SPAT Appendix B

List of Works

Addendum

Wizard of Chaos - 9^th of September, 2017

Hi. I’m WoC. I offered to write an addendum because I saw the journal and thought it was an interesting idea. His information is now slightly out of date, however -- I no longer live in that 1,000 population town (not even a town, really, more of a community), as I now live at Longwood University, where I’m a physics major. I try not to electrocute myself too much here.

He’s broadly right in terms of describing me; the only real major detail he fucked up was that it was a groundhog, not a prairie dog. I’ve done a lot of really stupid shit, frankly, and I’m sorta lucky to be alive. I’m not really trying to be abrasive, I just don’t have much of a filter. He’s right when he describes me as a redneck. I have a hard time telling what’s politically correct and when, because I grew up in an environment where that simply didn’t happen. I enjoy firearms, physics, engineering, video games, cooking, and alcohol. Drew has told me repeatedly I have a drinking problem, but I disagree -- I can drink just fine.

Right now I’m the #gaming enforcer; I re-joined the server for awhile because #gaming had gone to hell and I wanted to fix that. I like the channel. I like video games. I’ve played so fucking many video games that I’m qualified to have an opinion on most of them, which is why I enjoy interacting with the users there; no matter what, I’ll probably have some sort of opinion or advice. The only question is whether I’m gonna have time in between all my classes.

Drew has a tendency to hang out in the #mspa-lit channel (currently called something absolutely retarded, as usual), which means he focuses on it, so I’m going to try to avoid talking about that particular shitpile of drama for too long. Instead, I wanted to mention the addition of the channel #social and also a quick history of the #serious channel.

One quick thing, however: the thing you want to remember about #mspa-lit is that, as Drew mentioned, it’s pretty goddamn cliquey, and I myself want to see the whole thing just gone. I recognize that nobody agrees with me in the matter here, but there we are. I think it’s just a channel for Makin to talk about pretty much anything he wants, and that its purpose is easily served by other channels. #social was literally created so that Makin could tell people to stop talking about their personal lives in #mspa-lit so he could get back to whatever he wanted to talk about. You’ll see frequent calls to move to #gaming, or to #social, or to #serious, or to #anime, depending on whatever is currently interrupting Makin’s train of thought.

Anyway, my point here is that a new channel got made specifically for that-- people to talk about their personal lives. It’s like #general, but for a slightly more… not exactly positive crowd, more like hugbox-ey crowd. It’s currently a channel for people to give vague compliments and utter phrases like “oh no, you’re beautiful, it’s fine”. I do my best to disrupt the flow of navel-gazing with bursts of sheer hostility just for a bit of difference. It’s a thankless job, and nobody needs to do it, and in fact I probably shouldn’t do it, but dammit, I have serious issues with just letting people sit in a corner and tell each other that it’s okay to never, ever change. Alongside the meaningless complimentary attitude, the channel has frequent bouts of obsession over weird shit. As I’m typing this, the channel is currently talking about how they want to marry everyone and they’re making fake plans and it’s just insane. The point of all this is, despite the fact that the channel’s kind of redundant, it’s developed a small community of its own. It was interesting to watch it happen from literally nothing.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that #serious was a festering shithole for many, many months. Initially, the channel was started as a “absolutely NO shitposting” channel, for topics of serious discussion like political affairs and whatnot. Economics, brexit, pretty much any discussion that could be taken seriously. However, eventually it became a channel for people to talk about personal problems-- emotional issues, girl troubles, boy troubles, what have you. This was also fine, since it tended to share space with the political talk and overall the channel was pretty good.

However, after that, the channel attracted a crowd of people who wanted to talk about way darker personal issues-- suicidal thoughts, self-harm, depression, et cetera. The serious discussions got wiped out and the channel became a place for people to talk about their deepest, darkest feelings. This was an interesting direction to go in, but it also brought in a whole horde of attention seekers. These people would come in, every single day, and talk about the same issue, over and over, while refusing to actually do anything about it. They were very clearly in it for the attention of others. I’d stopped using the channel by this point, it was a little much for me. The channel had gone from solid to used for whining. It was a pretty sad transition to watch, frankly. Sometimes you would get the odd person who actually needed help, but by this point there were so many people dedicated to “helping” (offering useless, useless advice and trying to calm people down) that nothing would really happen.

Since then, though, the channel has seemingly cleared up. Right now it’s being used to talk about issues within the server itself, which is fine, and actual serious discussion has made a return. The attention seekers have mostly fucked off (when you have a community based around suicidal impulses, don’t expect it to last long). The activity level as a whole is much lower, but in my opinion that’s a good thing. Wild, crazy channels tend to require much more policing. I’ll be interested to see what the community as a whole defines as worthy of “serious” discussion in the future.

Additional notes on LOFAM

Ndividedbyzero (Cait) - 21^st of July, 2018

With a significant portion of Homestuck fanmusicians and quite a few fanartists in one discord server, the scope of UMSPAF's projects increased dramatically. While LOFAM 4 was also in the pipeline, being perhaps by far the most anticipated album with the greatest amount of enthusiasm and work directed towards its release, the now drastically more active and collaborative community began work on future projects. An example was Xenoplanetarium, an album about the trolls' planets, which was planned for release after LOFAM 4. Though not quite the work of the LOFAM server specifically, another album showed itself in March 2017 with the release of Weird Puzzle Tunes, a Problem Sleuth album developed by the aforementioned FLSA, which had also initially come up with the idea for Xenoplanetarium before it was superseded by UMSPAF. (As a sidenote, FLSA is perhaps best described as a short-lived music collective branching off mainly from the members of CANMT, but others such as myself also joined.) Though production of WPT had begun in October 2016, by the time of release almost all FLSA's active members accepted that it was basically being vored by UMSPAF and had joined it, so WPT could be said to be the first album released under the reinvigorated UMSPAF banner. From there the months passed as everyone worked towards the various projects in development. New people filtered in, friendships were forged, and there was a fair share of drama and tension along the way as well, though never catastrophic in a sense that compromised the projects themselves.

In June, something rather unexpected happened- with no warning or heads up whatsoever, the beautifully titled ?H?MESTUCK VAP?RWAVE 2016 RUH?-?RUH?-?RUH?-?REMIX??????·?????·?????? [Editor’s note: this text is broken because Cait’s notes were provided in notepad, which doesn’t do special characters. The text is corrected in the article proper] was uploaded to the bandcamp, an album mostly full of ironically shitty vaporwave remixes of Homestuck tracks by Jamie Paige and Marcy that was first uploaded to Soundcloud in 2016. Being that this was a shitpostfest of previously released tracks, however, it was more a small quirky event in the scheme of things. More importantly during the same month was the coming to the forefront of yet another album project: the Ancestral Album. Initially developed by a single organizer (who can be called Porrim-Maryam or Josefin), this album was inspired directly by and served as a "sister album" to Beforus, which makes sense: where Beforus was about the Beforan trolls, Ancestral was to be about their A2 versions. In the background of everything described from Beforus' release up to this point, Ancestral had steadily been amassing tracks and track art of its own, and at this time it was nearly complete, with a whopping 70+ pieces of both music and art each complete. However, much work, mainly administrative, remained before it was ready for release. This is where UMSPAF came into play, beginning to do joint work with Josefin. The organizational team's main goals in helping the Ancestral project were to master the album and do the gargantuan amount of work to get all of it on Bandcamp, and there were additional factors too, such as the creation of promotional materials and covering for songs whose composers had decided to drop out. In the end it was a pretty fun experience, and the Ancestral album was released near the end of August, with (appropriately enough) essentially an identical reception to the one Beforus received. Those who are inclined to view Beforus negatively shouldn't write it off, though- in my opinion its highs are HIGH.

We'd barely been able to shake off the post-release feeling of satisfaction when just three days later, an incredible revelation occurred: after years of waiting, Hiveswap was actually going to be released, specifically on September 14. This posed a problem: similarly to how Ancestral had been in June, LOFAM 4 was at this point mainly complete but for the mastering, administrative work and supplementary materials, as well as a few errant songs. This meant that by all accounts it was probably going to be released in September, but if it were released after Hiveswap, there was a huge chance of the album getting buried in the hype surrounding the game. Therefore the best option remaining was to ramp up production of the album in its final stages, setting the release date to LOFAM 4 as September 9. This proved very stressful at times, and it can't be understated that we were working *hard*; by the final 2 days, I had gotten in about 3 hours of sleep within 48 hours. But the deadline was met. On September 9, 2017, Land of Fans and Music 4, which ended up at a truly unprecedented 105 tracks spanning over 6 and a half hours in total length, was streamed on Twitch, then released. This stream stands out to me personally as probably the high point of all my time in the community, which I may admit be biased, but is true nonetheless. An average of over 150 people came to listen and react to the album, and that number, incredibly enough, stayed consistent over the entire 7 and a half hours that the stream lasted for (including intermissions to watch Youtube shitposts). Seeing this many people react to the work that we had all compiled and worked on for years with hype and praise was a vindicating experience, to say the absolute least, and across those 7 hours, even with my massive sleep deprivation as described earlier, I never really got tired. After the stream, a few very last minute touches were put on the album, and then it was finally out on Bandcamp as well. A significant chapter in the Homestuck fanmusic community- and oddly enough, my personal life, as well- was over.

With "the most ambitious crossover in Homestuck fanmusic history" now out, the community naturally began to grow quieter over the coming months. But things weren't over forever. As mentioned before, Xenoplanetarium was still in development, and was released in December, a 12-track effort that was the smallest in the discography by design. Regardless of its length, or perhaps in part because of it, I personally view it as one of the most enjoyable albums the group's released. Christmas saw the quickly mustered release of an album entitled Gristmas Carols that was even smaller: 9 songs of holiday-themed goodness, some sincere, some tongue in cheek. At the date of writing, Gristmas Carols remains the last album released by UMSPAF thus far. All in all, 2017 yielded six albums by the Unofficial MSPA Fans and well over 200 songs in total, by far the most productive year of all. As mentioned, the UMSPAF community's grown quieter, and no albums have been released this year yet. However, this is set to change- currently UMSPAF continues to work on its next project, Cosmic Caretakers. An album about the Guardians, Lusus and particular others, it's been in the works for quite a while now, and so I think I speak for everyone when I say we're all anxious to see it done. Until then, please wait warmly- so far it's shaping up to be quite an experience.

Channel Descriptions - circa April 2018

#altgen - deusAscendant

The history of Altgen is a turbulent thing, the channel getting its start due to some grand event (Spoke to toast, apparently gen was just getting spammed with shit 24/7 back then and cc was given the mandate to deal with it)

It quickly took off under the imperious eye of cynicallyCritical, amassing more than 4500 posts in its first 24 hours.

From eyewitness accounts and my own personal observations trawling through the backlogs, early Altgen was a hellish lawless place where the only hard rule seemed to be no NSFW, counting numerous cases of spam, bot abuse, obnoxious text quirks among its many attractions. I'm not sure exactly when, but perhaps after the changeover in pseudomodship from the first mod to Tori, the channel began to quieten down to a mere dull roar of complacent friendly shitposting, rather than a maelstrom. Evidently there was a lot of insufferable behaviour and raiding happening around this time, as it got bad enough to warrant the first of many supplementary rules to be added to the pins. Eventually in November 2017, Tori stepped down from the Altgen Pseudomodship and Dingus was promoted in her stead.

By the time I arrived just before Hiveswap was released, a community had formed in Altgen and was engaging in the practice of hugboxing (something I'm sure Drew has already explained). This hugbox community eventually drifted away, as all old regulars beforehand had, after a sweeping change was imposed on the channel and subsequently rescinded due to backlash. I suspect this was largely due to inaccurate information being gathered and reported second and third hand to the other members later, who then whipped themselves into a frenzy and somehow managed to never hear the truth.

In the months after the departure of the hugbox, altgen lapsed into a state of seeming dormancy, on the surface the channel was still active, but if one was to look at the channel for anymore than three consecutive days, they'd notice a lot of repepetitive content, a state that continues to persist, but may be improving slowly. Shortly into this state of creative torpor, Makin initiated the second Reckoning and out of the ashes, Dingus and myself were promoted to "compete for the Altgen Pseudo Mod Position" although the current working theory amongst all observers is that we have instead initiated the Double Juggalo Presidency of Altgen and will either bring salvation or ruin to the channel. For my part, I am trying to encourage creativity, cleverness and originality in posting, but the progess is, as aforementioned, slow. Going into the future my hopes are high. Think I might go stir them up a bit when im done here actually.

There are few regulars in altgen these days, unlike previously, but my life is richer for their presence.

