Several People Are Typing

February

11^th

Makin has officially iterated on Linkybot and made a newer, better Drewbot based on my posts. Instead of simply calling a random message from my history, this is an actual trained chat model [based on GPT3?] that he fed a bunch of my messages and now can spit out completely new things. He actually wrote an entire article on the process which is quite a nice read.

The bot started off kind of rough in some respects. It can be set to certain “temperatures” in order to impact the coherence of its speech, but it struggles not to say empty filler messages such as “uhh” or “i’ll be right back.” We also believe that the training data has influenced it to pull from 4chan culture (I don’t understand how that all works, but that’s what I gathered from people who know more on the subject), possibly from the fact that I say “ree” on a nigh daily basis as a joke. Unfortunately this caused it to respond in aggressively offensive ways occasionally, although Makin eventually added a filter for that.

These things aside, Drewbot has had some really funny strings of responses, which I went ahead and added into an album. I’m debating whether to add yet another section to the website to host these properly, if I keep the formatting simple it shouldn’t be too big of a pain, although I hate being lazy when it comes to rehosting things on here. Might just be better to keep it to an Imgur album, although that massively increases the possibility of something going wrong with it. Proper archival is a pain in the ass.

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March

20^th

A repeated event: Valerie and Swish seem diametrically opposed in a number of their opinions. This is common enough for arguing in mspa-lit, but whenever those two start to argue it often becomes full-on mudslinging. At least four or five times now, one of them will get on a heated topic–from what I recall it usually involves the war in Ukraine, or western interventionism more generally–and then they’re at each other’s throats like a flash in the pan. It usually resolves without either of them being banned, but it can get quite nasty. Personally speaking, Valerie usually seems to have the more coherent arguments (as she corrected me: “description of swish fighting like an idiot and me intelligently fending off his attacks*”), but she is so horribly acerbic in these fights that it almost negates the quality of her arguments. Swish is not quite as coherent but also doesn’t take his rudeness quite so far, which unfortunately is not very meritorious.

Valerie in general (both figuratively and in the channel) seems to be of an old mspa-lit persuasion that the tone of a discussion matters much less than the actual content of what is being said. To be specific, she is rude as hell and does not care one whit about hurting other people’s feelings in the process of a conversation. I sympathize with this view but prefer to be more diplomatic in my approach, and one night as my temper was running short I yelled at her for being caustic. I drew back and apologized later, and I think we’re both on good enough terms as is.

Swish, as much as I appreciate him, is basically unrecoverable though.

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27^th

Cyanide, owner of the Requiem cafe in Anaheim, California, joins the Homestuck Discord Server. I’m temporarily turned back into an admin in order to facilitate a dialogue with him and set up a channel for him. #requiem-ama is created specifically for people to ask him questions about the upcoming event and any particular details he might be able to divulge at this time. #requiem-event, in turn, is set up for anyone in the server who might be going to the event themselves, or people who are simply interested in the goings-on there. The cafe will be Homestuck themed from 4/13 to the end of April and will feature various things I’ll comment on during the actual day the event premiers.

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April

1^st

No April Fool’s Day event planned in advance, although last night we did prepare haltingly for another /r/Place event. Little progress was made, with scattered suggestions for a pixel rendition of Rosemary. Luckily, no such event manifested (indeed, Reddit seemed not to have any substantial April Fool’s event at all, aside from an obscure ARG of some sort). However, entirely off the cuff Makin decided to host a stream of Vampire’s Kiss starring Nicolas Cage, which we presented as the upcoming release of Renfield, also with Nicolas Cage.

A relatively minor event but overall the effort seemed successful.

13^th

Annual stream commences, this year being the live action Super Mario Brothers movie¹ from 1993 as a nod to the release of the new, animated movie from this year. The Con Air: Special Edition portion of the stream gathered a delightful number of participants, exceeding 300 at the most. Despite the general slowdown of the property and its fandom over the last few years, it seems that we can all still celebrate the major events with no issue.

Additionally, the Requiem Cafe event seems to be proceeding wonderfully, with a release of the canon heights of all the main characters and a packed reception (the tickets to the event were completely sold out within a matter of days, if not hours). The event boasted a wide array of drinks and treats:

Photo credits to HeyItsJess76 and yoitscro.

Cyanide describes that, while the official event is only for 4/13 in particular, he might have some other special treats on the menu throughout the rest of the month for people who couldn’t attend the event proper.

As is common for such things, a photo op was assembled.

Photo credits to yoitscro and Viz Media.

Michael Guy Bowman appeared as a special guest and provided a miniature concert on an acoustic guitar (a few videos of this are pinned in the channel on the Discord). Throughout the event he took the time to meet and greet with patrons, making for some memorable experiences.

Photo credits to HeyItsJess76.

To contrast with the Requiem Cafe proceeding so nicely, this is the second year in a row that we’ve received no official news of any kind. Makin was hoping for even just a tiny teaser for Hiveswap Act 3, but we’ve been left high and dry yet again. Hussie himself seems to be completely gone from the scene, which is probably just as well all things considered.

