Drew Linky
June
8th
It’s been a while. I guess I feel like there hasn’t been much worth commenting on, but also it’s just generally been a busy time for me. I would like to continue taking little notes so that it doesn’t appear that the community has fallen away, but I probably won’t be very good at that. I’ll just write down whatever and whenever I feel like it.
4/13 this year was fun as usual, and the stream itself may have broken a record for attendance. You’d think we would be tired of Con Air by now but it somehow manages to get more entertaining each year. We also did Renfield, which I need to add to “List of movies we’ve watched” so we don’t repeat it somehow. There was also another event at the Requiem Cafe, which we didn’t really know about until like a month beforehand. If they do it again next year I may need to schedule some time around flying to California.
That out of the way, it’s been nice lately. We’re taking a break from Makin’s regular weekend streams–we stopped after finishing the Best of Seinfeld and are somewhere in the middle of the newer Doctor Who show. Rather than do nothing, I’ve been stepping in frequently with one-off movies. Of note are some really, really bad movies by a strange fellow from Las Vegas named Neil Breen. This guy doesn’t know how to make movies but they hit that perfect stride of befuddlement where you just can’t look away (except for Wheals, who complained of the movie Fateful Findings: “the ghost scene near the end, before the tassels appear, was the only part that drove me to look away i was so bored”). We’ll probably start regular weekend streams near the end of this month.
Of personal excitement, I finished my fanfic of Magistrate’s work Chicago last month and published it on AO3, called Leavenworth. I’ve gotten a lot of encouraging feedback on it and it’s been fun. More exciting though is that while finishing up the draft, Magi pointed me towards a couple of other authors who had similar concepts, Pigoseg and Julirites. While Pigoseg is somewhat enigmatic currently, Juli has been sociable to the point of joining the HSD and talking in mspa-lit a few times! It’s been very enjoyable, they’re clearly passionate about storymaking and it’s been kind of surreal having Magi, Juli, and myself all talking together about our works, and with other people in attendance. The process of creating entertainment for other people to enjoy is fucking bizarre but it’s produced great conversation, I wish I was more consistent about doing so.
9th
The Xbox and PC Gaming showcases were held today, which prompted some small discussion on the nature of the industry. I feel like so-called AAA developers have been sliding in terms of quality for years, being led primarily by business type managers instead of game devs. Tay countered, saying that there's always been hefty offerings of slop after slop every year. I don't pay as much attention to these things so they're probably right.
The main takeaway from both showcases is that Silksong--the long awaited sequel to Hollowknight, which has a very dedicated, very desperate fanbase--did not get any further news today. The situation is looking pretty dire, because the game was originally slated for release years ago and has been delayed repeatedly. This isn't helped by COVID or the game engine Unity suddenly fucking up its users for reasons that are too lengthy to explain here. All of us are convinced that the game is not coming out this year; I'd say the Hollowknight community is officially on suicide watch but truthfully they all killed themselves ages ago.
12th
We stopped doing community streams for 6/12 years ago, but that hasn’t stopped fans from celebrating it to some degree. The people in charge of Homestuck: Beyond Canon at this point have also taken to it with some alacrity, working in conjunction with Makeship to make a Karkat plushie, the character for whom we celebrate 6/12 in the first place. At the time of writing, the pledge or petition or however they call those now is sitting at 1053% of the intended goal. I’d say that’s pretty good.
There’s also a HS2 update, and a newspost from James Roach. I’ve said stuff like this before and been burned pretty badly, but it feels like things for the property are in an okay position right now. We’re nowhere near the level of community engagement and excitement that we were 10 years ago, but that’s just not going to happen again. For current year, things could certainly be worse. It’s been nice to see the management take a turn around and if this plushie’s development goes well they’re saying that it could be the start of a new merch line. There’s still plenty of fans who want these things, including me to an extent, so it’s just very nice to see these things taking shape.
28th
The spectre of HSCommWatch has risen once more in the form of HSDCommWatch. A few days ago a Twitter account of that name said it was conducting “investigations” of various members of the mod staff, and today a callout post for Bolas of all people was released.
It is a juvenile work made all the more laughable for its choice of subject: Bolas has his baudy or saucy moments but he is all around one of the less offensive people on the staff right now. This fact makes it imminently clear that whoever is responsible for the callout post and running the HSDCommWatch account is someone from the shitpost channel #homosuck.