Dingus, OG shitposter, memesmith and co mod of the rolling dumpster fire I affectionately call Altgen

centralAntecedent, or Oblong Meat Product, is an artist with a propensity for posting random cuts of their art and disappearing, in between saying things that may or may not have been thought through thoroughly.

parcelPyxides is a user with an affinity for making moderator memes and is responsible for a few of the many Drewposts scattered throughout altgen.

Shaggy2Grope and Violent K, the unironic juggalo twins, one is a midwesterner whose catchphrase is "spin my nuts" and the other is a Brit that unironically misses the days when ICP visited the UK

Sniffle, aka GinnyJin, is another artist who infrequently posts his naiad original character (whom I've been repeatedly informed is NOT his fursona) Anth for one reason or another, be it getting feedback or reacting to another post

Prime "leijon lover", one of the shitpostier users, along with Yes, That Reglare whom I am told is an old altgen regular returned from The War

other regulars or semi regulars include Jovie Joye, AKIO, Spiral, depressionGeneticist, virtuNat, Drunken Aradia, anoymous, Eldin, qweq12, Monday, TooFewSecrets and juicyPineapple, formerly known as pinapple boi

#art-cosplay - Teratosapphic

Hello, all. I'm Rar.Exe, or Rar for short, and I'm the pseudo mod for the Homestuck Discord Server¹'s art channel. I've been brought on to talk about the channel I host, in order to give the reader a better idea of the server outside of mspalit. Of course, being that my tenure in the channel is rather new, I've asked for help with recounting some of the history, namely from the first pseudo mod of the channel, Anervaria, and the previous pseudo mod, Tensei, along with others who have volunteered information about its creation, namely WoC and Wheals.

The art channel was initially founded on October 22nd, 2016, with its inception due to people repeatedly arguing with Makin about the existence of one. Makin, only having made the channel begrudgingly, created it under the stipulation that it would be deleted if the channel was found to be too inactive. As it stood, the channel remained consistently active relative to the userbase, and the channel stayed. Sadly though, this "proto-art" was flawed in that there were no restrictions on shitposting save for mod interference, and the regulars that did use the channel for its intended purpose were biased by elitism, even going so far as to discriminate against users under the age of 21. The turning point of this era was when an elaborate chain of events occurred. Firstly, on January 1st, 2017, LRS accidentally altered the roles of the then present NSFW channel, allowing minors to access the channel. A few regulars to NSFW, who also happened to overlap, perhaps unsurprisingly, with the ageist elitists. They began to spam the channel with borderline pornographic images and had to be removed from the channel. Soon after, WoC accidentally DMed one of the spearheading members with a .gif file of a decapitated deer's head, filled with explosives². They were so disgusted by the event, they permanently left the server, with their like-minded followers leaving alongside. WoC was demodded shortly after the occurrence. The final step in the transformation occurred on January 22nd when Tensei began to complain about the quality of the channel, saying that the shitposting taking place in the channel discouraged actual art. Makin was initially hesitant to enact any change but eventually decided on giving Tensei the position of art pseudo, giving him the authority to alter the channel as he saw fit. This redefinition of channel standard saw the art channel as I would first see it in February of 2017. Of course, this was long before I came into relevancy in the server.

The next few months proceeded calmly until April 18th. Makin, apropos of nothing³, made an official statement in art, saying sprite edits would be universally banned from the channel for lack of effort and uncreativity. Important to note is that this event greatly predated the creation of OC Shrine, so all sprite edits were relegated to altgen. This seriously upset people who made sprite edits, especially those who put genuine time and care into their craft. They cried out, saying the ruling insinuated their work was naught but a shitpost. This, of course, was exacerbated when Makin actually agreed with the statement, and figurative fists began to fly. The climax of the entire event was when the outraged took to Makin’s DMs, filling them with vitriol, pleas, and groveling. He quickly shut down the entire debate with a statement that the decision was unanimous between the mods, and all those trying to repeal, whether in art or over DM, would be banned from the channel⁴. Several people ended up leaving, feeling stripped of their passion for the community, and disenfranchised with the server as a whole. The echoes of the change still rang out for a good few days after, as those who had not been present expressed their lamentations, but it was effectively finished. I had taken the side of the editors, and still believe they were in the right to this day, but I've since resigned to the fact that the change is permanent. Even today, I remember conspiring with others after the fact about how best to evade the rules via loopholes. I believe those who remained became the community of OC shrine. Very little happened in the channel for almost a year. Tensei and Anervaria had managed the channel in such a way that the regulars of the channel essentially performed the rule enforcement for them. Of course, there were those who ran counter to expected behavior, but that’s to be expected from a community as large as it is, and they were dealt with cleanly and efficiently. I became somewhat of a known name despite rarely ever posting art of my own, instead becoming associated with being an absolute stickler for the rules, and asking new or unfamiliar artists if they would/did draw body horror art (a personal passion of mine).

Of course, with the Rapture, the order had been shaken up. Tensei was promoted to fullmod, Anervaria was fired completely (at least, for about a day, until the mod team had successfully convinced Makin to reinstate her as the janitor for the voice channels). This left a stunning tally of no one in charge of the art channel. Makin held the same poll as for all channels, the nominees being the well known and well-liked contributor to the fandom, Griever, and the essentially unknown outside of art itself, yours truly. Also worthy of note was that I wasn't present for this whatsoever, and was ironically nominated due to conversation *against* me being modded, started even more ironically by a user named Cartlord, who despises me to the point where, after I was hired, changed their nickname to “Cartlord has muted art-music”. Whoops. Almost tellingly from how I was selected, I lost to Griever with a final tally of 14-3. As you probably guessed, Griever did not become art pseudo. One of those three who voted for me was Tensei, who personally vouched for me, and argued against Griever gaining the position. Having successfully convinced Makin, he forewent the actual result of the vote in favor of placing me in the position, feeling Tensei's advocacy was trustworthy enough to bypass the process. The most striking point of me becoming the pseudo of art was that there was nothing striking at all. Several people had to be informed a change even occurred. In retrospect, this outcome was extremely likely given my modus operandi regarding moderation.

I have a much easier time enforcing predefined rules, with organic creation of them becoming akin to a precision balance mechanism. Even if it were less of a chore, I don't feel as though I would made any overly major alterations to channel dynamic, as I feel that, aside from my previously mentioned gripe, the channel has already struck the/an optimal system. Upon conducting the interviews for this article, however, something was pointed out to me by resident train-wreck-and-a-half WoC. The channel has been stagnating regarding discussion, with a large portion of the channel's dialogue being comprised entirely of complimenting artwork without saying anything original. This has caused several people to complain, even comparing the channel to a hugbox. I ignored this up until the previously mentioned interviews, where WoC brought this up directly, and I decided that something should be done. On April 1st, I posted the following message:

“Due to complaints with general channel behavior, I'd like to instate a new policy; that generic messages of praise and/or criticism will be frowned upon, and specific or constructive comments will now be heavily encouraged. Punishment will not be levied in violation of this, but know that this is for the well-being of the channel as a whole.”

Only time will tell if this alteration will have a lasting effect on the channel, or be swiftly forgotten. Speaking of April first, starting on April Fools', the channel was split into two: #art (now #art-cosplay), and #music. The entire team had assumed when Makin was joking around, since not only did it contribute to channel bloat, we assumed it would stagnate and die off soon after. To all of our surprise, not only did it remain, it had begun to flourish in a matter of hours. I'd go on, but I'll leave that up to Olki. Suffice it to say, I quickly stepped down from the position of music pseudo. The channel is, and has been, a small but thriving community. It's no small exaggeration to say I'm pleased, and mildly prideful, of the culture that's developed in the channel over the past year, even to the point of becoming a figure in it. It's heartwarming to scroll through social media, only to see art someone posted, and think to myself, "Hey! I know them! They post in *my* channel!" It doesn't happen all that often, but that only makes it all the more special.

Two of the people who stand out in my mind are FurryLatula/Latch and Major, users who help around with enforcement, as well as being good presences in the channel. Others include Moira, a user who people exclaim about as being extremely professional quality; Tin, maker of the fanventure of Hiveshit; Cat, who is just an all-around upbeat character and source of positivity; Deer, a user with a very characteristic style of almost comically thin characters, as well as an inspirational figure for some; and Scrub, a very artistically adamant regular, and probably the most active user in the channel. This admittedly clumsy list is a mere fraction of the rich tapestry that binds the channel together. If I could, I would absolutely delve in to the characterization of each user, but that would only serve to discourage all but the Ctrl+F crowd (yes, I see you there, cut it out).

Regardless of presentation quality or lack thereof, please take this article not only as a historical documentation of the channel, but as a love letter to everyone who frequents it. You guys rock, and keep striving for greater. You're the ones that keep me going. <3

#gaming - Wizard of Chaos

Hi. Wizard of Chaos here. Still #gaming pseudo. Everything written about me up to this point, even if I specifically wrote it, is a damnable lie. I blame Drew Linky in particular for spreading said damnable lies.

I have been asked to write about the history of my channel. There’s not much to tell. We talk about video games and play them sometimes. I first became #gaming pseudo during the first time Makin threw out all the mods and got new ones. I became pseudo because I asked if I could mod #gaming and apparently nobody else did, so I got it.

There have been several “flavor of the month” games throughout the channels history - by that, I mean there’s one game in particular that a lot of people are playing and are prone to talking about. Currently it is Warframe (as of 4/3/2018) but I expect that to change when people realize it’s not actually fun. In the past it has been other games - Dark Souls, Elite Dangerous, Space Station 13, Super Smash Bros, very briefly Pokemon, and some others that I can’t recall right now (there was a week with Cookie Clicker but I don’t consider that a game).

Occasionally I have attempted to organize tournaments. It never worked. Setting up individual servers has worked better, or playing multiplayer games sporadically. The Overwatch tourney in particular was a dismal failure. Sometimes for games that I especially enjoy I’ll hand out free copies. It’s not really that big of an expense to me and I love seeing people play games that I enjoy, since they’ll usually spot something interesting about it. Knights of the Old Republic and Freelancer are good examples of this.

An issue that has come up several times is people liveblogging games, by which I mean sending lots of screencaps or text about some game they’re playing with minimal time to respond. I tend to stop this whenever I see it. It’s just clutter.

The channel has been an uphill battle against pretty much everyone else refusing to use it and / or insulting it outright. I’ve done my best to make sure everyone feels welcome to post about whatever games they like. In spite of this, there is a long standing attitude on the server that #gaming is not worth anybody’s time and any request to move to that channel when games are taking up space in other channels is usually met with derision. The fact that at least half of the mod team refuses to move whatever they’re playing (currently SCP Secret Laboratory) from whatever channel they’re discussing said game in to my own doesn’t really help that image. It’s extremely frustrating to deal with the fact that some games people complain about and request to be moved to gaming and some don’t. Typically, whenever forced to move, users will make one or two snotty comments and then abandon the discussion. Every time I’ve attempted to get newer users involved in it, older users tend to come out of the woodwork and mock me for it, so I’ve mostly quit doing that. Most regulars get here through osmosis. Another issue I had, although I was demodded at the time, was the addition of another channel for Space Station 13 talk. It felt like a direct slap in the face from the owner of the server because it was essentially saying “Gaming isn’t good enough. I’m making a new channel, because fuck you.” to the current gaming channel. I left the server over it. Came back after it was gone. Extremely stupid issue.

The regulars are there and post frequently about various games (although as stated before it usually gravitates toward one specific game). It’s fun to interact with most of them. I don’t have to issue gaming bans too often, the channel quality is usually high enough that only minor admonishments are needed.

There have been a couple notable users who got banned for being hilariously creepy. I’ve saved screenshots and pins of the best of them. The one who stands out is this one guy who threatened to murder everyone in whatever game they chose. That was an easy ban.

In the future I hope to continue work on dispelling the overwhelming shitty attitude towards #gaming and potentially successfully organize a tournament at least once. Currently, my plan is to set up a sort of scavenger hunt in Freelancer where they search for landmarks and ships, but I don’t have all that much hope for it. It’ll be interesting to see the new flavor of the month games over the coming years.

#serious - Ifnar

Serious. Serious has changed. But seriously, no pun intended, the kind of conversations happening in the channel at the current time (8th of April 2018 for those keeping score) are quite different from those occurring in it in 2016 and early 2017. Back then, most conversations were close to conversations that I would say occur in hangout nowadays, centring on every day topics like hobbies though running a wide gamut. In fact, the channel description semi-jokingly at the time listed “serious” topics such as glasses and periods which were edited in mostly in response to a conversation about the topic occurring in the channel. The channel’s main draw at the time was that it had a more stable and calm atmosphere, compared to the chaotic and at times shitpost-dense channel of general.

