Several People Are Typing

February

2^nd - weekend streams are continuing in abundance, finished Venture Bros and Smiling Friends, current line up is one episode of TNG with Cobra Kai. A new reread for Homestuck will begin soon, thanks to the organizational efforts of Harpy, PaxProbliscum, Doomed (a new janitor for the Homestuck category) and Makin. Realization of what a treasure it is to have this community to talk in every day, and witness people as they go through life and hash things out with each other. Brings to mind the phrase: “these happy, golden years,” even if it’s hard to see it at the time.

14^th - another reread begins, spurred by the efforts of Bambosh, Makin, Gio, as well as Pax Probliscum, HarpyHour, and Doomed is promoted to pseudo-mod for their active involvement in planning and assisting with the reread.

24^th - invasion of Ukraine by Russia begins and chat watches raptly as developments unfold, Ennemy eats crow for previous assertions it wouldn't happen; Misha and Nut get dualbanned for talking about sex too hard in chat, and Carlarc gets reactbanned again by way of ancient ritual.

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March

12^th - Magistrate releases his new novel, Cockatiel x Chameleon; reception is largely positive owing to its powerful prose and much more guided imagery/story as compared to Modern Cannibals. The tone is somewhat depressing personally, but it is largely agreed upon that the smut is well portrayed (Magistrate had concerns that it would come out poorly due to lack of experience writing such), and several prominent characters are recognized for their strong portrayal, overall deemed a writing success.

17^th - a large-ish number of people have their names hellenized as a result of myself and especially Ennemy’s influence, at least six or seven people and I bother to change our names and the channel’s name is switched to “#διάβαζε-βιβλία” (“read books” in Greek) for a day.

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April

6^th - Moonjail and Misha have a nigh apocalyptic argument over potential new healthcare policies in Canada that could allow for people diagnosed with mental illness to directly ask for euthanasia. Misha, alongside Tarty and WoC, suggest that it is appalling and a complete disgrace that such a thing could become part of the state’s healthcare apparatus. Moonjail and I agree that the implications are disturbing and unethical, but we’re both sufficiently convinced that it’s not quite as simple or easy to achieve as the others believe. Regardless, the conversation inflates and eventually destructs violently with Misha leaving for the evening and Moonjail’s feelings hurt. We talk it out extensively in DMs. The next day, it is revealed that Misha was excessively drunk and the two reconcile with relative ease.

13^th - 13^th anniversary of Homestuck. Typical community stream ensues, with a somewhat greater degree of success than last year. Can’t recall how many people attended in 2021, but we estimated it was around 150 at max. This year it’s closer to 250 for basically the entire stream. Makin as per usual compiles a list of important fan works and official news (spoiler: there were no official developments to speak of) in his his thread on the subreddit.

20^th - a pleasant visit from a lurker named Lilac_City_Skylines; ironically they appeared after we started talking about lurkers (which as usual prompted a brief word or two from Cruuk, my favorite lurker), but Lilac stuck around a bit to discuss various things. We successfully requested that they try a couple of the shills out, such as Pills and Modern Cannibals. They seemed extremely nice, a fine change from the more abrasive tone the chat has taken on in the last several months. Would be nice to have a better balance as time goes on.

21^st - Makin has bought ad space on Tumblr with their new program, which drops ads randomly on the website with no care for preference on the part of the individual user. So far the program appears to be insanely successful, boosting our average join rate from about 5-10 per day to more like 70 per day, if not more. A bit too early to tell if it’ll stick, but the difference is palpable so far.

23^rd - Makin has thoroughly revamped the website homestuck.net “with a new reader's guide, a list of the most recent official updates and info, added a bunch of resources and assets, and fixed the localization files, enjoy!”

28^th - Discord releases “forums,” a new addition much like threads both in that their purpose seems completely self-defeating on a platform like this, and that they are more fun than they have any right to be under the right circumstances. As soon as the feature to make forums became available for us, Makin created a forum called “mspa forums” and at the time of writing there are about 55 threads that have been created. The most active include: a fanventure by Carlarc involving a self-insert who is literally trapped inside Discord’s UI and plays a game of basketball with the “Big Man,” aka Fat Husky; a thread literally saying “Thanks Discord” by Ifnar where everyone complains about the feature or loves it; and a thread entitled “best sandwich?” by lobster (their guess: “i don’t know, i think a good cuban sandwich is alright”).