Still, the fandom seems to be picking up the slack in the absence of the official team. As is typical for our annual holiday, there was a bevy of delightful art on the subreddit and even some really high quality musical releases. Notable enough to receive an announcement, someone named Cosmoptera released an album on bandcamp titled Vinculum Vitae, heavy with electronic instrumentation and covering a wide range of tones. NarcolepsyDriver released a different album, metal rather than EDM, on Spotify called Don't Read a Webcomic Called Homestuck.

16^th

Briefly wanted to describe a strange occurrence in the voice channel: a large group of people are commandeering vc-2, where they seem to have created facecams of the characters from Homestuck using panels ripped straight from the comic. When one of these people speaks, it seems as if the character itself is talking instead. A common enough tool, but it’s the first I’ve seen this for Homestuck. None of them appear to be roleplaying, which is really the important part. Our mod Slashed Out is good at keeping an eye on voice channels when they start to get packed, so I’m not terribly worried.

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27^th

WoC has made it a habit for a while now to contribute to mspa-lit by appearing briefly, dropping a random shitpost, and then leaving. Makin banned him for this a long while ago–long enough to the point that I had forgotten this behavior. Upon appealing to be unbanned, I granted him this.

Unfortunately this came back to haunt me, as WoC did the usual thing, and I woke up to find that I had been de-adminned. This is not really a problem considering I asked for that exact thing a couple weeks ago, but at that time Makin had denied the request. I asked him why he changed his mind, and he said it was for enabling WoC’s “drive-by shitposting.” If nothing else, it seems I’ve arrived at a method to let me properly resign my post if necessary again².

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28^th

While I refer to it exclusively as mspa-lit in this document, the name of the channel I talk about so often has actually been #read-the-shills or very close to that for the last couple of years. Makin, for no perceivable reason, decided to change it back to #mspa-lit this morning.

Coincidentally, we ended up having two enormous disagreements today, one ending very poorly and the other more positively. First was a definitional disagreement between Moonjail and MrCheeze on the topic of statistics. Specifically they were discussing the concept of significance.

It is not an exaggeration to say that this conversation went on for about three, maybe four hours (if not more), crowding out all other discussions which tried to flair up but were fairly quickly aborted while the two were occupied. This finally came to a head when Moonjail decided he had enough and exclaimed that MrCheeze is “intellectually dishonest” and a “cunt,”³ declaring he would be blocked from now on.

I can’t say for sure whether or not I felt this escalation was warranted. However, recently I had something of a fight with Moonjail too, where we were arguing about the utility of rocketry and going to space while the technology is currently so inefficient, and that there is little we can realistically do with it. I whipped myself into a frenzy during that conversation but Moonjail claimed he wasn’t stressed at all, just perplexed with my position and reasoning–otherwise the interaction was fine, and we both ended on an amicable note.

Conversely, with MrCheeze I feel like I’ve had discussions with him where I noticed he would refuse to answer certain questions or exposit on points I asked him to clarify. I wouldn’t go so far as to claim him to be intellectually dishonest, but Moonjail does the exact opposite: tending to belabor a discussion well past a point where his opponents are exhausted with it. I think it has something to do with him being trained in debate.

Regardless, while I would definitely not have reacted in that way, I suppose I can’t blame Moonjail for doing so. It’s been a long time since we’ve witnessed a discussion so protracted and kind of vicious.

Which makes it all the worse that it happened a second time tonight. Valerie and Swish hissing at each other came to a head tonight when the topic of the war in Ukraine came up yet again. I tried to move the discussion to a more suitable place, but Valerie insisted that she had no intentions of seriously pursuing the discussion. Without going into too much detail, she described later that her primary intention with the topic at all is to mock Swish for parroting opinions that she associated with so-called armchair leftists and activists on Reddit; devoid of any real substance or nuance, she hates the things that he says.

On the one hand I also don’t care for much of Swish’s rhetoric, but I’ve generally found him agreeable enough to try and talk to about things and inject some more complexity into whatever’s being discussed. On the other hand, when it comes to Valerie specifically, he would become completely acidic and things quickly inflamed to untenable levels.

Misha stepping in might have saved things, because he both possesses the willpower to want to talk about these matters and also actually understands them to a more significant degree than a layman. He started to dismantle Valerie’s statements on the matter, which forced her to fess up to the fact that she was (somewhat) shitposting just to aggravate Swish: “after like the 3rd conversation where he called me a putler stanning fascist baby killer i kind of just decided that the goal of every conversation from now on would be to make him mad.”

However, there was a breaking point after this where both of them admitted that their participation had been less than respectful, to put it mildly; both Valerie and Swish described that they would try not to attack the other so swiftly in the future. I’m pleased to see the reconciliation occur, and hopefully time will show it to be firm.

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May

3^rd

Given the large number of aspirant rationalists (or simply “rats”) in mspa-lit, many things or people adjacent to the topic of rationality often come up. Of note is Eliezer Yudkowsky, author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and avid opponent to the proliferation of artificial intelligence on claims that it will eventually be used to annihilate humanity.