Channel regulars at the time that still stick in my mind today are Andrew, no relation to Andrew Hussie, a user who is still in the server though not in the channel anymore and only very rarely outside of it. I don’t really remember much of them as a person except that they were the second person to ever join the server. The other regular of that time is AnionCation or AC for short. A generally upbeat and knowledgeable person, AC was made serious pseudo for quite a while before becoming inactive on the server and generally reducing her activity on the part of Discord I am aware of. Recently however she has returned to the server and occasionally talked in serious again.

These two were however not the only two regulars of the channel as I remember a quite large community of people posting in the frequent discussions.

Nowadays, the channel is, as I mentioned in the beginning, quite different. Discussion occurs less frequently than I remember and is centred on topics such as troubles in interpersonal relationships of all kinds, depression and other such things that broadly fall under the mantle of “venting” as well as recent news stories whenever people like bringing them up. This is despite the fact that the actual rules of the channel have not changed significantly in their updated version, though the “serious topics” section has been removed. This has obviously created a different atmosphere in the channel and there nowadays is no real community for the channel like there used to be.

Current regulars of the channel include Kreuz whom I appreciate as they seem to have a good sense of what is actually appropriate in the channel and are interested in having its rules be upheld. Secondly, there is Oblong Meat Product, generally referred to as only Oblong. While sometimes being the one to talk about their personal problems, they are often empathetic and understanding to the problems of others and seem like a generally nice person. Finally, there is Bec, who is similar to Oblong in several ways though strikes me as slightly less experienced. Other people who have posted in the channel on several occasions and stuck in my mind are the aforementioned recently returned AC, Ferris, the pseudo Deus and the mod Sea Hitler, Furrylatula and Krilo.

#western-media and #eastern-media - Ngame

#western-media is where we talk about the latest and greatest content Western culture produces. By which I mean cartoons aired on kids' channels. Notable specific works enjoyed and discussed include Star vs the Forces of Evil, for which I have fashioned myself into something akin to a charismatic cult leader, bringing in large volumes of activity to the channel and inspiring others to join in on our lovely community. Steven Universe is pretty big too, although there's basically never any new content so no one gives a fuck :HowHigh: Many other shows like Adventure Time and OK-KO get shout-outs too, but I don't think enough active users follow them to achieve "critical mass" of discussion where you can throw a conversation starter out there and expect a full dialogue to blossom. Sometimes non-cartoons make their way there too but who cares about that.

Our core userbase changes over time, depending on what shows are airing new content and what people are passionate about, but it's safe to say that myself, Roots, and Tipsy are a consistent trio no matter the topic of discussion. Like the Three Musketeers, except with sitting in our chairs discussing children's television rather than going on adventures through France, but France is lame anyway. Suck it, Dumas. Maybe if you produced a kids' show about it we'd give a shit.

Anyway in conclusion, please come join my cult, we have cookies, candy, and idiots who are way too obsessed with fictional teenagers of all shapes, sizes,

Editor’s note on #eastern-media: Ngame neglected to write about #eastern-media, with his only commentary being: “this is where weebs talk about their moon rune toons”, and then asked me to write a small shitpost on the subject. As such as I can confirmed that Ngame’s statement is true, and that while there are a number of people who try to talk about a wider assortment of anime like Revlar, people like myself, Tipsy, Griever, and Putnam will often storm the place to talk about more popular stuff like Dragon Ball. That is all.

"Depthing the Iceberg" - a breakdown of Carlarc's Meme Iceberg

Teratosapphic - 6^th of July, 2020

Grood evening, all. I am Teratosapphic, art-cosplay janitor as of July 2020. I noticed that as SPAT goes on, fewer and fewer in-jokes are elaborated on. I felt that this specific post from the user nepetalover2012 ~~carlarc~~ could serve as a good cross-section of the various references, gags, etc. that have spawned since last coverage.

Layer: 01

“Homestuck 2.0 is still in the works”

A video hosted by Dante Basco and a WhatPumpkin employee claimed that, alongside the launching of the new Homestuck YouTube channel, new content would be coming in the form of videos, games, and written content, as well as accepting fan works and contributions to the canon. You can’t exactly say they went back on those promises, can you?

“Hiveswap will never come out”

Three years, Jade…

“HS is a gay singularity”

Andrew sent this tweet in response to a question that I, nor anyone I asked, could find. Later on, he sent this, confirming it was a tease for DaveKat.

(Surprise cameo from ipgd, nice.)

“Hussie is working on something new.”

Wishful thinking.

“HSD has no rules channel”

For an extended period of time, Makin was vehemently against the idea of a formal rules channel, believing codifying hard, server-wide rules to encourage rule skirting and defiance. For reasons I personally don’t remember and am unsure I’m at liberty to say, he was pressured into converting #welcome into #welcome-rules, which said everything the #general description said in a cool and new place. It also allowed the implementation of a new function from the secondary server bot, 72. Reacting to a colour-coded emote (see below) would grant you the colour role associated, instead of needing to use a “giveme” command. This roughly (read approx. 1-2 month span) coincided with the introduction of a plethora of new colour roles, which were all variants on the pre-existing name colours.

Layer: 02

“SHE’S RIGHT THERE”

Sometime in 2016, Doctors (better known as “Sea Hitler”) burst into #altgen claiming he could see Kanaya sitting on his bed, barely coherent and clearly sleep-deprived.

Needless to say, this has gone down in infamy.

“CONDUCT UNBECOMING”

Lyranea, a former server regular, had tried to invite Makin to her personal server. He responded by asking why he would want an invite to “a gay baby jail”. Maxmikester, the hero of this story, called out Makin’s verbal abuse with a line that would live on in infamy.

Makin bit back with an insult of his character, further reinforcing his point. He refused to take the verbal abuse the admins dealt him, begging that they see the error of their ways. He called for a user revolution, speaking of changes to the foundations of the server. Sadly, these pleas fell on deaf, easily distracted ears, so he relied on what he could.

This attack won over #altgen, everyone around him cheering his name. He continued to post F:GO gifs of his onslaught against Makin’s tyranny.

He was proclaimed a crusader, undoer of wrongs and leader of a nation. Eventually, the mods conceded their defeat and responded with a peace offering, a tapestry depicting their great battle.

And thus, he reigned supreme, until everyone forgot about it a few weeks later. The hallowed phrase, however, lives on to this very day, never to be forgotten.

“#hangout, # food, and #writing”

All of these were channels that were added, then removed. #food was a Patreon sponsored channel and deleted along with all Patreon rewards. #hangout was an experiment testing behaviour in #general that ended up as a detriment to server activity (or as we like to call it, “numbers go up”). #writing was a split from #art-cosplay that fell through because people ended up using it as an advertising platform with no good way to discourage said advertising.

“THE PHYSICAL RETURN OF JESUS CHRIST”

In 2016, a raider began spamming “THE PHYSICAL RETURN OF CHRIST” alongside a video of Biggie Cheese performing “Mr. Boombastic” from the movie “Barnyard”. This happened across every channel, between two accounts, while only two pseudo mods and no full mods were online. Supposedly after the raid was contained to #botspam, the user began to converse with people at the same time as spamming. This only came to an end half an hour after starting, when a mod finally woke up and banned the user. To this day, the event is still remembered by users. I personally had the honour of even seeing fanart of the event posted to the art channel. Credit to @aj#4435

“#mod-nudes”

Supposedly, when you were accepted as a moderator, you were required to send a nude picture of yourself to serve as blackmail in case you acted out of line. You could also use the channel recreationally and send casual nudes of yourself according to some. I, personally, have never seen the channel, and don’t believe it exists.

Layer: 03

“The SS413 Server”

Makin and Putnam, along with the funding from Patreon, created a server to host the game Space Station 13, affectionately named SS413. This included custom characters and interaction to make it specific to our server, in-jokes and all. This server was deleted once interest waned and the Patreon was removed.

“HS2 was never intended to finish”

“June Egbert will never appear in canon”

“Squiddle Session”

“There’s still some toblerones around”

These aren’t specific to the server and I’m pretty sure aren’t based on anything beyond pure observation and/or fandom knowledge.

“HOLY SHIT X JUST LEFT THE SERVER”

It’s hard to say this started anywhere in particular, the closest I can point to is the raw shock of multiple established regulars (e.g. Cait/ndividedbyzero, Griever) leaving with little warning. Afterward, it was common to respond with the tagline any time someone said something dissenting of the server or Homestuck, satirising their malcontentedness. It’s died down in modern memory but it lingers around.

“The Observers are observing #cafe-lit”

For the past few months, Makin has been hosting weekly streams of various shows as a substitute for being unable to push the Shills List in an official capacity. At the time of writing, they are watching Fringe, which I believe this is a reference to. If this is a Fringe reference, then it is out of my wheelhouse and I can’t comment any further.

“User water-filter theory”

This is a reference to the User Contribution section of SPAT, which you appear to be already reading. Sick. Click here to read the specific entry this is a reference to.

“is he okay hes in SNOW”

Nights, Oceanfalls author and esteemed husky enthusiast, was presented with an image of a Siberian Husky playing in the snow. Not knowing the family was bred for cold weather, she expressed her worry loudly.

“Secret contents of the HSD-Hussie conversation”

I refuse to comment further than Drew has already. See here, February 11th.

“Nepeta gets kidnapped by Meulin”

Where to begin, where to begin. Sylandrophol was a former #altgen regular who was banned for writing explicit content about Drew and Makin, grew to hate the HSD, and started a rival server in an attempt to compete. I have no idea what they do now, nor do I think finding out is a good idea. Regardless, this is a reference to a series of videos they made in GoAnimate. I refuse to link them on principle.

Layer: 04

“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnrBsl3PNZ8”

God damn it, Carlarc.

This video pokes fun at the regularity with which Griever used to advertise JoJoStuck, his old crossover fanventure.

“Dero’s youtube channel”

Dero is, to put it shortly, a power user. She is Drew’s sister, and a shitposter to the nth degree. Her videos are incomprehensible to the point where you laugh because you don’t know what else to do. It’s glorious.

“BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC SPONGEBOB TRAP REMIX”

When “Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff: Quest for the Missing Spoon” dropped, a channel was made to discuss it. When it sucked, the channel was closed. Two months later, Tripheus figured out that he could still talk in it for some-odd reason, and took full advantage.

“#altgen is a Chinese social experiment”

This one is predicated on the gag that Makin is secretly from China, which is why he’s so secretive about his true identity. Not much else to say.

“NSFW server demilitarized zone”

Cerulean, administrator of the former NSFW sister server and creator of Aradiabot (predecessor to Arquiusbot), became enraged at the verbal abuse Makin delivered to him, and responded by banning Makin from the NSFW server as well as removing Aradiabot from the HSD. Drew wrote about this on November 18th of 2018, and I’ll let him explain from there.

“Donald duck having a stroke”

One of WoC’s weird-ass videos, this one of a woman passing gas in a way that vaguely sounds like Donald Duck. Rewatching the video as I write this is making me giggle like an idiot and I hate myself more and more as I do. Death becomes me.

“‘first off, are the little kids at the beach npcs or what’”

cookiefonster is somewhat of a legend among older HSD users. He cemented his place in the community after creating a full reading of Sonnetstuck’s continuation of Dirk Strider’s rewrite of Detective Pony. He was (past tense, he’s simmered down quite a bit since) recalcitrant, obstinate, and incredibly poor at reading the context of conversations. He was very notably against the concept of “Flavour of the Month games”, where a single game would capture the entirety of #cafe-lit’s attention for multiple weeks at a time. The relevant example of this was Kerbal Space Program, which would drown the channel for hours at the time. During the tail end of one of these periods, Nights began to talk about a beach trip she had, complaining about the way people were behaving in front of several small children. Around the same time, Makin had been admonishing cookiefonster for being purely antagonistic about video game conversation, and so he decided to take Makin’s advice and actively participate in the conversation. Very few terms adequately describe the altercation that took place, so I’m choosing to misappropriate an unrelated term and describe it as a “Crash Blossom”. Drew created an Imgur album of the immediate fallout of this, recorded here. Because of this incredible event, cookiefonster realised how seriously he had been taking himself previously, and began to loosen up in conversation. He’s still infamous in the channel for horribly misunderstanding conversation, which is almost always a good laugh for all involved.

