Drew Linky
22nd of April 2026
I. Myself, or, Mono no Aware
For the entirety of my adult life I have been overly sensitive to impermanence. The root factors responsible for this are too much to summarize here; suffice it to say that if I begin to mull over the passage of time for more than a brief spell, it becomes agitating or can even bring on legitimately depressive moods. I simply cannot bring myself to get over the fact that, barring a technological-medical miracle, we will all die someday.
Nor do I strictly want to get over that fact. I think it is ingrained into my brain for important, overarching reasons. Principally, I do not believe in the supernatural in any form. I am not given to superstition, or appeals to a higher power. My experience and knowledge of the universe has made me resolute in thinking that the world is strictly mechanical. Even the most incomprehensibly complex things we are aware of, including the human brain and its capacity for all our diverse behaviors, is ultimately just an extremely complicated, interwoven series of chemical and physical processes. Accordingly, as I don't see any material support for a mechanism thereof, I am not convinced that there is anything such as life after death. I see nothing which evidences a higher cycle of being, or some plane where the ineffable soul might be diverted once the physical body has ceased to function.
In the spirit of the concept mono no aware which Tensei first brought up to me many years ago, I've gotten better at reckoning with our impermanence as the years go on. Unfortunately, staring too long into that particular void is still abjectly terrifying. Sometimes I'm not even sure why it bothers me so much; I am not a particularly happy person who craves living, I go through peaks or--far more often--valleys of emotional disposition whether for circumstantial or inborn reasons. Even with as little as I enjoy life sometimes, I am occasionally obsessed with the idea that my or others' being will inevitably collapse and we will wink out of existence.
This has caused me no shortage of melancholy, and something of a curiosity with legacy--or more accurately, record keeping. In the course of writing this document I have occasionally researched more permanent, effective methods of archival. Chief among these included: Astrobotic's "Peregrine" lander, on which Reddit user "Valphon" had offered to provide 10MB of free storage for the first so many people who asked. This project was ultimately a failure, with the lander purposefully destroyed in a reentry into the Earth's atmosphere in 2024; and so-called 5D optical data storage, an experimental nanostructured glass-based method which is currently not even available commercially. Estimates vary as to what it will cost once such data storage can be purchased. This format would in theory be almost impervious to decay over time but, until it can be bought, it is useless to me.
If I had the resources I would pay for or do all these things and more--I would engrave it all myself in some resilient stone! After all, I have hardly been alone in this line of thought. The impermanence of our lives is marked in manifold aspects of nearly every society on Earth: monuments to preserve our memories of the dead festoon all corners of the globe. Beyond just ourselves as a species, we also commemorate objects because said monuments, buildings, personal keepsakes, and even the ground we walk upon erode away with use or the simple passage of time.
Beyond the looming threat of loss, this topic has also fostered a sharp sense of loneliness. Even while in the midst of talking to people, I cannot ever quite let myself forget that it is a fleeting thing to be around one another. It is said that in the Roman triumphs, the glorious victor at the center of the celebration would be reminded occasionally that they are still mortal, invoking the famous phrase memento mori. I need no such reminding; I am draped in dread by my understanding.
Hence this document. At the end of things it may just be one more tome atop the mountain of human experience, but I hope that will be enough to stave off the final death for myself and the people I've cared so much about for as long as possible.
~
II. The Homestuck Discord Server, or, the Pequod
It is impractical to cleanly describe the Homestuck Discord Server in only a few paragraphs (one might point out that's why there is over half a million words of original writing on this website detailing its fuller history). The key aspects, as plainly as I can, will be summarized here.
Foremost was the sheer, absurd variety of people who joined it. In the truest sense it was a melding of ideas unlike any other I have encountered. No matter one's origins, their stripes, their interests, it all came together in a cosmopolitan1 explosion. Though detractors will claim otherwise, we did our best to be welcoming of contrary viewpoints as long as they were argued sufficiently (or at least were funny). Those who were witty or well-reasoned thrived, but even if one was slow or boring they could sometimes survive on their niceties.
Directly following this was the rush of ideas and viewpoints. I learned so much just by osmotic pressure, being in the same space as people different from me in experience and preference. Many days were marked by a frenzied rush of people talking, clamoring just to say things of personal and cultural relevance to one another. The exposure to new ideas and concepts that I might otherwise never have bothered to engage with cannot be emphasized enough; it has completely changed me as a person, changed my thinking and influenced the skills I have acquired.