We tend to follow whatever nonsense Yudkowsky is talking about because he is very adept at saying weird things in an obtuse manner. This is probably not purposeful, but whatever the case may be it’s not uncommon for his tweets or a news article about him to get thrown around in chat, usually to someone or other’s dismay or disbelief.

Recently this had to do with Yudkowsky being written about in TIME magazine back at the end of March, with vivid descriptions of the lengths humanity should go to avoid AI becoming a force for destruction. This includes but is not limited to executing economic and political sanctions on countries who pursue AI research, conducting airstrikes on processing centers used for training and developing AI, and using nuclear weapons in any way that might halt the progress of AI. All of this stuff seems fanciful at best and horrifically deluded at worst. Magistrate describes it thus:

Yud, man with zero credentials, tells layman that AI will end the world in extremely passionate language inherited from his actual background (storytelling), he then gets layman to go "damn that sounds bad" and thinks this is meaningful.

Fast forward to today, and it seems that Yud decided to engage in conversation with what he considers the average layman: Ross Scott of Accursed Farms⁴ streamed a mixed interview/debate on the topic of the dangers of AI with Yud. I wasn’t able to personally witness it, but all the rats present for it were having an incredible laugh at just about everyone’s expense.

Yud can safely be characterized as having fucking terrible pedagogical skill. It may be that understands the topic at hand, but he is strictly awful at trying to relay the information he possesses (and often came up with himself) to other people, especially if they aren’t already familiar⁵. Ross, then, is the worst possible debate opponent as someone who openly admits that he does not know or even really care about the topic being discussed.

The entirety of the stream was, as a result, a kind of cavalcade of nonsense. Yud has this tendency to wear a porkpie hat (it might actually be an honest to god fedora, I can’t tell the difference) and he gesticulated quite wildly throughout the event; many screencaptures were made of him that are so visually stereotypical it’s frankly unbelievable. Ross on the other hand stated repeatedly “maybe I’m just not smart enough to get this,” or some such. I’m honestly not sure if the debate went anywhere meaningful, although oddly enough I saw people saying that Ross was “winning” the debate, probably by way of chess with pigeons⁶.

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4^th

I previously mentioned that WoC was banned from mspa-lit some months ago. Makin makes it a point to issue a requirement for getting unbanned: read so many shills from the list, usually three (in the case of a za warudo, he usually stipulates that so many people need to each read one new shill, typically five). He did this again with thebadnut today, even though they have already read something like eight of the shills on the list.

I find myself grappling again with the fact that mspa-lit is really Makin’s space and he can do whatever he wants with it. On the one hand his tight control does keep standards “high” in whatever sense he might want to justify at the moment. On the other, I genuinely do believe that things have quieted down to the point that we can’t really afford to be cutting people out so frivolously. If this were back when we still had over 5,000 messages a day then sure, some chaff might blow away in the wind and we would be more than fine.

Generally though, nowadays it’s close to 1,000. The pace of the chat most hours of the day is sedate, and there are frequent spans of time where no one talks, sometimes for some hours in a row. The thought of that kind of creeping slowdown is what genuinely struck anxiety in me. Now that it’s actually here, I find that I’m mostly annoyed by it. There is plenty to discuss that this shouldn’t really be a problem, but I suppose it comes with the territory of us all becoming older and taking on more responsibilities.

If I had to give an educated guess on the matter, it looks like many of us will stick around indefinitely and simply become more judicious about how much time we spend talking in the HSD and why. By sheer member count we continuously grow by leaps and bounds–it feels like we’re getting more people per day now than ever before, often upwards of 20 or 30 people a day. This feels kind of absurd to consider given the amount of time since the last official content was released, and the fact that we’re already fairly large at 26,000 some odd people. Fat, one might say.

Despite this continuous growth, actual measurable activity has slowed to a crawl in almost every channel except for #homosuck and semi-regularly #general. The once mighty #altgen has become a shadow of its former self, often failing to break a thousand messages a day (compared to many thousands each day just a couple years ago). The incongruity between server size and its activity is disquieting and puzzles me every time I think about it, I have no idea how it can slow down this much when there’s far more people than ever before.

But, I’ve got more to focus on in my day to day life now. It can’t be as much of a priority as it used to be. As long as people are still talking occasionally, that’s good enough. With each passing year, I’m a little more convinced that tay was right and we’ll be here much longer than I expected. Let’s hope, anyway.

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9^th

Some months ago, we were informed that MSPFA had suffered a data failure and as a result most of the website’s content was gone. This was met with a huge amount of dismay–countless fanventures and years of other content effectively wiped off the face of the Earth. Thankfully we received an update on this, and through backups it seems that almost everything was restored. Makin describes: “The main data loss was some favorites after August, so no big deal.”

Unrelatedly, Misha still streams shows on Tuesdays and Thursdays, having been hosting Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis for an extremely long time now. We’re taking a break from that to avoid fatigue and because we’re approaching the end of both of those shows now (given that we started early last year, this isn’t too surprising).