“Fungal Overlord Theory”

A couple of users in #cafe-lit were fucking around with Arquiusbot’s “linky” command, which calls a random message from Drew’s message history. Apropos of nothing, Barkley suggested that the ideal hivemind would either be fungal in nature, or spawned from #altgen. This raised the question of whether #altgen was already a fungal hivemind, and things kept spiraling out of control until the chat had arrived at the concept of an isekai where Drew was reincarnated in a fungus-based society where SPAT is hailed as a religious text. Credit to @mint ★ #2222 for the fanart.

“BACKYARD FUN”

Ask anyone on the server and you’ll find out that the HSD loves Michael Guy Bowman. Aside from his music, he also makes a fair shake of skit comedy videos on his channel. This is a quote taken from the eponymous “Backyard Fun”, where Michael and his friend Scott are B-O-R-E-D, bored and remedy this by having, what else, backyard fun.

“Elon Musk releases SBURB, reveals he’s a Lord of Space”

There’s little to this beyond topical humour, so I’ll leave it at that.

Layer: 05

It’s worth noting that Layer 4 was superimposed with an image of a baguette, and Layer 5 features an image of Drew eating a baguette, the infamous “bred” image.

Look upon my baked goods, ye mighty, and despair.

“Drew Linky is an interim administrator” “WoC’s name is pronounced ‘wock’”

“Homestuck is an isekai”

“Baguettes found to be religious symbol in 21st century cult”

“There will never be another rapture”

These jokes are all fairly surface level and expounding on them would be wasting your time even more than I already am.

“Warhammer discussion is still ongoing”

For a good while in late 2019/early 2020, users Misha, Tarty, and Tensei would utterly flood the channel with talk of Warhammer, and any attempt to interrupt would be swept away in a tide of fantasy militarism. I personally have asked multiple times to ban Warhammer discussion in #cafe-lit with varying degrees of sincerity.

“(Ping @Makin)”

Multivac did an astounding rewrite of the song Snake Eater.

“#grist-request”

For those unfamiliar, the HSD was formerly a server for the fangame Overseer, which allowed you and multiple other people to play out a text adventure version of the game SBURB. If you’re familiar with the Genesis Project, It’s a more primitive version of that. #grist-request was where you asked others in your session to send you different types of grist for crafting.

“Secret lit users fanfiction”

See “Nepeta gets kidnapped by meulin”.

“Skaianet would have worked in 2010”

On New Years of 2019, Andrew Hussie released a beta version of Her Imperial Condescension’s backstory via the Skaianet Systems Inc. quasi-ARG. This beta contained instances of unintentional racism and antisemitism on Hussie’s part, which could arguably be justified by the fact that this had been written long, long before it was released, before Hussie started being mindful of cultural sensitivity, etc. Multiple people argued that, had this been released when it was written, no one would have minded at all.

“Mod maid cafe”

When #cafe-lit was named #cafe-mspa back in 2017, a regular to the #general and #art-cosplay channels named Mad got the idea to draw the mods as waiters and waitresses at a maid café. This was iterated multiple times, with the most famous versions being done by sozzay. I even got a rendition of myself as a maid in honour of my demotion in 2019, courtesy of Drew, which I still hold near and dear to my heart.

“The Syrian hack was an inside job”

In 2015, the official MSPA Forums had been hacked by a group of Syrians who spammed the site with Pro-Syria memes.

“Phantos’ Alt”

Phantos was an old member of #cafe-lit, and an extremely well-liked one. He was mature, kind, and extremely generous to those around him. And then… he left. No one knew why, most people assumed he simply stopped caring about the fandom. About a year, year and a half later, he came back acting like nothing had changed. Only a few days later, we found out he had been doxxing fandom members. He was confronted and banned, but not before saying “see you on my alt”. I still get mildly upset thinking about this, because I genuinely trusted him and thought he was a good person.

“Secret WoC nuclear fallback”

Drew promised, as a joke, that in the event of him also being ousted as server moderator, WoC would inherit his role. WoC also suggested in the event of a total takeover from WhatPumpkin, ArquiusBot has a few secret commands capable of “unspeakable things”.

“The SBAHJ stair comic was inspired by marsy”

Another mythic old lit user. This one was especially infamous, making casually racist comments and, most notably to this gag, stating he had once shoved an old man off an escalator because he was “in [his] way”.

“ÑO IS MY CHEEEEEEEEEEE”

A Dero-ism. Supposedly, Dero got extremely high and thought of a funny image she wanted to bake up, with the phrase “NO DON’T TAKE MY CHEESEBURGER”. This was mangled severely into… this.

“Drew still puts shit on his ass every day”

Another Dero joke, from this video.

Layer: 06

“Makin inflates server count”

“ICP shadow presidency”

“Betty Crocker blocks homestuck tweeters for a reason” “Makin cult of personality”

“Arquius killed Aradiabot”

“The creation of #mspa-lit is a fixed point in time”

These warrant no further explanation, are more relevant to Homestuck than HSD, or were already explained previously.

“Ifnar’s left eye”

Ifnar, the #serious pseudo-mod, has a picture of his own eye as his icon. Confusingly enough, the picture is of his left eye, making me think this was a typo.

“Secret BR server takeover”

For some reason, the server has an extremely high population of Brazilians, as well as South Americans in general. It’s become a running gag to mock Brazilians purely for the fact that they are Brazilian and nothing else. We all, however, band together to make fun of the Canadians.

“Pube-eating TDBC scene”

Now, we get into the interesting stuff.. Back in 2018, a couple of users encouraged Makin to read a webcomic called “Transdimensional Brain Chip”, about a layman who becomes the subject of a metaphysics experiment, and becomes able to see instances of his bifurcating timeline, a la the “many worlds” theory of quantum mechanics. While conceptually thought-provoking and deep, the writing and art style are incredibly crude, turning away many readers (myself included). This became one of the most divisive additions to the Shills List, with #cafe-lit seemingly split down the middle as to its quality. This specific line refers to an early scene where one instance of the main character, Ulf, is about to have sex with a woman. A secondary instance intends on watching his other self having sex, which the first insists is an act of voyeurism. As retaliation, the first threatens to eat the pubic hair from his shower drain if the second doesn’t stop watching. The height of literature.

“HVSD was funded by Makin because competition breeds improvement”

The Hiveswap Discord, known as the HVSD, was created and populated by users that were unsatisfied with the way the HSD was run. This, unfortunately, happened to include many users that had been permanently banned from the HSD, and ended up causing a lot of drama between each other. I’ve been asked not to continue any further with descriptions because, as of 2019, a mutual non-aggression pact has been established between the server owners that asks for neither party to gossip about the other.

“Kill40k is User5’s ectobiological brother”

I find it hard to introduce Kill40000/User5 directly, so I’ll lead with this instead.

This user joins the server, leads with this, and proceeds to offer the same challenge to anyone in #gaming. Upon attempting this dare, people found out something surprising; he was actually good. People were unable to kill him as promised, and he reigned victorious. He was eventually banned for clogging up #gaming, but not easily forgotten. Three months later, another member named User5 joined, echoing the same message.

It was revealed that these accounts were run by the same person, and people began watching him to see the spectacle of his odd mannerisms. After being beaten by Gitaxian in Planetary Annihilation, he began to start talking in #cafe-lit, growing close to some of the other members, and eventually becoming a regular. Sadly, he was banned in 2020 due to the excessive use of alternate accounts. This is by no means a comprehensive overview of User5 as a character, Drew talks about him more and better than I could.

“Return of Pablo”

Revlar was a very contentious figure in #cafe-lit. The one thing both sides can agree on is that he was very good at starting debates. Makin, in particular, was very fond of his ability to spark discussion on a dime, especially when it was able to push a topic more desirable than whatever was going on already. However, popular opinion points out how often he was aggressive about defending his point, some even insinuating he argued the way he did because he believed his opponents were trying to undermine him rather than simply disagreeing with him (termed “bad faith argument” by our community).

An argument was sparked when Gitaxian made a statement about “nice guys”, where Revlar insisted not all “nice guys” are inherently bad people. From this a debate on the modern idea of a nice guy as compared to a supposed older definition grew, morphing into semantic debate and what-about-ism and sucking in more and more participants until Revlar spearheaded a hypothetical someone on the precipice on becoming a nice guy, the titular “Pablo”. Pablo was a teenage boy, seeking a relationship with a girl, but has been consistently unsuccessful. It was Gitaxian’s job to explain to Pablo how to successfully attract a partner.

This single offhanded joke name turned an already bizarre debate into a parody of itself. Accusations of misreadings flew left and right as bystanders coming in midway through were left baffled and laughing their asses off. The steam eventually petered off as the conversation turned more to jokes than discussion, yet people were still talking about the ridiculousness of it hours later like it just happened.

Layer: 07

“You are now entering the Makin Zone”

“Finishing the shills list is a ploy to allow Makin to consume your soul”

Fairly sure these are just Carlarc being Carlarc.

“Andrew is Drew from the future, here in case the Twitter Police try to take over HSD”

“All of WP’s HSD allegations are true”

Drew sums up the backstory of these two pretty well throughout the final entries to Book I. The specific connection between Andrew and Drew is purely a joke on the similarity of their names.

“All current mods posted in #nsfw, kept docile via blackmail”

Not only is #nsfw long dead, this also suggests the mods are docile.

“Makin is using the patreon money to fund life extension research”

Makin is heavily against an ideological stance he terms “Deathism”. This is the philosophy that death is something to be expected and accepted. Makin is of the belief that any true rationalist should be fully against the death of the consciousness, stating it to be the worst fate possible.

“Makin’s cult of personality was inspired by Elizer Yudkowsky”

Since Makin is an avid user of the r/rationality Subreddit, he follows a lot of what E. Yudkowsky, author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and unofficial figurehead of the rationalist fiction community, says and does. We even have an emote of his face.

“Everyone but you is an Arquius function”

A reference to the “linky” command (mentioned in Layer 4), there's a very popular misconception that instead of polling a list of options the command uses machine learning to generate a custom response. This leads me to believe that this line is also a reference to the #read-tnc event of April Fool’s 2018, where former #coding pseudo-mod DeltaPsi used a Markov Chain trained on #cafe-lit to generate a full day of fake conversation from AI-generated lit users.

“Griever defected to infiltrate Twitter and fix Homestuck”

For most of these entries, I’ve been using the Discord search function to jog my memory. Unfortunately, Griever asked to be banned from the server, so all relevant messages were deleted. Griever, the author of JoJoStuck, had left sometime in February of 2019 with no warning. He came back in April/May of that year, claiming the HSD was a toxic cesspit and that he wanted nothing to do with it. Soon afterward, he was approached by WhatPumpkin and began to write for FriendSim, leading many people to believe the act was a show of allegiance to WP and not truly genuine.

“HOLY SHIT THE BETA”

This is somewhat of a convergent evolution of two unrelated jokes. When someone came into chat, obviously excited about something, people would suggest they just got a copy of the SBURB Beta. Meanwhile, when someone wanted to tell the chat something important or wanted to change the topic to literally anything else, they would often preface it with an all caps “GUYS HOLY SHIT”. Because of the similarity of their niche, they often get conflated.

“Makin’s true toblerone wish”

Back when the Toblerone craze was going on in the Homestuck fandom, Makin managed to find two of his own. Rather than use them both, he sent one to Drew, who eventually gave it away because it felt wrong to take it from someone else. Makin showed proof of his in exchange for his “wish”, which was the return and/or archival of the old MSPA Forums. After being informed that neither of these could be informed, he settled for a full, formal explanation of the Classpecting system of Homestuck. This would have been granted, but only on the condition that it was written by optimisticDuelist, who is often jokingly criticised as being the “Game Theory of the Homestuck fandom”. Makin quickly backed down, insisting that their failed attempt to restore the forums was satisfactory for him.

Layer: 08

The icon for this layer is one of Kate’s old twitter icons, edited to have elements of Drew and Makin’s icons. I am exhausted.

“#cafe-lit conversational topic recursive time loop”

“Ectobiological anti-natalism”

“User5 was removed from reality because he was an existential threat to Makin’s dictatorship”

“You’re also an Arquius function”

“#altgen secretly manipulates the timeline via the secret Arquius feature”

“Vriska is a universal constant”

“Outer space is the Furthest Ring”

“Toblerone wishes directly warp reality”

“Kate was right”

All of these are either horse giblets or have already been talked about.

“bad to the bone”

Yet another Dero video.

“Game Grumps transcription is fundamental to the fabric of timespace”

For the past few years, Drew has been writing transcripts of GameGrumps episodes from the “Jon era”, a.k.a. When the channel solely consisted of JonTron and Egoraptor.