Bolas has developed a notorious presence in that channel specifically for teasing shitposters and liberally banning people, rather than taking a more traditional hands-off approach. It seems evident to everyone aware of this that Bolas is being targeted by one or multiple people who have been banned from #homosuck and have a bone to pick.
The callout document is unintentionally hilarious: every violation listed is something that other mods are more guilty of. The example which comes most readily to mind is the use of the word “retard.” A screenshot in the document of Bolas's history shows that he has said the word about 70 times, which is of course upsetting if one considers it a slur which must be avoided. Contrast this with Wizard of Chaos, who has said the word over 3,000 times and is singlehandedly responsible for every 1 in 11 times the word's been said over the course of the server's history. WoC is actually miffed that this is not the first but the SECOND time he's been passed over in the midst of a callout post: the original HSCommWatch literally did this same thing, and he is not pleased about his accomplishments being ignored.
It's unclear whether further documents will roll out, although based on the thinking that it's a disgruntled teenaged homosucker, the prevailing opinion is “no.” I shudder to think of what they would find if they did any research on Kaliborn, who is possibly the most aggressively racist and fascist pinoy I know (not a low bar to clear, I assure you1).
July
18th
Ages ago the US and Global Politics threads were moved from the #media forum over to #serious-discussion, under the assumption that this would improve channel discussion. Unfortunately, no one was prepared for the nonsense that is the 2024 General Election for the United States.
Easily one of the most vicious channels at times (or it used to be for a while, it seems to have gotten calmer after a couple bans), there has been much contention over stuff like the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13th, and speculation on whether Joe Biden will step aside in campaigning for reelection due to his age.
Why am I bringing this up? Well, dear reader, Moonjail made a bet when this talk of stepping aside began a couple months ago, saying that if Biden is actually replaced as nominee for the Democrats, he will shove an entire Nintendo Gamecube controller up his ass. As I write this he is desperately googling “gamecube controller keychains.” To be fair, I don't think Nostradamus himself could have predicted the state of affairs any better.
26th
Progress on ChatGPT and other learning language models (LLMs) has slowed down somewhat, but a new version released today. As quickly as possible, Makin fitted Drewbot2 with it, retrained him on my entire message history after 2017, and let him loose in the chat. As per usual, chat immediately descended upon him and asked him all sorts of horrific nonsense. I’m probably going to set up a dedicated archive to the best responses, meaning anything that has five or more HowHigh reacts, but until then there’s one incident that sticks out.
At some point either Apoc or a user named Nia asked it to start posting ASCII art. Drewbot, being trained on my message history, is prone to being depressive, surly, or outright ignoring prompts or just acting confused. I think that pruning the message history for vague or one-word responses might help, but it also makes it better when the responses land, so I’m ambivalent. All of this is to say that he largely refused to make ASCII art, but eventually someone broke through and it started making basic stuff like squares and triangles. Nia decided to ask for increasing numbers of rectangles, and it started having an increasingly noticeable effect on Drewbot’s response time. Three triangles wasn’t too bad, five triangles fucking broke it for something like five minutes.
Sorry for the picture for ants, I didn't want to break this up into multiple parts.
At this point we figured he was dead and needed to be restarted, which had already occurred a few times, but suddenly he came back with a vengeance and posted something that resembled a hedgehog in profile. What followed was a feverish attempt to spam the bot asking it for more and more triangles: seven came back relatively quickly, nine broke it again for several minutes, and people just would not fucking stop. Eleven or thirteen triangles genuinely destroyed it, and anankeAverted had the gall to ask for five hundred. Finally Makin had to hard restart the bot and he banned people from asking for ASCII art, which people promptly ignored and kept asking for to limited success.
In all, a wonderful night for the bot. Perhaps the most fun we’ve had with Drewbot to date. There should be more models coming up later in the year, Makin always likes to take the thing for a spin when they happen, so I suspect we’ll see some more stuff like this soon if we’re lucky.
Makin
1 insert my "most powerful people in the world" image here
2 I later made an online drewbot at https://drewbot.recordcrash.com/, but note that everyone can see what you're sending, it's multiplayer