Makin gave us a tentative streaming schedule for his weekend streams as well. To give some background, for a long time now we have settled on a format of two shows running simultaneously, one with 20 minute episodes and another with 40 minute episodes. We stream two episodes of each every Saturday and Sunday, so a solid chunk of two to three hours usually. We’re currently finishing up The Good Place for 20 minutes and The Sopranos for 40 minutes, though Makin often complains that the latter’s runtime is closer to an hour. Both of these shows have been greatly enjoyable (though the latter is decidedly not as popular as the former).

Going from this, Makin’s prospective list is as follows: after the Sopranos on the 40 minute block we potentially have Black Mirror, True Detective Season 1, the final seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the best of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Cobra Kai was originally on there too, but the Writers Guild of America⁷ just initiated a strike which means that the final season of the show is almost certainly delayed, and we probably won’t finish that show until it’s all released. On the 20 minute block after The Good Place, we have: Only Murders in the Building, the best of Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and a restream of Venture Bros in preparation for the movie release. I’ve seen suggestions for Metalocalypse but I don’t believe the chances are high he’ll bother to watch that one.

It’s delightful that the weekend streams have persisted for so long. There’s a very solid base of around 15-20 people for the 20 minute block and 10-15 for the 40 minute block, and often enough it can be higher than that. Though my skills with photomanips are horrible I’m getting a bit better at picking stuff out to add as custom emotes on the cytube channel. We’ve been at it for a while but people don’t seem to show any signs of fatigue, generally. I hope we can keep this up in perpetuity, I’m always grateful to have a few hours of this to look forward to on the weekends. I think we’re starting to run out of ideas for what we want to watch though⁸, it might be advisable to switch to movies for a bit to shorten the runtime and avoid making it so people have to keep up over an extended period of time. I’m sure we’ll work things out.

Due to my personal circumstances changing around, I’ve also been able to work out streaming on Twitch for people. It’s been a fairly limited affair but it pairs well with me picking up Pathologic 2 on Misha’s suggestion, a spectacular horror RPG with extensive story elements based loosely on Mongolian steppe culture. He actually wanted me to play this back in 2019, but I don’t think I was as receptive to it back then–the original game has an HD remake that improved the experience but nonetheless was a lot more impenetrable than the sequel is. I’ve been enjoying Pathologic 2 more than I expected, though with the new Zelda game coming out in a few days I need to get done with it quickly.

The general hope is that people will start streaming themselves playing games in general; there was a brief span of time a few years ago where people were trying to show off the things they played, like Moonjail and Tay playing Dark Souls (and Moonjail still streams himself playing Skyrim from time to time) but there hasn’t been a lot of this lately. I think there’s an impression that streaming on Twitch was something of a fad, but it’s just nice to share in the experience with other people sometimes. Qweq and Tera both had a tendency to stream more obscure, strange games, and I’d like to see a return to that at some point if possible.

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12^th

Makin was informed of a post by someone named Pip, who worked on Homestuck related material and especially Homestuck 2. In a long Tumblr blog, Pip describes various aspects of working on the property such as the nature of the story. The post alleges that Hussie enticed people to work on Homestuck 2 under false premises⁹, telling them that it would have more weight in terms of canonicity than he otherwise stated publicly. As a reminder, Hussie and others in his entourage were pushing the idea of “post-canon” or “dubiously canon” content, as a way to encourage fans to make whatever Homestuck related material they so desired without worrying that it would be pointlessly irrelevant.

So far as I can tell, Pip’s post (which has been mirrored in its entirety thanks to Makin and is discussed at length in this Reddit thread) indicates that Hussie actively misled his workers so as to secure labor from them. There’s further indication that Hussie pushed this and other projects in order to procure funds which would be used to satisfy some sort of outstanding debt.

In all, Makin signalboosted the Tumblr post (the archived version, anyway) in the #news channel on the Discord server, on Twitter, and on the subreddit. Naturally, we ended up discussing the post for quite some time. There was a lot of initial excitement surrounding the information–it’s been a couple of years at least since we last received any news of note on official matters–but it settled down relatively quickly.

My initial belief is that the fervor was muted for a couple reasons: firstly, the fandom has only continued to dwindle in the last few years, leaving fewer and fewer people who might care about this to begin with; secondly, the overall information of the blog post boils down to “Hussie is an incompetent and/or unscrupulous manager who exploits his employees,” which is something that we’ve all known for years now.

There was some pushback on it in #mspa-lit over the matter, though not heavily. Interestingly enough, Gio ended up getting in a tiff with Makin about it, which Magistrate described as “dumb, petty drama.” It wasn’t necessarily vicious or violent, but Makin ended up blocking Gio on Twitter over the whole affair because the latter was being a “reply guy” over the matter (exhausting to keep all of this straight, to be honest). Petty seems the correct word, although Makin later apologized for his behavior and claimed he was sleep deprived.