“HSD is a trans singularity”

There’s a running joke among #cafe-lit’s trans community about “The #cafe-lit Curse”. If a user comes out as transgender as an active user of #cafe-lit, they will either accidentally or intentionally take a chosen name from Homestuck or the Shills List. So far we have WHATISLOSTINTHEMINES (Taylor), qweq (Noelle), Putnam (Ana), tmtmtl30 (refuses to specify), and myself (Roxy, Claire). There are also unconfirmed rumours that Revlar has also fallen to the Lit Curse.

“Drew’s avatar was beamed into his brain from outer-space aliens”

Drew’s icon originally came from a dream he had years ago, of him sitting underneath a willow tree. It’s been iterated on multiple times by multiple people, but it always returns to the same minimalist design. I would post the full dream here but Drew has never elaborated beyond, "There's a tree, it's very calming."

History of Cool and New Music Team (CANMT)

Wheals - 28^th of October, 2017

Hey, wheals here. Drew asked me to write a few words about the CANMT and its relation to the HSD—well, thinking back, what really happened is that I volunteered to do this myself, since this kind of history is something I’m interested in, and I’ve been on both servers since just a few days after they were made, but I’m getting ahead of myself here. I’ll include an apology here to the long-suffering Drew who’s been waiting weeks and weeks for me to write this, while I was delayed by school, personal matters, and reading HPMOR, just like the current name of mspalit enjoins me to.

Where can I begin talking about this wild year-and-a-half-journey besides at the beginning? Well, that would be a mistake. Need to flash back over two months before the CANMT server was made. At the time, on April 10th, 3 days before Homestuck ended, a user on the recently created Omegaupdate forums with a username of simply “o” started a thread in the forum adventures subforum called “cool and new web comic.” I saw it at the time, but didn’t pay it much attention. It just seemed an attempt to retell Homestuck with deliberately shitty/low-effort art and stupid writing. Thinking back, I can’t think of a previous example of exactly this concept, but it blended together for me with other joke fanadventures of similar quality/purpose. So I didn’t look at it any longer, which was just as well, since after that one day it stopped updating for the rest of the month, 20 days, until April 30th came along and there was a momentous update: a non-shitty character had appeared. Rose was not changed in the same way the rest of Homestuck was. This presaged the seriousness and effort that would eventually begin to go into the adventure, but at the time I was still quite oblivious. And so I, and most everyone else besides a few on Omegaupdate, remained until June 6th, when the end of Act 1 flash (though it was in fact a YouTube video made in Animaker) called “{s]every one; enter” was released, Niklink discovered it, and posted it to the subreddit. The flash showed serious effort, in crafting a real plot, in making things stupid and silly in a funny way, and just in making almost 4 minutes of Homestuck-style animation, even if the art wasn’t good. I myself first saw the comic through Makin crossposting it from the sub into the channel, then still called #homestuck, that I now think of as mspalit (even though it hasn’t borne that name for a while either).

In the next few days, the chatter on the subreddit and discord about cool and new web comic (CaNWC for short) didn’t die down, as some fads quickly do. It only grew. The fanventure satisfied urges for new content after Homestuck ended and fit in perfectly with the home-grown shitposting culture on the subreddit, and it quickly climbed to popularity there. Because the active mods were fans too, it made appearances on the sidebar image and text, to the point that some people complained it was a forced meme and unfair to other adventures (it should be noted that sidebar images, stickied posts, and so on do also get made for other adventures, like Redditstuck). A perhaps more minor reason for its enduring popularity was the strict persona that that author o kept up: he has never broken character, not even in forum DMs, and because of that “o is Hussie” was always a popular meme.

But even before CaNWC had made it big on the subreddit, another promised delivery from the content drought between Homestuck’s ending and Hiveswap’s release (then lying an unknowable distance in the future)—the long-awaited Volume 10. The Homestuck music team had been going strong throughout the period of Homestuck itself’s greatest activity, 2009-2012, but had released only a singular album in early 2013, and as of March 2016, nothing since. Those who followed the team members’ tumblrs and soundclouds and twitters more closely, and those with insider knowledge, had heard previews of Homestuck songs that the musicians had been working on, but for those long years, no concrete release plan was in sight. A glimmer of hope first appeared when, after three years, the Bandcamp theme finally changed from the green Cherubim theme, featuring the album cover in the header, to the plain gray theme it has today. The pessimist’s interpretation of that, of course, was merely that the album cover was a spoiler (which is especially unfortunate when the comic’s text links to the Bandcamp site as a joke). More hope appeared when the soundtracks for [S] Collide and Act 7 were released as an EP and a single, respectively, and the clearly abridged version of one song used in the flash was labelled “(Canon Edit)”. Over the following two months, it became clear (from many tweets, mostly) that an album was upcoming and it was going to be awesome. It’s hard for me to describe here just how hyped I was personally; there was something just fun about seeing things come together from behind a veil of secrecy. This period was, incidentally, when I first ran into ost; though I was mainly discussing all this on the HSD, it was on a subreddit thread speculating on what would be in Volume 10 that I first saw them (I did not realize it had been them until after knowing them on Discord for a few weeks, though).

Because What Pumpkin didn’t seem too interested in creating hype themselves (though in the end, they released a trailer for the album on the day it was released, on the Homestuck Official youtube channel), we just had to do it ourselves. I personally listened through the entire Homestuck discography leading up to 6/12, having got the whole thing in the 4/13 sale. Penumbra Phantasm (a song that Toby Fox had remixed in his previous music, but never released a full version of) memes got big then, tying in with memes about Toby Fox being too busy rolling in piles of cash from Undertale to help with Homestuck music anymore, and other memes about it being Gaster’s Theme from Undertale. “Leitmotif” became a big meme word at the time, especially thanks to Putnam. A couple weeks before the release, Jamie Paige and Marcy Nabors, two pseudo-music-team-members, made a fake Volume 10 leak, starting with some songs that had not made the cut and a fake Penumbra Phantasm, and then switching halfway in into meme vaporwave versions of Homestuck songs. Makin scheduled a community stream for just before the album release, so that it could switch right from meme videos into streaming the new album, and had people in #homestuck gather good meme music-team-related videos to watch as part of the stream. Quite a number were from Michael Bowman (usually just called Bowman) or his comedy partner Scott Stutzman, and the quality of both his music and his humor earned “Bowmemes” their endurance. I mention all these things not just because they give a context to the hype surrounding Volume 10, but also because all the things in this paragraph became major memes in the early days of CANMT.

On June 18th¬ (it was going to be closer to the release, but was delayed after the Pulse shooting), several members of the Music Team held a stream where they chatted, gave commentary on the album, and answered viewer questions. The question “have you read CANWC?” came up, and it went from there to jokes about making a CANWC fan-album. And that’s when ost went to Discord and made a new server, calling it “Cool and New Webcomic Soundtrack.” They invited people from the chat to join, and Ngame, Niklink, Putnam, someone I don’t remember called “daviddrawsgood,” thunder413 (who was only ever a fan), Alexander Rosetti (a member of the Music Team), and Jamie Paige all joined at that time, among (probably) others. The rest is history.

History that I’ll be writing in a second, though I’d like to pause here for a second to mention that the advice the musicians gave in the stream helped me transform my hype for music into motivation to begin composing, and the creation of CANMT gave me a place to experiment and make bad music without feeling too bad, so I must doubly thank that stream for happening. This isn’t a purely personal thing—quite a few musicians on CANMT have started with little or no experience and improved greatly, and in the end, that’s one of the things that makes me the happiest that it exists.

I’d be remiss here if I didn’t mention one last, huge influence on CANMT: SiIvagunner. Early-mid 2016 was just as it was getting big, and it’s not hard to see its fingerprints all over Voulem. 1, from the most obvious example of upp word movmeant (Fanon Edit), which was specifically made as a rip of Descend, to 25x SHOWDOWN COMBO’s reference to the Flintstones theme. Their ARG that took place not long after CANMT’s founding had its beginning and ending announced in our announcements channel, and inspired our own ARG a few months later. It’s easy enough to see why this other, bigger project all about making jokes out of music was such an inspiration.

Back to the chronological story of CANMT: I joined two days after the server was made, on June 20th, when ost posted an invite in HSD. I don’t remember what number member I was at the time, but I’m now the 7th on the server chronologically by first join time (so not counting people who left after I joined). Nonetheless, I still don’t have the best memory of how things were that far back, so I apologize in advance for any factual errors.

People had by then settled on “voulem.1” for the name of the debut album. At the time, there was far less secrecy, so the album cover was mostly made in #homestuck, rather than on the CANMT server itself. As more people joined the server via the recruitment thread that ost posted on the subreddit, we tried to set up more organization. The current system of public and team channels, and only letting people with Composer and Artist roles see the latter, while anyone with the Album Fan role can see the former, started then. Except for the very first few days, there were never unlimited invites publicly shared, and though this hasn’t always kept out the worst people (both ITOAN and his later alt Perifrog joined the team nonetheless), it has helped with problems of avoiding toxic people. Around this time our spreadsheet was created, with a single tab keeping track of what songs people had made. It’s since ballooned to 89 tabs, ones for album planning, ones for resources, ones for concepts that never got off the ground, ones for giving song commentary, and a few shitposts mixed in there for good measure.

The group of people who responded to the link in the stream chat, on the HSD, or the first recruitment thread made up the first wave of contributors, defined as the ones who were on voulem.1. In addition to the list of managers, many of whom are HSD regulars or mods, there were some people who were or became HSD regulars or semi-regulars, like MrCheeze, interrobang, Hadron, and Putnam. o himself was technically in this wave, because he submitted several tracks via forum PM to ost. The managers at the time were (aside: until October 2016, there was technically a difference between the “Mod” role and the “Music Team Manager” role, but it’s been so long that I don’t remember it, and they were effectively identical, so I won’t draw a distinction):

• ost, who needs no introduction

• minish; this was still in the height of his shitposter stage, but that went perfectly with the cool and new aesthetic

• Ngame; while he wasn’t all that involved in the later stages of the project, after voulem.1, he’s continued to keep an eye on things, and record almost every single album stream we’ve ever done, and he did tons of management for the initial album. As he sometimes says, he got into a position of being a mod ultimately because of showing Makin the SBAHJ movie during a community stream and getting modded so he could add it to the queue, and appropriately enough, “xistmas soong” on voulem.1 is an excerpt from that movie

• Mira. He’s got a very long story with CANMT and HSD, involving a lot of leaving and joining, dating back to just a few days before CANMT was created. Back then, he was a big shitposter called aviaryDestruction, but, in what was one of the first interactions between the Tumblr side of the fandom and the HSD, he was screenshotted and shamed into leaving under that name, because of a stupid edgy joke involving Not On My Watch and the recent Pulse shooting. He returned as miraculousAvantgarde (or Mira for short), but got mad a few months later when he was muted in CANMT #announcements for shitposting too much, and left the server. He left and rejoined a few times, but seemed to be upset by a perception that people trusted him less, and was barely around after September 2016. He still was on HSD occasionally, usually joining and then leaving the server after being done for the day, and more permanently on his own JJBA server, until disappearing entirely in December 2016.

• Difarem, who doesn’t need much introduction either; he got busy with school and other responsibilities so he left the manager team in late 2016, but remained active on the team itself

• Jaspy (originally known as Sir Felix); while in pre-CANMT days he was a regular on HSD, he left a while ago, and hasn’t had much direct interaction since

• Niklink, who was quite active at the start, but became very busy over the summer and was demoted from managerhood, and then demoted to Album Fan when a whole bunch of inactive team members were

• luminantAegis, well-known for their youtube channel extending Homestuck music, but who never was active as a manager or team member

• and Makin; his being a manager has made signal boosting (or as some might call it, shilling) on the HSD and subreddit a lot easier, as well as being a good manager in his own right.

Plans were made for a 7/2 release date, for the meme number and because it was the soonest weekend after we had a good number of songs. Most of the music was memes, ironically shitty, or other kinds of jokes, though Noisemaker contributed the excellent Cascante, and it was right away decided to make it the first song, so that it became traditional for albums to start and end with the best stuff. Makin let us make the release an “official” /r/homestuck community stream, and ever since, a stream, with a sticky post on the sub and an everyone ping in HSD announcements, has also been traditional for releases.

