

I used to consider Griever a friend and I enjoyed talking with him about various things, but this is the second time he’s essentially come out and stabbed us all in the back. At this point I’m not sure if he does it because he genuinely believes it’s a problem or if he’s being opportunistic and trying to increase his reputation with people who hate us. Perhaps it’s both, but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter which one is true: both explanations are dispiriting and rob my confidence in him.

Kate is the more upsetting figure in all of this. After this happened I went back and read my entry on the visit to Chapel Hill to see her Pgenpodcast live recording, and that entry was pretty optimistic--cautiously so, but it still spoke of hope for the future. The reality of what we’re dealing with now makes it completely tragic. Kate seemed fairly reasonable and nice in person, but online she appears to be nothing short of monstrous--her accusations have gradually become more outrageous, even crossing into the realm of delusional thinking. More than anyone else, I’m disappointed in her for advancing these false claims so far and for proving my hopes wrong.

As it is though, I think I’ve talked enough about this. There isn’t really much more to say about it: barring something truly explosive happening, everything seems to be a retread of stuff that’s already happened in this debacle. It’s possible that this could escalate further, but I’m not sure how that would be possible considering the claims lobbied against us now.

What next, one might ask? If the past is any indication, the number of people who are outraged will shrink until the callouts stop, either through critical thinking and gradual reassessment or through general apathy. I’m sure that all of this misinformation that’s been gathered or generated will be useful in future callouts against us though.

That having been said, it feels like all of this has served to strengthen our resolve as a mod team. As said previously, most of the people here aren’t taking the claims seriously or even find them funny. Despite that though, I’ve noticed that the tone on the mod team has been one of increased solidarity. We come from a rather diverse set of backgrounds and circumstances in the Homestuck fandom and in real life, and it makes me proud to see everyone standing together on these issues. I really appreciate the rest of the mod team and this community, especially for how they’ve responded to the circumstances that beset us now.

On that note, it is time to move on to brighter and better things. The community has been bustling recently, although I do want to point out one neutral thing that I still found somewhat amusing: #writing has consistently been the least used channel on the server since it was created, sometimes going days without a single message (the most I counted in a row was four or five). Due to its extreme inactivity, we discussed and decided shelving it would be appropriate¹¹. We talk plenty enough about writing in mspa-lit as it is, there’s no reason for it to exist at this point.

Then a few days ago on the 15th, Skyplayer described that she had found her “Internzi badge” recently, which brought up something that happened during one of For Fans By Fans’ puzzle contests in the past. She described it succinctly:

Short version: During the FFBF arg I joked in this very chat that the ARG was being ran by an Intern. They took on the Intern persona and we had a blast with the puzzles. When they left FFBF their friend asked me to [put] together a goodbye present from a bunch of other fandom artists. Then they mailed me the Internzi badge they had made for their internsona.

This is a rather wonderful interaction by itself, but the conversation was heightened when joined by the very person in question. Internzi showed up and chatted for just a little bit, and though it was brief, it was a rather heartwarming encounter.

This aside, last night there was an extremely bizarre occurrence that I don’t think many of us will soon forget. One of the most prominent and popular characters from Homestuck has the online handle carcinoGeneticist, and as is to be expected in this fandom, there are plenty of copycats who assume this handle for various reasons, either because they like it just that much or they want to roleplay. As it is though, today we had two people who talked with each other using this handle, which quickly ballooned into nearly 20.

Obviously, this rapidly resolved itself into complete madness. Normally this sort of stuff would be banworthy, but Makin himself interceded and said that the people involved could “do this for an hour.” Without hesitation, everyone sharing the handle and more besides popped into the general voice channel, and outlandish amounts of mic spam and memery ensued. The sheer scale of the chaos was impressive, and while some were surely annoyed, most involved seemed to have a really good time.

As the hour passed the situation slowly increased to a fever pitch, and by the end of the hour the noise was incomprehensible. It was like being awash in a roiling sea of Homestuck bullshit; the energy was of a magnitude I haven’t seen in the voicechat for a very long time. One user named endeviousElf called it the “carcinoGenocide,” which I found to be an extremely suitable name for the event. Even a couple of mods were involved, with some just listening, but I know that Valkyrie actually changed her appearance to resemble another character from the comic and play along (as well as she could play along in the impressive din, anyway).

Then, as all things must, it ended the moment an hour had passed. To their extreme credit, everyone involved immediately stopped and changed back to their normal profiles, and they made no attempt to extend the event. It reminded me of some of the best moments of altgen with more restraint. Makin seemed to enjoy it as well: “I’m sorry to say I’m considering instituting a ‘KARKAT HOUR’ in every channel of the server,” he remarked. I don’t believe that we’ll see this happen again anytime soon, but that’s undoubtedly for the best.