Later in the night, yoitscro came by to chat over the news and offered their perspective, explaining that Pip is almost certainly experiencing harassment now over the news reaching a wider audience. They also pointed out that the information might not be accurate for a bevy of reasons. Pip themselves is not, to my recollection, a strictly reliable source. Perhaps more important is that Pip posted this not to generate attention or tell other people about it, but just to vent in their own space with some expectation of privacy, with no real substantiation behind it¹⁰.

As far as that latter point is concerned, I’m of two minds. In more ordinary circumstances I would feel that boosting someone’s post without their permission is inappropriate. However, the nature of the information is something that people who have been fans of Homestuck for this long probably deserve to know, because it can recontextualize how people think of the property and the way it functions. On a more pragmatic level, I think that posting anything publicly which you do want to be amplified is a foolish idea, especially in an environment where you are physically aware of people who tend to be gossip hounds¹¹.

The fact that the information may not be completely accurate is a far more salient problem, insofar as the fandom in general is concerned. I couldn’t be bothered to tell you why outside of loose associations over time, but I’ve gotten the distinct impression that Pip is not a reliable narrator. As to the information itself, a lot of it is worded very ambiguously or in ways that don’t make sense. The whole reference to paying off debt is not expounded in any meaningful way; most people seemed to take it to mean that he was in debt to Viz Media, which I’m not sure how that would be the case.

Regardless, the information is out there now, and time will tell how important it really is. One development has come about already, which will require a small explanation: I can’t recall if I ever mentioned this previously, but the TF2 Engineer is some anonymous user on Twitter whose gimmick was to reply on official Homestuck people’s posts with a gif of the Engineer from Team Fortress 2 doing a dance. This somehow ended up aggravating those people enough that it got the account blocked or some such, which turned it into a tongue in cheek symbol of irreverence for Homestuck’s later content.

Last month the person running the Engineer account said they would go dormant as there was nothing left to dance about. After the news came out today, however, the Engineer posted once more to spread the news. So there’s that, I guess.

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13^th

Eurovision took place this week. Attendance felt a little less robust than last year but I couldn’t say with any confidence if that’s true or not. Regardless, it was still very fun this year with various songs proving to be an instant hit. Notable mentions include Austria’s entry of “Who the Hell is Edgar?” and Croatia’s song “Mama ŠČ!”. However, the hit of the finals was Finland’s entry “Cha Cha Cha”, which thanks to the popular vote landed second place. The victor was Sweden, which scored a seventh victory that ties them for the most victories against Ireland, who coincidentally sucked hard this year (I will link neither song because I don’t care much for them). Tensei, usually a notable participant in Eurovision, appeared to dip this year because the Netherlands didn’t even qualify for the grand finals, earning him much mockery.

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15^th

Makin added another interesting function to Drewbot using GPT functionality. It now detects “toxicity levels” in chat, providing a message every few minutes which calls out people for speaking negatively on any topic or being rude to each other, and complimenting others if they use positive language. It also always suggests a change to a new topic or how to improve current conversational quality.

On the one hand it’s hilarious, although I feel strangely about becoming increasingly obsolete (not that I was being supremely positive anyway). This function is going to get old very quickly but it’s truly amazing what can be done with AI chat functions. I only regret that this gives Makin more ammunition for his arguments about learning to code, as if we need more programmers in the server.

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19^th

#mspa-lit has been closed more and more often in the last few months it seems, and this time is the longest closure so far. I mentioned in a previous entry that he requests people to read shills in order to be unbanned from the channel, like Nut, but now he does it to get the channel unlocked as a whole. It’s been locked for two days now and everyone has had to mix with #general in order to keep talking.

Honestly, if he keeps doing this he’s going to lose people.Magistrate in particular was already complaining about frivolous channel closures like this, and it’s honestly enough to make me not want to use it anymore. Why bother trying to talk in a place that can be closed for multiple days for no good reason¹²? Not to mention that the viable number of people who will bother to read shills to get the channel unlocked is already low, because most people who talk in the channel have already read many of the shills that do not take several days to finish. This is a game of rapidly diminishing returns and he’s either going to have to back down or the channel will just be closed indefinitely.

As of this writing there’s one left to unlock, but rather than do any of that shit¹³ I opted to just add Pathologic 2 as a new shill to my own list. I’m sure that doesn’t count though, because of my horrifically plebeian tastes.

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20^th

Four days ago, a member of the group dedicated to Let’s Read Homestuck on Youtube came to issue a takedown request of their content from Makin’s Homestuck archive. This request was summarily ignored until today, when Makin revealed that he had blocked the person in question for taking part in accusations against this community along with Kate back in 2020.

The heat of this discussion built up like a pressure cooker, with Makin and the participants–an individual named Ryan and another named Bonzi77–talking past each other and becoming increasingly acidic over the debacle. Obviously given the circumstances and my proximity to the events in question, I feel more than some sympathy towards Makin’s position. However, it still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up whenever he actually starts to engage in a “debate” with people on things like this. I commented several times that it feels like he doesn’t know when to turn off the nonsense personality and stop joking even when he is ostensibly trying to deliver real criticism or engage in a serious discussion.