The cool and new web comic Voulem.1 (it was changed to its current name on Bandcamp, “cool and new Voulem.1,” sometime between 8/19/16 and 8/23/16, to fit with the names of the other albums) release went very well. The positive reception led to tons of people joining afterwards; that second wave of contributors still makes up a big fraction of the currently active contributors. The subreddit recruitment thread Niklink posted under a day after the album’s release racked up 92 comments. By 7/4, we were already faced with a problem: there were 75 tracks or track ideas on the spreadsheet, and it had been only around 48 hours. OpsCat, a composer and artist for the team, suggested we release two albums at once, and MrCheeze iterated on that to suggest releasing two volume 2s, with slightly different spelling, later settling on volume 2 and volume II. The original plan for the release on 7/20, made even before voulem.1 came out, was “Minish On Kazoo,” but sadly that was scrapped entirely. Meanwhile, we contacted Bowman on two platforms; first I tweeted “i am sititng in a buttock” at him, and he knew enough about minimalism to appreciate it, and then he replied to an email sent from the CANMT account, approvingly calling us “the weirdest Homestuck sub-fandom yet (counting Octopimp).” One of Ngame’s tracks, “Three in the Morning (4 1/3 Hours Late Remix),” a mashup of a Homestuck song, Bowmemes, and the Rollercoaster Tycoon (a CANWC reference) main theme, got noticed by Lambda and was the first CANMT track chronologically to get on LOFAM, in a shortened form.

Around the time of our initial release, we tried to set up the usual resources that the Music Team and LOFAM already had. Our main problem was having some way to let fans get the album. The main release method was through Bandcamp, and while it allows unlimited streaming for anyone, we only have 200 free downloads, across our entire account, allowed per month, and we blew through them with voulem.1. Our practice ever since has been to put the price of the album at an absurd price, so nobody can give us money and cause all the legal/drama issues that would lead to, and provide a MEGA.nz download for it. UMSPAF (Unofficial MSPA Fans, which includes LOFAM and others; see Cait’s history for more information) hosts albums with neither download nor payment options on Bandcamp, but the company removed that ability in 2012 and only accounts made before then may do so. We spoke with the people behind dl.skaia.net to see if they could host, but they never got back to us (which was just as well, because they would doubtless have to stop hosting eventually due to the sheer quantity of albums). Lambda wasn’t interested in putting the album on her music reference list, in keeping with the practice to not add fanventure albums, so cookiefonster made a reference list, with me doing most of the HTML and CSS behind it. We’ve kept up that division of labor ever since (composers ViKomprenas and power464646 have made minor contributions to the list as well), although in the last few days as of this writing he wrote a program so I no longer need convert his reference lists from Word documents to HTML. The JS I wrote for the page helped me understand and fix a long-standing issue on Lambda’s page; it was nice to give back in that way.

The first managerial turnover took place on 7/8, when luminantAegis was demoted and replaced with Cerulean (yes, the same as the HSD mod). Lumi was never too sure how best to contribute, and had several other major responsibilities, so they were glad to step down. In addition to usual managerial duties, Cerulean assisted ost with album mastering, but he was never all that big into CANWC, so he stepped down around a month later.

The stream of cool and new volume 2 and immediately following it cool and new volume II marked our first big twist release: we first released a 50-song album, said there would be a surprise at the end, and then as the twist released another 50-song album. The other big surprise we had hidden was that Tensei had sent us a track for Volume II, though it would be many more months before he joined the CANMT discord. The surprise was almost ruined by someone in cytube chat called “jhon” talking about a second album release that night; as it turns out, their friend had told them about the secret, but not the fact that it was a secret. As it also turns out, jhon was nights, who has successfully reformed from her lawless ways (but remains a goddamn nerd). Many hours later, after the main events of the stream had ended, Bowman himself joined the cytube chat and talked with us in real-time for the first time, perhaps attracted by the good timing of the stream, taking place as it did on 7/20.

On 7/24, Pi was promoted to manager, mostly because of doing good work with managing our spreadsheet (which frankly was a goddamn mess at the time). On 7/30, we hit a milestone—our music was used for the first time in CANWC itself, in the flash page s]hecka Jef, featuring Crypt’s songs Tick and Tock (the gimmick was that they formed a complete song when played simultaneously, as the flash did). Since then, almost all have used our music exclusively, except for one with music by o (an AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA remix) and another with Bowman’s How Do I Live; the later o song, as well as an earlier o song for a Rose/Jack flash called [S FIGHT EACH OTHe, both were later put on albums.

Our next release was, uh, [NSFW] Ｐｅｎｕｍｂｒａオーガズム：百万ドルリミックス（ＧｕｎｓｈｏｗＳｉｎｇａｌｏｎｇ）の小ローン, a Toby Fox and Donald Trump erotic poetry reading shitpost. It was our first release without a stream and also the last such release for over two months—we were very much primarily releasing in streams in those days. The idea emerged from the wild shitposting on the discord server that also spawned Matrix 2, our own homegrown shitpost comic. The less said about both these things, the better.

On 8/7 Cerulean and Niklink stepped down because of inactivity, and JohnJRenns and Cryptanark (aka Crypt) took their places. They were both good composers from the times of Voulem.1.

Our next release, on 8/20, was a dual release as well, but of a different kind: the first album was Of Troles and Chiptumes, a solo effort by cookiefonster. He’d made a chiptune medley for Sollux (which later was on LOFAM4) in pre-Volume 2 times, but instead of putting it on the album had decided to follow up with medleys for every other beta troll, as well as a thirteenth track corresponding to Rex Duodecim Angelus in Homestuck. The bonus track on top of that is a reference to a mixup in the subreddit announcement: Makin put 🍟🎵in the text of the announcement as a teaser, since in non-American English that would be interpreted as “chip” “tune.” However, Americans took it to mean “frytune,” so cookie made a short bonus track with Philip Fry quotes.

The reason that Makin made a cryptic emoji announcement, rather than using text, was really to obscure the fact that the next volume would not be volume 3, but rather cool and new volume V. The idea of making an all-Doctor-remix album and naming it after Homestuck Volume 5 was mine first, I believe, though of course it could never have happened if people didn’t agree it was a fun thing to do. Listening to so many remixes of the same song in a row is a surreal experience, and people were breaking down in the stream chat; I highly recommend listening to the album sometime. Around the same time as the release, George Buzinkai, the composer of Doctor, was going through some tough times, so when we released the album we linked to his gofundme in the description—I believe it had also been linked in HSD #announcements and stickied on the subreddit at the time, and along with luminantAegis’s help talking about it on Tumblr, we managed to reach his goal. In turn, Buzinkai listened to the album, and was commented on Reddit about how happy he was to see something like it. From his latest tweets (at the time of writing), it seems he’s in a more stable position in his life and financially, and making publicity to help him out at one of his worse times was one of my favorite things about being on the team.

Late August saw some shakeups in managers; first Bambosh was taken on to increase artist representation on the team, because he had made the commentary booklet for volume V (he had also made booklets for Vol 2 and Vol II, though those had no commentary), and because he was making all the videos for the upcoming Cool and New Homestuck project. Three days later, on 8/25, ost temporarily left the server to focus for personal reasons, giving ownership to Makin temporarily, who promoted Noisemaker, possibly our best musician at the time, in the meantime. Ost came back the next day and reclaimed the server, while Crypt stepped back from being a manager but stayed around as a composer. By 9/14, though, he decided to step back up, since he had been doing pretty much the same things anyway.

I should note in the middle of this that we’ve always tried to minimize the importance of the manager team. Sure, we need to set deadlines and ping people, so that the work that needs to get done gets done, and upload things to Bandcamp and YouTube since we can’t just give the passwords to everyone, and similar functions, but the ideal of the team is to work through consensus, and not force things to be different from what people want. We’ve been better and worse about this at times. One brouhaha over modchat transparency led to our delivering daily reports in #announcements about what was being discussed, though this only kept up for around a month till we realized that nobody really cared.

The next big release was preceded by an ARG that was CANMT’s greatest point of intersection with the HSD; Makin created an #arg channel there so the community could solve the puzzles we made, together. It remained active for days as further hints were dropped (and it didn’t help that at times, other members of the team were making up their own ARGs and those ended up as red herrings distracting from the main one). Makin put serious work into the ARG, spreading clues across his Youtube account, Tindeck, Imgur, and a Super Mario Bros romhack. Eventually they solved it, and it fulfilled its purpose of building up hype for our next release, Cool and New Homestuck, on 9/3.

The idea of CANH was something Pi came up with only a day after the release of the volume 2s. I’m honestly surprised that nobody in the fandom had the idea before, since it seems so obvious in retrospect, but to be fair it was a lot easier for us than for a serious fanmusician because (a) we had a team, which helps a lot when rescoring 4+ hours of flashes, and (b) we were the CANMT, so we could get away with half of the music being shitposts. Because of the simplicity of the idea, and its lack of a direct relation to CANWC, we predicted that it would be one of the best ways to attract new fans, and we were vindicated—over 250 people were watching the stream at its peak, a number unmatched by any community stream before (except for the [S] Collide and Act 7 ones) or since. The other album in the stream, Cerulean’s solo work A Shade of Blue, helped CANMT with getting a reputation as having some seriously good music, but CANHS had some of our good music too: the stream originated the meme of Makin saying “this is the last bad song in the album,” usually when two songs later an even shittier shitpost comes along. These albums had the first cover arts without any contribution by Mira, incidentally, and CANHS has the first album booklet by interrobang, who has made all but one since.

A couple days later, Hadron was promoted to manager for having done extensive work on the ARG, and having direct access to the youtube channel for uploading more lore videos (another concept inspired by SiIvagunner) would help him a lot. A few days after that, Crypt stepped back up, as mentioned above. Around the same time, ost posted a recruitment thread on the subreddit, which attracted some of our most prolific and active members. Also around that time, Bowman was discovered on HSD, and before long joined the CANMT server too, where he’s talked to us a couple times. He was never as active as the other two Music Team members who talked there, Tensei and kali.

The next release, 20 days after the previous, was by far our most infamous. We dropped no less than 4 albums in a row, in a stream already preceded by Makin playing a Makin-themed Binding of Isaac mod that artists koykoy13 and Greenagon had made. The first was ost’s first solo album, Cyclica, which contained the third song chronologically from CANMT that would be on LOFAM4, Dersite. The next was call and new, which followed the idea of the game of Telephone, where one person whispers a word to the next, and so on. Difarem had the idea two months earlier, before the volume 2s even came out, to adapt it to album form by having people remix the previous composer’s song. By its very nature, though, the album took a while to get made, even once we started enforcing a rule giving people only 48 hours to do their remixes. It was a big hit, though, and was generally agreed to hold up as a good example of our music both serious and memey.

The album that didn’t hold up so well was cool and new volume s*x: hair transplant (the subtitle was MrCheeze’s idea, “s*x” was Makin’s idea, riffing off of how CANWC always censors “sex” in that way). There were arguments and recriminations later, after the stream ended, on Discord about why it had gone so badly. Ultimately it seemed to be a combination of fatigue from the already-long stream, the extremely long album (it had been almost two months since the last non-themed volume release), the long-but-unoriginal songs in it, and the high ratio of uninventive shitposts that it contained. Ever since, Makin has claimed that the next album will be “the new s*x,” and we all reassure him that a repeat is not going to occur. At any rate, many of the worst songs got skipped in stream, and we essentially apologized during the stream for the effect the album had on its listeners. But even once the album ended, that wasn’t the end: we finished off the night with CaNWC Sound Test Vol. 1: REVENGE OF THE GIIVASUNNER. It contained scraps and things too bad even for a main volume, inspired by the Homestuck Sound Test first created by Niklink (now maintained by Sanctferum), which contains unfinished/unreleased Homestuck music by the Music Team. The name, a reference to SiIvagunner’s original youtube account name, was also a reference to the fanmusic project codenamed ROTG about all the guardians in Homestuck; the actual name was later revealed to be Rubric of the Guardians, but it will be released under a different name, so now the only vestige of ROTG is in the sound test name.

The tenth track on ROTG was called L.O.R.E., and in a parody of SiIvagunner’s lore, the audio for Bowman’s Credit Score was interrupted in the middle by a gunshot and SiIvagunner’s voice took responsibility. This was prompted by our realizing, even before the release, that Credit Score had reached the point of an oversaturated meme, and it was time to kill it off. Even before the volume 2s had come out, people were talking about retiring Bowmemes with the upcoming albums, and finally we decided to do so, to keep things cool and new. But we had also agreed that we would bring him back, which, long-delayed as it was, we eventually did do…

The first reform to come out of the stream debacle was the creation of the YouTube channel upload queue, where we put stuff that was too bad/joke/low-quality/effort to go on the main albums. By coincidence, it started out on 10/01, the very day that SiIvagunner “ended” (though it continued to upload rips afterwards, eventually going back to its regular schedule), and is the place that has taken the most inspiration from it.