Finally, I want to comment some on Arquiusbot’s development over the last week. Nat and WoC have both done an amazing job installing new functions and fine-tuning them: they’ve completely replicated the functionality Aradiabot used to have, but have somehow made it work even better. On top of that, they’re using their control over it to add a variety of fun and crazy functions, including some stuff Makin has requested.

For some days now, discussion of Star Wars has become increasingly frequent, owed especially to the release of The Rise of Skywalker recently. These conversations are all over the place, variously talking about the new movie and what we thought of it (spoiler: the consensus is that it’s fucking bad) to how it compares with the prequels to extended universe nonsense. The exact content of what we’re talking about doesn’t necessarily matter, it’s more so the fact that we’ve been talking about it a lot.

Makin finally had enough of this the other day, so he created a containment channel and associated role so he could get rid of the topic. This was effective if somewhat of a hassle to implement, so he requested that Nat and WoC build a command in Arquiusbot to make it so that, whenever he feels like it, he can enact the ban against Star Wars and automatically send people to the containment channel. The command is styled as “D--> execute order 66,” upon which for a period of five minutes using certain Star Wars related terminology will get you canned from the channel until someone comes and removes the containment role. This has actually been extremely effective at curtailing Star Wars discussion and keeping it from getting out of hand, a result I find more entertaining than it has any right to be.

Similarly, there is now a command for freezing the channel (Makin’s infamous ZA WARUDO) which he used to have to do by hand. Not only can he do it with a text command, but the bot posts a gif of the process in question, which automatically adds some more gravitas to the occasion. The channel remains frozen until he submits another text command (“D--> time resumes”), and though he was trigger happy with it at the start, his usage has fallen into more normal patterns. It definitely adds a bit more of a punch to the whole process though.

Honestly, I can’t say enough good things about Nat and WoC’s work on Arquiusbot. They are extremely attentive and quick to implement things that are necessary or even just fun. There’s an enormous amount of potential surrounding this bot, and I think I speak for more than just myself when I say I’m excited to see what we all do with it in the future.

Nothing more for today.¹²

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11^th of February - Makin Steps Down

It has been a very long few days. Sometime last week, the hostility between the HSD and subreddit versus Homestuck Twitter reached its absolute height. Andrew Hussie himself reached out to Makin, declaring that he wanted to see what options were available for easing tensions. Makin responded in a decidedly undiplomatic manner, and Hussie was not pleased.

I’m not sure how at liberty I am to discuss the contents of the subsequent conversations. After this initial problem, I stepped in to speak in Makin’s place and negotiated with Hussie what was to be done. Makin and I conferred between ourselves, figuring out how to respond to certain questions. Hussie asked us for explanations and evidence of what was going on, and I did my utmost to provide those things. Perhaps most importantly, we provided proof that the source of these escalating tensions was a malefactor specifically wanting to sow discord between our groups.

After all of these things, the three of us came to some critical agreements. First, the HSD and subreddit were not responsible for abetting criminals in any fashion, which was a key allegation on Kate’s part. Second, the fact that all of this trouble was possible because of a single bad actor indicated a deeper problem, being that there was no possibility of trust or support between our communities. Third, even if Makin isn’t guilty of the more heinous things he was being accused of, his history and current involvement in managing the community precludes coming to terms with each other, and opens the door for more of these events to happen.

With this last one, the three of us further concluded that it would be necessary for Makin to step down and hand control over to someone else. We agreed to this, but submitted conditions that must be met before he did so. Despite the initial rockiness of these negotiations, Hussie was amenable to the evidence we provided and our explanations. Thus, he graciously agreed to all of the stipulations we laid forth.

This process sounds pretty straightforward in the way I describe it, but it was actually a very intense set of conversations going back and forth almost constantly over the course of a few days. It was messy to untangle everything that was actually going on and reconcile accounts with each other. I think it’s safe to say that none of us were strictly happy with what was going on or how it had come about. This was a grueling dialogue about what we needed to do in order to secure the best possible future for the wider fandom.

By the end of last night, the 10th of February, everything had been arranged and agreed upon. Makin officially transferred the server and subreddit over to me, and we provided a subreddit post describing what was going on. It seems that the vast majority of comments were overwhelmingly positive. Some people had reservations of course, mostly in the sense that it felt like Makin was being used as a sacrifice to ensure peace. There were at least two people who were extremely upset for basically opposite reasons (one felt that this was a signal of the death of the subreddit and HSD, while the other felt that there was still no guarantee of the subreddit “defending marginalized people”).

I’m not sure what Makin thought of these proceedings once all was said and done. To be sure, this is probably one of the hardest decisions he’s ever had to make. One of the conditions I submitted to Hussie was that once he stepped down, Makin would be able to remain on the team in a purely creative capacity; I’ve mentioned before that he has a unique capacity for galvanizing the community in times where it would otherwise have died.