May

10^th - Eurovision starts again. Most people are in favor for Latvia’s song, but the country is unfortunately knocked out of the grand finals.

11^th - Canis is granted parole (banned in January for blasting the entire server with Nesquik in a deliberate attempt to be banned) for Eurovision.

14^th - Eurovision ends with a Ukrainian victory. This result was expected given the circumstances, and we wonder how exactly they're going to host the event next year given the ongoing conflict and the scale of damage.

June

6^th - Cuil, after rejoining the server some several weeks ago, has taken it upon themselves to try and finish every shill on Makin's website. They've been going in seemingly random order, at once reading something in the shilled section, then something in mine, and now they're on Cockatiel x Chameleon.

Their immediate reaction was "I've barely read any of cxc and I'm already tired of this person's prose," to which Magistrate simply said "Nice". The irony continued for several minutes with Cuil not realizing the author was right there, though their opinion on the work seemed to improve (except with regard to the actual smut, which they made of continuously). Their eventual realization of who Magistrate was proved all the funnier.

I commented on what a strange intersection lit was as a chatroom for all these different people, and Misha described an incident where MrCheeze had just finished releasing a video on ACE techniques in Ocarina of Time sometime ago. Upon discussion of this, Misha loudly protested, "there's no ACE in Ocarina of Time you moron," for which he was appropriately blown the fuck out. A slice of humble pie, as he described it.

Unrelatedly, but quite nicely, Barkley showed back up in chat after an extended absence of several months. He describes that things had "become too heavy" and he needed space to take care of things in his life, which I'm sure most of us can appreciate.

15^th

A great disturbance occurred today, whereupon¹ Captor in #altgen decided to enact a spam raid where everybody in attendance posted an image of Dr. House an unbelievable number of times. Spam has been banned in #altgen for some time now, as Misha convinced me that it was sufficiently ruining things and needed to be destroyed.

Tera froze the channel for several hours; it seems clear some kind of reset is needed. Captor was actually full banned for starting the raid, and there has been discussion of punishing the rest of the participants to a lesser extent, which seems to be taking the form of a two day ban. Since then, various members of the channel have filtered into #general and elsewhere. One in particular immediately made a joke about being 12, a topic we have historically had no tolerance for; they were summarily banned and then brought back when it was explained they’re actually well known and understood not to be underaged. Someone else made a similar joke and was banned from #general for one day for it. Every day that passes like this, I think Misha is more and more right that the channel needs to be tossed into the dumpster.

17^th

Reckoning “The Great Undoing,” Makin hides all channels and creates a forum for the determination of new mods. All mods and janitors are demodded; every channel besides lit gets its own thread in the forum, although a big voice chat also forms for discussion of what it means to be a mod and what kind of person is best suited for it. Makin claims that it will continue for “at least 24 hours” so everyone gets a chance to nominate, and he wants to do some “data science” with the nominations. In the past couple of Reckonings it feels like mostly the same team gets assembled at the end of things, but perhaps this time Makin will try harder to establish something fresher.

Indeed, after all is said and done, there are only a couple of faces left from the previous incarnation of the mod team. The full mods now consist of: Lut, B3es, vR, and Homer. The pseudos consist of: ActivelyAnonymous, Chasca, Doomed, myself, Ennemy, Interrobang, Slashed Out, and Valerie. The only janitor is someone named amiableGabber. The voicechat channels are all gone.

September

9^th

Makin seeks an alternative to Arquiusbot because WoC and Nat have both moved on to doing other things with their time, and Makin wants compatibility² with the forum feature. He decides to retain Arquiusbot because it’s a better system than others he can tinker with, and for other functions like Linkybot. He decides to keep an additional bot named Dyno to handle threads, although no one seems to be bothering at the moment.

14^th

Makin briefly makes me a coadmin again because he was too lazy to add a Rosemary emote. The reason he wanted the emote added in the first place is because there’s an ongoing Twitter poll contest for “best yuri ship,” of which Rosemary is close to winning outright. Currently going against Bubbline of Adventure Time fame. James Roach has promised “new content” if Rosemary wins the contest³. People have been getting the word out, Makin even made an announcement about it in the server.

Additionally, Makin brings back forums due to finally getting bot compatibility for them going and vows to bring back voicechat this weekend⁴.

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