A few days after the release, I took Pi’s place as manager, and his spot especially as managing the spreadsheet. A momentous occasion took place some weeks after that, when on 10/8 ost and minish proposed to officially change the name of the team to Cool and New Music Team; we had gone by various names before that, usually Cool and New Web Comic Music Team, or sometimes Cool and New Web Comic Fan Soundtrack, dropping the “Fan” after o linked to our Bandcamp in the forum thread for CANWC. We had occasionally called ourselves the Cool and New Music Team before that, too, but never officially. Part of the change to CANMT was just to shorten the name and abbreviation, but there was some motivation there, in my opinion, to remove “CANWC” from necessarily being in the team’s mission. Ever since the very first album, there had been arguments about how “CANWC” the music needed to be. Is having shitposts enough, since that’s in the spirit of CANWC? What if they don’t have any direct connection to Homestuck, like things based purely on Bowman’s Credit Score, or memes referencing the subreddit community? MrCheeze was always most on the side of purism, more than once suggesting we get pure memery out of the team, and split it off into an /r/homestuck music team or something like that. This argument has never truly been resolved, but by now most people are happy enough with the compromise of trying to keep things CANWC-related, but not being too hung up on general Homestuck/meme stuff.

The other reason to distance from being CANWC specifically was that ost and minish, among others, had been getting less enchanted with the comic by that time. In minish’s case specifically, I believe that some it was pseudo-political; he was hanging out with the anti-Makin crowd, and somehow whether or not you liked CANWC had become part of the Makin discourse, apparently just from how thoroughly he had shilled it. (There was also some discussion that it was problematic because the gay jhon/dabe romance was played for laughs, but I don’t think anyone ever took that argument very seriously.)

The next album, and the first full album to release without a stream, was CANWAVE, a project spearheaded by olki. Vaporwave had been a Homestuck music meme ever since the fake Volume 10 leak, though olki was a vaporwave fan anyway. Canwave is unique (aside from Greatest Hits) in including some identical rereleases of vaporwave tracks from old albums—we’d been considering doing so for CANHS too, but had settled on all-new music. For the most part, the music was mostly memewave, involving slowing down in Audacity and applying some filters, but SplitSuns made some quality vaporwave that I showed to Cait on twitter, who nominated it for LOFAM4, making it the fourth song to get on. The album was generally agreed to be at least the second-best vaporwave release of the day, Blank Banshee’s MEGA having coincidentally released that 10/10 as well.

The development of a track list for the next main volume went through some serious problems. We had decided to have actual quality standards, for the first time ever (whether something had gone to the Sound Test instead of a normal release had just been up to the creator). The moment when ost showed up with a list, with quite a few tracks crossed out, marked a real turning point in the team’s history. Of course, there were moments before then that presaged this change in emphasis. The question of quality control, like that of our relation to CANWC (and not entirely unrelated to it), is indeed something we’ve never been quite sure about. We had previously ranked songs after their release by unironic quality, said that solo albums should be non-shitposty, Makin had gone through and reviewed every track on s*x before release, and the spreadsheet for CANHS had a column for “suggested quality.” (The last of those, for my money, is when the shift towards a path of increasing quality really began.) But none of those compare to straight-up telling people, “this will not be on the album as is.” There was a big argument over this, especially because it was so close to the album’s release, but things were smoothed over by ost creating a flowchart, the gist of which is that songs had to be either original and funny, directly CANWC, or high-effort/quality. My opinion, as a new manager, was that it was a good change, but we had handled it poorly: I suggested a system of manager reviews well ahead of time (so that nobody received a nasty surprise when their song didn’t get on), with each one giving a go-ahead or not. My original formulation was overly complicated, but we did do something similar for volumes 8 and 9.

On 10/15, we released Basement Tale, JohnJRenns’s solo album vaguely based on Undertale, and COOL AND NEW Volume 7: At the Price of $104.13 (the album art contained another two names for the album, since we couldn’t decide on any single one). The album was much shorter than volume s*x, but it still stands out as filled with great quality music with some hilarious shitposts thrown in. Unsurprisingly, it was to dominate the upcoming Greatest Hits, with 1 in 5 tracks being from it (despite there being 14 albums in total in the running). Several of them made it onto LOFAM4, and after this point doing so is a regular enough occurrence that it isn’t worth listing anymore.

Volume 7 led to a little scuffle that we should really have been expecting. Back on 7/12, Redditstuck released a flash with a great song called “Conflict!” MrCheeze quickly made a midi for it, and naturally, because we had a midi, we made several remixes in time for volume 2/II. The composer, EmeliaK, showed up on the subreddit and then HSD and complained in a rather hyperbolic way about our having not honored the original licensing terms, which required us to release any remix of it under the CC-BY-NC-SA creative commons license. Copyright and Conflict! became a meme, and volume 7 had a track called “licensed under a CC-BY-NC-SA license,” which understandably pissed off EmeliaK even more. This time, he joined CANMT itself to avoid getting the drama all over HSD. The argument, nevertheless, turned into a giant clusterfuck. I think it’s fair to say that we were in the wrong then by essentially mocking him in the song title, but EmeliaK was still entirely overreacting. At any rate, during the conversation he said “just rename the song cormflit or something,” and “cormflit or something” has been its name ever since.

Cool and New Greatest Hits was released during the 10/25 megastream that Makin ran that year. That tied in with one of its major goals, to introduce the CANMT’s work to people who were not familiar with the work, without scaring them off too badly with shitposts. The goals were never 100% clear, though, which led to arguing about whether some legendary joke songs like Savior of the Screaming Dead and Meme Voyage should be on; we decided not to, but enough people had changed their minds by the time of Greatest Hits 2 that the two songs went on it instead. The idea of releasing such a “beginner’s” album had been around for a while, but after 9/23 Makin suggested getting it out quickly, as an apology of sorts for volume s*x. (A side note: Bandcamp claims the album was released on 11/6, because the mastering had to be revised by JohnJRenns after release. Ost had been using bassy headphones, leading to most of the mastering being wonky. For this reason, and the events of the next paragraph, John has mastered all the albums since.) The album cover was an adaptation of the truly amazing CANWC poster that Aryll had made and posted, months earlier, on the subreddit. Only a week later, her fanart of the Halloween snapchats had attracted Cohen’s eye, and she got some of her (Homestuck) work put up on WLF! The other release during the stream was the Carne Vale Fusion Collab, a group effort of dumping memes on top of the song, again with SiIvagunner as a huge inspiration, and our first big hit on the Youtube channel, not counting the CANHS videos.

A few days later, ost decided to step down from server owner/project head to pursue their own new project of FLSA, whose goal was to keep the good traits of CANMT that the other projects in the community did not have, but without all the CANWC and meme baggage, which ost was getting bored of. Bambosh was chosen as a successor for project head, and ost stayed on as manager and composer. Minish, who was also interested in going to FLSA but had been much less active as a manager on CANMT, stepped down as manager then too.

I should mention here, at the time of Bambosh’s assumption of Ultimate Power, the institution of Sleep Jail, Bam’s project to keep the bad sleep habits of team members in line. He had always told people to not stay up so late (being Australian, he was awake to see Americans who were up past their bedtimes), and at some point or other he got the power to lock them into a channel if they stayed up too late, and disallow posting on other channels. The benevolent rule of the “slep manajer” went on through 2017, though it died down as activity lowered and as people finally did start improving their sleep schedules, and is now out of use (I have asked to be put into Solitary Confinement once or twice to focus on writing essays, though).

The next double release, on Halloween, was s]hecka jef and CANWC for the Holidays. The first was based on an idea dating to pre-voulem.1 days to have a short EP based directly on events from CANWC; we worked on fleshing it out to 10 songs. While 4 months is longer than most of our songs took to release back then, it’s not even close to the records we later set for content being used after its creation (not counting BLAPCK on voulem.1, which was years old on its release, having been on youtube for a long time before that). The second was a Christmas-themed album, which we thankfully got out by Halloween; would have been awkward to release the album on Thanksgiving, or to even be forced to delay it to Easter. The stream was the first to not have an announcement on the subreddit in advance, though there was a ping in HSD announcements; it was a nice cozy stream, and fun to see mostly people I knew from HSD there.

NyashAlex’s often-overlooked solo album Median, riffing on Homestuck’s Medium solo album, was released next on 11/11, during a stream Makin held hoping that some good Snapchat updates might come out that day (they did, in fact).

Two and a half months after CANHS 1, we finally put out Cool and New Homestuck 2, covering Homestuck Act 6 where 1 had covered Acts 1-5. It had much good music, but the real standout was Thyme on My Fries by SplitSuns, the Time on My Side replacement (named by yours truly), generally agreed to be one of our best songs up to that time. Tensei even said he preferred the reharmonization in the intro to the original chords used. The name “Coolaid,” for our version of [S] Collide, had come from an ancient, volume 2s-era project to release an EP parodying the one on the Homestuck bandcamp, which had been subsumed into the CANHS project. The only other vestige of that project was that Crypt worked on the Oppa Toby Style replacement, and OpsCat on the Heir of Grief replacement; very little of the music they had made for the original project remained, though. A few days after, Difarem and Noisemaker were demoted from manager; the former was very busy with school, while the latter was still active, but not interested in doing managing.

CANHS2’s release date of 11/26 was specifically lined up so that we released a video from CANHS3 daily from then until the day before Christmas. At first, each one was announced in HSD #announcements, though later Makin only posted the ones he found most impressive. CANHS3 consisted of the small, short flashes that hadn’t been impressive enough for 1 or 2, but nevertheless warranted something. While the videos were releasing, the queue was put on hiatus, but in the end CANHS3 was great news for it; the videos proved that a daily release schedule was possible, and the pause gave time to build up a backlog. On Christmas day, we released 7 GRAND END, a group project to rescore Act 7, with each person claiming a segment of the song. These collaborations are some of the most fun I’ve had on the team. “Roundabout” by Yes is referenced a few times in the song, in a reference to Griever’s video that syncs up Roundabout to Act 7, a staple video in community streams.

We had run into a small problem with ending the whole CANHS project; the Credits had come out after all the planning was done, and we needed to figure out how it would fit in with CANHS. As it happened, yazshu had drawn up slides for a movie-style credits sequence back in July, hoping to use it to end CANHS. However, that was mostly forgotten by others (including me), by the time December rolled around, and we had ideas to either: use the credits as is, use the credits but replace the snapchats in the video with CANWC references, or use the credits but replace the snapchats in the video with references to Hadron’s CANHS lore that had been ongoing. To this was added yazshu’s original idea, and it all became one huge clusterfuck of planning. Making things even more complicated, the modteam had been unsure about the skill of the person who had signed up to do the credits music originally, so we decided to make it into a contest; we had five submissions in all, and the person who originally signed up never finished their submission at all!

Eventually we figured it out. There wasn’t enough interest to redo all the snapchat images anyway, so ost’s submission was used for the main credits video, and added to the end of the video was yazshu’s credits sequence with Noisemaker’s music, which had come in second place, but wasn’t long enough for the full credits video anyway, because he had run out of time. So, in the end all our problems cancelled each other out. At one point the plan was to use OpsCat’s, which had won the poll, for the main one, and ost’s for the lore one, but in all the switching around when the latter got cancelled ost’s got moved to the main one, and OpsCat’s and JohnJRenns’s got pushed to the next main volume. The one Squarewave (then known as Dream_Narwhal) made got put on the queue, being a meme mashup. It fell on poor nights to make the art for both ost’s and Noisemaker’s versions—and because we weren’t certain of our plans until that very day, she had to do it fast, which she did admirably. With all that sorted out, we released Cool and New Homestuck 3 as a Christmas present to the world.

Backing up a few days to the previous Friday, a discussion in #team_general about Jaspy’s emulating old Windows versions had somehow turned into a discussion of OS-tans, which led to someone suggested CANMT-tan, which nights quickly created. It took till the end of 2016, but we finally had a mascot for the team. Another era ended on 12/27, with Ngame, who had drifted farther apart from CANMT, stepping down as manager, and being replaced with interrobang, who had shown dependability creating booklets for album after album. Of the 9 original (pre voulem.1 release) managers, only ost, Makin, and Jaspy remained.