At first Makin seemed more or less fine, but then today he disappeared at a time where he would otherwise have been talking. There are some extenuating circumstances that I can’t really speak about, but I think it’s safe to assume that he was extremely demoralized. It is my and all of our hope that he doesn’t feel the need to go away. That above all would wrack me with guilt: whether he deserved to be removed for all of this is still, in a sense, debatable. I don’t want him to feel like he was unwanted by anyone, and I certainly don’t want him to feel like he should go away. He’s an absolutely critical fixture of our group, and he doesn’t deserve to feel bad about what all has happened¹³.

There’s not much else to say about this for now. Extenuating circumstances aside, this is just about the most positive outcome we could have hoped for given how this all started off. We should be relaxing after all of this as best we can, and yet I’m kind of stricken by this sickening sense that something isn’t right. I don’t know what’s to be done or what the future looks like for us. I never wanted it to get to this point.

Yet, what’s done is done. I can only hope that things will continue more or less as normal after this, administrative changes notwithstanding. Everyone on the server and subreddit are either unaffected or are even happy with the change. Mspa lit is not going away, I explicitly kept it around so we could keep our culture and shills talk. Makin is still on the team even if he has no authority or power to make policy. For Makin’s part in all of this though, I can only hope that he doesn’t feel too bad. If he feels obligated to leave after this, I will forever regret that we got to the point where we are now.

Nothing more for today.

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Two (and a half) Years of History

Note: I originally wrote this on SPAT’s 2nd anniversary, the 9th of July 2019. Given what’s happened, I’ve repurposed it and changed the writing to fit here instead.

It’s officially been two years since I started writing this document. I’ve described most, if not all, of what I wanted to say. There are surely smaller parts of the community that I didn’t touch on, like the culture of the less used channels, but to be fair they often don’t really have a proper culture. Their activity is just too low--the only thing that I could possibly record are people who are arbitrarily regular participants, which isn’t really interesting on its own.

Rather, the “more important” parts of the place have been recorded faithfully enough for my purposes. Over time, the server has de-escalated severely in the amount of drama that happens. This is ultimately for the best; while drama confers entertainment for those who are sufficiently distanced from it, there were a lot of hurt feelings for a while. Naturally here still are hurt feelings sometimes, but it’s usually more manageable now.

Our community members--by which I mean the people I know--have changed a lot since I joined. Some have changed for the better, and some probably for the worse. The actual shape of our community has changed greatly since I started writing, as well--the memberbase looks nothing like it did two years ago, with lots of the old guard simply gone and many new regulars who have themselves come and gone. Of those remaining, there is a very relaxed atmosphere that I would personally say counts as friendship, even if just casual.

I asked for people to write down their thoughts and feelings on the server if they felt like it. Their responses have been nothing short of amazing, with about 50 users providing their input and constituting nearly another 50 pages of writing. I am beyond delighted with their enthusiasm, and their writing is all pretty interesting as well. I highly recommend anyone who’s reading this to peruse what they’ve said.

As for the future, I would be deluding myself to say that nothing of note will ever happen again. I actually feel optimistic that we have a while to go before things wear out, and I’m sure there will in fact be various things that spur me to write; sometimes the weirdest things inspire me to do so, and it’s not inconceivable to think that they’ll pop up every so often. If this is to happen, then I’ll attach them to this document in the regular manner.

Conversely, as far as regular entries go I believe I’ve covered most of everything that I feel was necessary to say, as well as a hefty amount that I didn’t expect to comment on. As it is, it can be said that the first, largest part of SPAT is done. I brought up the possibility of closing this document around June of 2019 in mspa-lit, and everyone present was surprisingly understanding of the idea. There was no accusation of laziness or suggesting I was making a mistake, only support and kindness. That’s the sort of community spirit that I want to point out and remember, when I look back on this document and the time I’ve spent with these people. Above all, I want to crystallize the idea that the users I prized were good people worth talking to.

It’s been over three years since I joined the HSD, and I’ve met a lot of people that I variously consider good friends. I’ve talked endlessly with more of them than I can count, and in the process I’ve learned a lot about them. I’m familiar with people from around the globe that, without this place, I would not have met otherwise. All of them are unique and interesting somehow, and talking with them has helped me to grow in ways I could never have expected. I wonder, too, how many more people we might meet in the future.

As I laid out at the very beginning of the document, I pursued writing this as a way to preserve all of these memories, armed with the foresight that one day I’ll probably stop talking to these users or participating here. Looking back across past entries, I think I’m satisfied with the result. Even without all of these pages though, I doubt I would ever forget my friends here--even those who might not remember me.

As to the reader, for anyone who may possibly be examining this document far in the future, do me a favor if you feel so inclined: all of these strange, wonderful people don’t deserve to fall into obscurity. Even past the words in this document, there are countless moments and experiences that we’ve all shared together. We exist and existed, and for all of the times we’ve had both good and bad, these people deserve to be remembered. Keep us alive in your mind for me, if you can.

Thanks everyone¹⁴.

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