In short, it was something of a clusterfuck. The matter was protracted for something like half an hour to an hour, when it really could have been finished in less than fifteen minutes. In Makin’s defense, it seems that Ryan and Bonzi avoided outright saying “We are sorry for accusing you of being pedophiles,” which is ultimately what he (and I) want out of something like this.

That being said, the actual matter in question today was the Let’s Read Homestuck videos being taken out of the archive. After infuriating almost everyone present, Makin did eventually acquiesce… and a token apology for the events of 2020 were issued as well. In effect, it seems that the hatchet was buried, though it could almost certainly have been done in a less anxiety-inducing fashion for everyone involved.

Thinking on the past though, I’m sure it could have gone a lot worse.

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29^th

Drewbot has evolved even further today. Some context: in Homestuck proper there’s a device called an Alchemizer, the function of which is to combine two or more items in various ways to create something completely new. The items thus produced were often very stylish, functional, funny, or all three, and it was conceivably used to make just about anything including weapons, outfits, and more.

Given the scope of this tool, it has been the object of countless Homestuck fan materials and indisputably contributed to the webcomic’s popularity. The Overseer Project, for example, had a large amount of material dedicated to item combinations to emulate this property of the story. For a long time people have tried and had variable success (mostly failure) in trying to make their own Alchemizer program, pouring their love and effort into a replication of the idea.

Then, as he often does, Makin put his programming knowledge to the test.

Drewbot was given an alchemizer function today using AI (specifically the Da Vinci¹⁴ model if I’m not mistaken), fine tuned on Overseer Project data. Obviously it doesn’t succeed all the time but I’m astonished at the times it does succeed. Some of the results in question are nothing short of incredible: one time Drewbot was told to combine a fat husky with nunchucks, and it actually output a result detailing nunchucks entitled “CUSHY HUSKY CHUCKS” with the following description:
These nunchuks feature a rotund husky plush at either end that not only softens the impact but also adds a touch of cuteness. Practical for combat? Debatable. Adorable? Absolutely.

I often underestimate the newer AI models until I see results like this. It seems a small thing for a human to conceptualize but the fact that we’ve gotten to this point with machines never fails to impress me. It continued to output several entries like this and many that were even better, such as the following combinations:

You alchemize Nutella && Bleach. You get…
Chloro-Nutella
It tastes kind of like bubble-bath. You're not sure if that's a good thing, or a bad thing.

You alchemize Potent Coffee && Light Bulb. You get...
Java-Lamp
You thought the regular fork was a bit to intense, until you combined it with this lightbulb! Never drink coffee before waking your Denizen

You alchemize The Noir Album || Kickstarter. You get...
Kickstarter Knuckles
These black and white knuckles exude mystery and an air of cool that you find almost irresistible. Unfortunately with each hit it makes you feel like you've just lost a lot of funding, and you can't help wondering if your fancy new gloves smell like sweat Equity.

That last one, as a reminder, or in case I’ve forgotten to ever explain this in the first place, is about Tensei’s Noir Album which he’s been working on for years but has yet to release. It also (probably unintentionally) calls to mind the fact that he wears fingerless gloves, which makes it even better.

To be frank, there are several dozens of entries that are clever like this. It’s a little overwhelming to consider just how advanced the technology has gotten in the last year or two. All the better then that it’s being used to amuse us for a fraction of a penny. Makin has truly outdone himself this time, though I still insist that the function could use some sort of cooldown to avoid spam or burnout. While impersonating me¹⁵ could understandably be seen as hacky or kind of rote for a model like this, this is the first thing that’s come out of the bot which pays homage to Homestuck proper and does it very well. I eagerly look forward to whatever else comes out of it in the future.

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June

1^st

There’s something I want to discuss in brief: I was avoiding writing about this out of assumed deference to a wish for privacy, but I was asked about it today when I mentioned releasing these entries. Fae and B3es had a baby a couple of months ago, a first for the community as a whole! For most of us it serves as yet another reminder of our increasing age and gradual decay; as hb put it, their baby now serves as “ evidence that not all hsd users are going to be genetic dead ends”. In seriousness, it’s a little strange to think of the ties that have been forged in a silly Discord server. Who knows what else might come about because of this place over the next so many years? It almost makes one shudder to think.

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11^th

We watched a livestream of Reddit communities going dark in protest of the company increasing its cost for access to their site API. Makin has chosen not to engage in the blackout because of poor timing with 6/12 (and personal disinterest¹⁶). Note: writing now at a much later time, I can say that there wasn’t much of an impact from this blackout; it did nothing but piss people off who weren’t really paying attention, and Reddit messed up the API anyway. The website isn’t visibly worse on the surface but bot functionality for a lot of places is really bad now. Just further down the tubes, I guess.

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July

Refer to the 2023 meetup article.