By extension, I have developed an unprecedented bond to several people on the server. Even those I will likely never see are dear, but I have met a number of them in real life, some once and some a few times. This has utterly transformed how I feel about them; though we may not speak every day in the future, they are precious to me and always will be so.
Finally, though it was not initially my fight, I am sometimes astonished by how we rallied together in more difficult times for the property of Homestuck itself. In truth I do not consider Homestuck vitally important to me anymore, marking the end of a span of over ten years where it has been a story I marked in my thoughts on a nigh daily basis. In cooperating with Makin over these years, I finally placed myself against the unethical encroachment of "official people" in whatever capacity, including Andrew Hussie, the owner himself. Make no mistake: I think it would be more beneficial to everyone if we could finally cooperate. It is only with somber distress that, due to how Hussie and his associates operate, I decide this is functionally impossible.
With this in mind, one of our most vital functions was as a place for people to collectively, freely criticize the handling of Homestuck as a franchise. With the Homestuck Discord gone, that space has been ripped away. All of our dismay and rage against incompetence, dismissiveness, and outright nefariousness is, for the moment, gone to the wind. If we're lucky, some other place may fulfill this purpose once again.
Even if so, the official conductors of the franchise have fought as hard as they can to keep singular purchase of what is now rotting fruit. If things continue in this fashion and they continue to blind themselves to reality, they may very well keep their prize.
The fusion and continuous discussion of all these details has been the subject of my writing for almost nine years. It is staggering to think of just how much time I've spent typing words on a computer to describe all of our cavorting and commiserating, the various things which have together forged unlikely and dramatic relationships both positive and negative. Barring some restoration efforts which may never see the light of day, what I have written is all that effectively remains.
Though I could live another one hundred years, I may never see the like of such a place again.
~
III. The Future, or, From Me to You
I never did and still don't know where things are heading. As of now the field looks as follows.
There are a couple of small, private servers still in existence, some of them the so-called "splinter servers" and others more independent spaces. To my knowledge none of them are extremely active, but they have nonetheless retained their membership for some years already. People can be content in these places, and through their general quietude they are exceedingly stable. They could plausibly last as long as Discord does. Maybe the refuge that I have described near the end of this document will become another such place. There are currently around 175 people accumulated there, with nebulous plans to bring in more if we deem it appropriate.
There are also some plans to create a more independent space of our own off of Discord, something we could fortify against various internet and real-life policies that threaten the very essence of what we do, and how we think. This is mostly on hold for the time being, mostly for logistical reasons (as frustrating as it is sometimes, Discord is still the most convenient free platform for organizing groups like this).
As mentioned above, Makin has already moved forward with making another main server, which may prove successful. Given the state of flux we're in currently, I am especially interested to see what happens to it. Yet, the original server being lost in the way it has been should serve as the ultimate lesson not to trust in the permanence of any of these structures.
In the worst case scenario where the original server does not come back and the new one is also struck down, I have some hope that we may all be able to endure in a way similar to my Sydlexia group, namely on a more private basis through the refuge server. My associates from Sydlexia have talked and continue to talk to each other indefinitely--some of them have known each other for over twenty years now!--even if the pace should become glacial or our lives spread ever more apart. Even in light of that, I resist thinking of where we will end up, or else I inevitably turn to darker thoughts. The bigger picture is firmly out of my control and the future remains, as it ever must be, unknowable.
My plea, then. If you have found your way here and have read my words; if you have felt anything at all about the people and things I've described; if our existence has inspired some measure of thought in you: please don't let it all be worn away like just another monument. I and the people I care about are living, feeling entities who have shared some of our precious, limited time together. Against terrible odds, we exist!
And eventually that shall become "existed." I am terrified at the prospect of ceasing to be, and I am terribly saddened by people I know following suit. Though the idea of this corpus surviving for any stretch of time past my own life seems terribly implausible to me, writing like this is the greatest power at my disposal to safeguard against oblivion.
To you in the future, I reach out from the murky past and offer you words dredged straight from my heart. Whether you read all this as we still live or long after we have returned to the soil, I beseech you to help protect what I or others have written2. Eventually it might be all that is left to mark our passage, and I am desperate that it will mean anything in perpetuity. We can ask nothing else, so it will have to be enough.
This document is thus ended3.
Makin
1 shhh hussie still believes we're a bunch of chuds
2 I beseech you to pet your nearest dog
3 I'm not close to overdramatic enough to write an epitaph for a Discord server. Confusion will be my epitaph.