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September

16^th

Today there was a livestream of the new LOFAM album: Land of Fans and Music 5 Act 2. The stream was six hours long with small breaks at the 2 and 4 hour mark. Suffice it to say that many Duanes were had. The album’s quality is startlingly high throughout, I vaguely recall someone–maybe Makin–saying that it’s their best album yet. Of what I’ve heard I’m inclined to agree. Though Homestuck’s general fandom grows quieter as time goes on, it’s clear to me that the active core at its heart is still very much alive and thriving in its own way.

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October

1^st

Makin froze the shills channel a couple days ago over some frivolous nonsense, which is hardly unprecedented, but he ended up leaving it that way overnight. I always get frustrated when he closes it even briefly, but this especially upset me so much that I decided I need a break (in his defense there was other stuff too, but it was mostly this specific issue). After doing some soul searching and coming to terms with the state of things I came back. While I was gone, though, I was touched by the people who wished me well or reached out to see if I was doing okay. Really hammered in why I stick around and still try to care as much as I do.

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8^th

Homestuck 2, now officially branded as Homestuck: Beyond Canon, henceforth abbreviated to HSBC, has resumed updates. There is also a post from James Roach requesting questions from the fandom concerning the project’s development, pending a news post that will come out later. The community is quite abuzz over it, being our first official content in a number of years. After reading the update myself, I have to admit that despite not caring one iota for general Homestuck 2 content, this made me laugh and seems to have a glimmer of the old spirit to it. I’ll happily accept this and I hope we see more soon.

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30^th

Following another update on the 25th (on which we also had our community stream, doing Donnie Darko this year), James Roach released an extensive news post explaining his thoughts on the state of the property, the fandom, and where he sees HSBC going in the future.

He seems very direct and even apologetic at times (“I would like to personally recognize and own up to the fact that many of the decisions and actions of that era hurt a lot of people and created a rift that might never truly be bridged. For my part in that, I am sorry.”), which is a bit surprising but decidedly welcome. Of particular note is description of the goals and ideas of the “Homestuck Independent Creative Union” (HICU), headed by James Roach. He makes it clear that this group is distinct from previous incarnations of the Homestuck team and that it is firmly disconnected from Andrew Hussie or the whims of previous project managers. He even says that the HICU has “legally acquired a license from the creator of the IP to work with the property and monetize it,” which should preclude some concerns over the legality or legitimacy of the project. There’s also claims that merchandise may come back–it’s not a dead certainty, but it’s something they would very much like to do.

In all, the post is informative and very optimistic. I myself am only cautiously so at this point, but all signs at the moment are pointing in the right direction. Here’s looking forward to the future for once.

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November

7^th

A couple of fun developments. First and foremost, we were reached out to by the HICU to establish a sort of liaison group. Considering how this kind of thing went before, I was initially rather apprehensive. After the initial encounter and admittedly awkward discussion, I am much more excited at the prospect. Far better than before, everyone involved seems very earnest. I will avoid listing their side out for now, but our half of the liaison group is Makin, myself, terminalTermagant, Ifnar, B3es, and Niklink.

For now, it seems there’s a focus on recognizing errors in the past without dwelling on them too much or wasting energy re-litigating. Additionally, it seems everyone involved has a decent understanding of professional boundaries that should be kept. In our dealings with Hussie there was a concrete and pronounced fear that we would be forcibly changed somehow, but here I get the impression there’s a real concern with making sure that they don’t interfere with our doings or internal workings that much. It’s a refreshingly conscientious approach to the situation.

There wasn’t much else for now on this, there will be a further meeting soon-ish and with the initial weirdness out of the way (I hope, anyway), maybe more constructive meetings will follow. For now it seems they’ll give us a heads-up when official news is due to come out, which by itself is already a lovely boon. The more I reflect on the first conversation, the more pleased I am with it.

That aside, on a more local level, Magistrate decided to pick Worth the Candle back up. I can’t speak for anyone else but I think that work is my favorite on the shills list for generally high quality and an interesting premise, and it seems to be a work that we end up discussing frequently. Magistrate tried a while ago and made it about 20 chapters in, but upon picking the torch back up he’s been positively racing through it and is now on chapter 200. He’s gone so far as to say that he takes it as evidence that web fiction is the future of writing, which coming from him is rather high praise.

Given that it’s November, Nanowrimo is around and writing seems to be the ongoing subject in at least a couple places. Bolas is hosting another writing contest in his Patreon channel; I’ve neglected to participate officially, both because I won last year for my middling Dark Tower fanfic and because I’m struggling with motivation to work on my current idea, itself a fanfic of Magistrate’s own fanfic Chicago, a towering Madoka Magica fanfic.

He noted at one point that it seems to be a running theme where I only write fanfics of fanfics. This is not necessarily true, the Dark Tower fic isn’t based on anyone else’s fan material and I did write a very brief Gundam fanfic at some point. I guess that doesn’t speak well of me regardless.

Nothing more for today.

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8^th

Makin continues to tinker with Drewbot. For now, it seems to be general improvements on functions that already exist. I don’t understand all the technical aspects of it, made painfully obvious to me when Nights conducted a surprise visit and started asking me questions (sorry, Nights. Not a computer scientist). It is definitely an impressive piece of work though, the art renderings for sylladex combinations are all very clean and detailed.

Drewbot impersonating me is not as funny as it used to be, too often it gives responses that are just “oh god” or “oh no” with no further clarification, refusing to answer questions properly, or is just boring (one might suggest that this is actually completely accurate anyway). Occasionally you do get funnier bits like being asked what it thinks we should do to improve the server, to which it responded we “need a little more eugenics.” I sometimes think about what would help the bot be funny again, it could be a matter of specific finetuning or–as I like to think–it’s that the technology has moved past the initial awkward stage where it was more likely to churn out non-sequiturs.

That all being said and done, it’s time to return to an age old tradition where I described users in the channel. According to Tetrahedron and terminalTermagant, who are both reading through the document, there are some notable figures I might have forgotten who have been present throughout the server’s history. If this proves true, I’ll definitely be writing them descriptions too. For now, a couple new ones.

First is Starfang Primemeow. Recently he described that he settled on his name using a “fursona name generator,” which says quite a bit on its own. He recently convinced me that this work qualifies as something of an ethnography, and I updated the description on the website accordingly. Following this, he seems to be an anthropologist¹⁷, and actually delivered a conference presentation on the subject of preservation of the Homestuck fandom, interviewing myself, Makin, Gio, and Bambosh for various efforts involved in archival. Starfang is also somewhat vocal on matters of politics, adding their voice to the leftists in the US Politics channel frequently. Even in such discussions which develop serious friction, Starfang seems to be a voice of direction and focus who keeps the conversation from spiraling out of control.

Alice is a rather interesting new user who first joined a long time ago, and only just started talking in earnest a few months back. She claims to live in the Bay area of California and is a career artist, which has naturally led to a lot of jeering from Makin who openly claims to “hate artists.” We’re not really sure how much of this is a joke. Alice also speaks frequently on the government and culture of China, offering a perspective through her own heritage and experiences visiting various provinces there. She seems to have an interest in interaction between official team members for Homestuck and the fandom; when Starfang mentioned conducting interviews about archival, she suggested that he could also reach out to various members of Homestuck’s team both current and past, such as James Roach and Bowman. Starfang brought up Tensei’s presence, but Alice jokingly responded, “tensei doesnt seem to have hobbies other than hanging out in this chat / sorry that was mean tensei if you see this.” A decidedly positive addition to the group.

I find it interesting that the average age of newcomers seems to have increased alongside the general age of longtime inhabitants. There is some discussion of newer Homestuck fans rising out of places like Instagram and Tiktok but for the purposes of mspa-lit especially (which I am begrudgingly starting to think of as “the shills channel” instead of lit) it seems that the core audience, at least for our purposes, hasn’t really changed. I’m not sure whether I would prefer it to stay that way or if I want some new blood to arrive. In the interest of longevity, it would probably be the latter.

On that note actually, I wanted to describe some boring numbers really quickly. Makin and I have been going back and forth on server activity, with him dismissively saying that we’re “more active than ever” while I insist that this is not the case. Without adjusting for anything, we’re still declining slightly each year since 2020 (still above 2019, an absolute low. Maybe the pandemic was good for something after all). Something I’ve been looking at with more scrutiny over the last half year, though, is the amount of total server activity which is made up of shitposting (defined mostly as how much #altgen and #homosuck talk). Over the last year, shitposting has made up a significantly greater amount of holistic server activity than usual, rising from roughly a third or so to over 50% in some months.

I’m not sure how much this will stick, though; the shitpost percentage for October was only about 36% if I recall. Further, I have to admit that Makin is not entirely wrong: this year’s October was the most active so far, something that surprised the hell out of me considering this year’s April was the least active. It was probably aided in no small part by the return of Homestuck 2, but there also seems to be some draw away from #homosuck (a behemoth that frequently accounts for half of all activity on a given day) towards the newly minted mspa-forums. Said Discord forum has a thread dedicated to the “Homosuck Sburb Session” which is absurdly active, I can’t see the precise number but it reached over 100,000 messages by itself a long time ago already.

Something else that might account for the activity is bot logs; while the return of Homestuck 2 has had distinctly good effects, it also seems to have brought about the return of regular raids. There seems to be one persistent individual who is sending regular bot raids which spam boilerplate gore images. Makin raised the security levels so the images aren’t being shown, thankfully. Occasionally for the last couple weeks when we’ve tested it by lowering the security again, bots immediately come through and we have to raise the level back up. This has adversely affected users who don’t have a proper phone for verification, and is proving to be a sore spot for new users who join and have to jump through hoops just to talk.

We thought this might be related to some sort of internal drama between two users (I’m not familiar with the details), but the raider literally responded to this with subsequent bots whose usernames basically spelled out “I’m not related to that ongoing drama, this is nothing personal. I’m just doing it for fun.” It’s pretty unique to have a raider with that level of dedication, I only wish that the spam was something more creative and less unpleasant to look at. Lots of effort is being wasted there.

Nothing more for today.

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