On 12/30, Tirantbacon posted a screenshot of some notes in FL Studio with the question, “would you call this a harmonic progression?” Somehow or other, everyone (including Tensei, twice) started remixing this tiny snippet of music (it later turned out it was part of Alphys, from the Undertale OST), and we ended up with an album on our hands, full of songs with meta names. I gathered everyone’s work, put it on Bandcamp, and gave it the title Take My Song in a Completely Different Direction, a reference to Bowman’s fanadventure from years ago. It was the first full album to not be either streamed or first released on Youtube (not counting CANWAVE, which is totally unstreamable), and the first to be abstract to the point of having no connection to CANWC (though call and new had come close to that point). My inner CANWC purist sometimes wonders if I had made a mistake organizing it. I definitely had made a mistake in the organization of it, by not pinging everyone to make sure they had submitted everything they wanted to submit, and Jaspy’s remix got missed in the confusion. Of course, people always yell when they get pinged, so you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

V8️lu♏e, the next main album, released and was streamed on 1/14. Interrobang was busy, so XenoZane took over the work of making the commentary booklet. This was the only album that had a strict quality control judging system; volume 7 was haphazard, and by volume 9 we had improved enough to not need as strict of one, though some tracks were still rejected there. It was originally planned to release on 12/25, but Makin advised us not to, since nobody would show up for a stream; judging by how inactive Discord was that day, he was right. The release date was moved to New Year’s Day, but when that came around work on the trailer for the album had not been completed. Composer and artist Roxe organized that project, an animation in the style of Homestuck flashes telling the lore behind the making of the album. As it was a first-of-its¬-kind for us (earlier album trailers were either jokey things made in video-editing software, or Blender animations by Hadron), getting all the assets together, including an original soundtrack by ost, took longer than we were expecting, so it ended up delayed two weeks. The title was originally going to have the billiards emoji instead of the 8, but that was scrapped since not all displays of the emoji use an 8 ball. It was our first big release/stream with only one album coming out since voulem.1, though in total the album was around the same length at volume 7 + Basement Tale.

A few days later, on Trump’s inauguration day, CANWAVE 2 dropped. The association between Canwave and Trump was created when Makin made a “timeline” for our albums, ala an in-universe timeline of Zelda games; Canwave was put in the dystopian future following from Trump being elected, along with the Trump x Toby Gunshow Singalong. When it turned out in November that the Trump-gets-elected timeline is the one we live in, we decided this meant we just had to do a follow-up to the Canwave album.

At this point, our activity started slowing down. It was something that we had been speculating and fearing for a long time, as far back as September; it was, ultimately, inevitable. The hype dies down, people get interested in other projects, and the pace of work calms. Nevertheless, the team was still far from dead. 2ound Te2t, the 2nd sound test, came out at 2:00 on 2/2, our sole release for February. March, too, had just one album, but it was a doozy, as was the reaction it got.

The realization that the 10th anniversary of the Bowman’s Credit Score video would be on 3/9/2017 was made by minish as far back as 8/23, and over time, concrete plans for a celebration coalesced. We eventually decided on making an album all about Bowmemes, called Bowmania. Because we had killed off Bowman’s Credit Score months earlier, we needed to bring it back through further L.O.R.E., which involved writing a script and asking Scott Stutzman, Bowman’s friend, to help us out with the voice acting. Thankfully, he graciously agreed and worked on the script with us. I personally contributed to the album by wrangling 36 team members into reading and recording parts of the text of the video, and cutting it together so we had our own version of its first 4 minutes. I sadly had missed the album stream, and was feeling a bit down about it, when Bowman announced that he would be doing a livestream of his reactions to the album! Getting to see his appreciation was one of the greatest moments of CANMT history, to me. Even o himself showed up for the stream chat (and because it took place on Youtube, we could verify it was the real author of the web comic himself).

In mid-March, Hadron posted a mashup of a Sonic the Hedgehog song and Aerosoul (the Strife 2 song) on the Youtube channel. For whatever reason it was picked up on by Sonic fans who not only had no idea what CANMT was, but also did not understand the concept of SiIvagunner. They left angry comments about how it wasn’t a real song from Sonic Forces… and pushed the video to 15,000 views, far more than we had gotten from any of our other videos. Based on that event, we decided that we would convert the Youtube account to a Sonic fan account for April Fool’s Day. BobTheTacocat and XenoZane, our mashup artists/high quality rippers, made several Sonic HQ rips in preparation for the event, and Jaspy and TirantBacon contributed one each as well. In addition to those, Hadron did several Sonic remixes for the day, which were uploaded along with the original Aerosoul mashup as Cool and New Sonic Team.

The day after April Fool’s, after so much waiting and searching, we found the lost Toby Fox track Penumbra Phantasm. It seemed like a belated joke at first, but it was entirely real. Someone on the team had been searching through Toby’s file attachments on an old EarthBound forum, which he had used for file uploads for years of being a member of the Music Team, and stumbled on a file that began with a version of Penumbra that had never been heard before. While the full track wasn’t there, a midi with labels specifying which soundfonts and samples should be used, was. It was an amazing discovery after the song’s elusiveness being a meme for so long, and we immediately pinged @everyone on the server. Of course, it wouldn’t be quite right to ping @everyone on HSD for it, but we didn’t need to: LLF accidentally did so in #anime only a few hours later, and after freezing the channel so only he could talk, Makin shilled a link to the song. The sad conclusion to the story came when the discoverer emailed Toby a question about the song, and it transpired that Toby had not intended for the files to be public, and politely requested they not be shared. He was extremely kind about the whole thing (Makin had sort of freaked out after Toby’s first email in response, but it turned out that was unnecessary), and in return we removed the subreddit/HSD/etc. posts about it, though because CANMT is not a public server we had been more cavalier there.

On 4/6, nights, who was already a pillar of the CANMT community and prolific track artist, got promoted to manager, for more artist representation as well as her general competency. She was also entrusted with getting the ,jpeg project into gear, on which more later.

4/10 saw two major CANWC-related projects come out on its birthday. First was the Act 4 walkaround, developed by team member and programmer CogentInvalid. o had contacted us months earlier, asking for help with programming; Cogent had experience already, having made “the hous swich places,” a CANWCization of Hiveswap. The managers had kept the project a secret even from the rest of the team, because we recognized that a significant fraction of CANWC fans was on the team and it wouldn’t do to spoil them unnecessarily, and thankfully Cogent was able to pull it off without needing any help (o supplied all the art assets, making it easier). The other was Intermishin, a riff on the Homestuck albums Drawing Dead and Felt. It was undoubtedly our most CANWC-related album yet—every song had a concrete connection to something in CANWC’s intermission—and arguably our best in music quality at the time too. Three days later, on the meme number day of 4/13, we released queue and new, a compilation of nearly all our music released on Youtube before then. Our next release, on 5/2, was also a rerelease from Youtube: a single from Gordian called The Ballad of Megan Pouring, his name for fem!Makin. The Fem!Makin meme dates back to Summer 2016 on HSD; basically an alternative way of representing him beyond the good old ~ath face. We put it on Bandcamp as a free download soon after it went up on Youtube, since people were asking for a download.

Most of May went by without another release, until on 5/28, we finally got the long-delayed “train game” out the door. Way back in September, shortly after call and new was finished, we decided to make a sequel, but with the remixes going in branching paths instead of a single straight line. The similarity of the diagram to a map of train stations gave it the nickname, which stuck around till we finally decided on a real one shortly before release. The project took forever to complete because everyone had to wait for everyone behind them to finish all their work before they could start working. So when call and new 2: locomotif finally rolled out of the station, the first of its tracks were two-thirds of a year old. We followed up this extremely delayed album with an extremely rushed album, CALL AND NEW II: EMERGENCY PHONE CALL, bringing back the 2/ii joke from so early on. Much like Take My Song In A Completely Different Direction, everything was completed in a few days (just 3, in fact) and no real track art was made.

In a… somewhat similar vein, shitposting about tiny-headed bear toys in CANMT #altgen somehow led to meems making a “Bear Song,” which got put up on Bandcamp as a single. People then made more bear songs (mostly soundfont swaps with bear noises), and the single got upgraded to the album Bear Songs. We proceeded to delete it very quickly, the entire thing beginning and ending in a span of a few hours, because it was a bad idea and also hilarious. This had some precedent with For Dupeb, the single song on a fake Cool and New Voulem 3 from August 2016 that existed for around two hours as well. Dupeb was an HSD user, whose other claim to fame was that pretending to be him and/or his body parts was a short-lived meme, which is why there are still to this day accounts nicknamed “dupebs forehead” and “dupebs right foot” on HSD.

Next we went back to finishing off ancient projects, by releasing .jpeg. The gimmick here was that art was made first, and then the song, instead of our usual process of artists making track art for already-finished music. For whatever reason, getting the album done took absolutely forever; the project began in October, and went through three phases of management, but in the end nights and yazshu did an exemplary job of judging the art submissions, and getting the composers to get their work done. One of the arts on the album set our record for the longest time it took content to see the light of day: Bambosh and Mira’s Lego art, released as the art for “Crash Course in Creativity,” languished from 7/4/16 to 6/12/17, only a few weeks shy of an entire year.

We dabbled with nostalgia for the next few weeks, commemorating the anniversary of the team by changing role colors and names back to as they were in the beginning and saying memorials for Mira. On the anniversary of voulem.1. we released 9, whose very short name emerged from our total inability to come to a consensus on a name for the next volume. MrCheeze and cookiefonster strongly wanted anything without a 9 in the name, the former because 9 was too strongly associated with post-scratch, the latter because simply adding 1 to the previous volume number is too predictable (and I found myself agreeing with cookie). We PM’d o for advice, but since he gave multiple options we voted on them alongside our original ideas. The winner was “Volume 8 2,” but it wasn’t anybody’s first choice. We had been pranked again by Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. And so we eventually landed on 9, from it being what was popular in #team_general at the time. Bambosh dictated that we were no longer to argue about it, to get us all to finally shut up.

While we were putting the finishing touches on 9, we argued about what the trailer would be. We weren’t entirely happy with how the V8lume trailer had turned out, especially in how it combined representations of team members with CANWC characters. At the same time, we did want to do something good for it, especially because only two albums had trailers since then. We took the usual route when we have too many ideas to agree on, and just did all of them, asking everyone to make whatever trailers they could. After quite a few ideas emerged, we realized that having 9 trailers would work perfectly, and tried to get as many people as possible to make one, so we could have a chance of reaching that number—and overshot, ending up with way more than 9 videos. We made up for this by, after getting to trailer 7, starting over and doing one for each main volume, going through 8 1, 8 2, 8 ii, 8 V, 8 s*x, 8 7, 8 8, and finally 9, the release trailer.

9 was a huge success, unquestionably our best album to date. Like volume 7 before it, it made up an outsized fraction of the immediately following Greatest Hits 2 album, releasing on 7/20. As mentioned above, GH2, as well as drawing on all albums since GH1, had Savior of the Screaming Dead (as always, a highlight of its stream) and Meme Voyage added, to make up for their not being in the first greatest hits album. One Week Older, ost’s second solo album, and Bro and Game Web Comic, BobTheTacocat’s GameBro mashup album inspired by the classic Brostuck Homestuck mashup album, also released that day, after a long time.

All this time, XenoZane had been diligently managing the queue, uploading videos to release daily, so he had more than earned being made the last manager on 7/31. Two days after that, on the anniversary of the Homestuck solo album Symphony Impossible to Play, “Crypt’s” “solo” “album” Symphony Impossible to Hear was released, consisting of 4 tracks on Bandcamp without any audio uploaded for them. Very avant-garde. Our next work, at the end of August, was YES WE CANWC, an album devoted to the SBAHJ and CANWC character Obana. The album had been proposed as a way to shorten the rather long album 9, by moving all the Obana songs out of it and releasing them on their own, ala s]hecka jef. Like s]hecka jef, more songs were made in the meantime, and it ended up with a respectable track list, featuring many of our newest members. Many of those members had been attracted by Cryptanark’s subreddit recruitment thread on 7/20, which had been our first in quite a while. We do welcome new members at any time—many people joined through the UMSPAF server in early 2017, for example—and as such recruitment threads serve mainly to remind potential members that we could use them, and make it known that joining is possible.

September nearly went by without a release, but it was far from uneventful. The major news was Hiveswap coming out on 9/14, and we had undertaken to capitalize on its popularity by making an impressive Youtube video for the same day. Inspired once more by SiIvagunner, Xeno organized a fusion collab of Undertale’s MEGALOVANIA, which here meant that the song was cut up into looping sections, and people remixed each section in a specific style. There had been jokes forever about Hiveswap having a Megalovania remix, because of Toby’s contributing to the OST, so the song was the perfect choice. We chose the Undertale version specifically for how easily its structure could be subdivided for different people to work on, and then looped with little difficulty. Shilling it everywhere, and the inherent popularity of anything Megalovania on Youtube, got it to almost 60,000 views as of the time of writing, far surpassing anything else on the channel, even Hadron’s Sonic videos. This was another of the group projects I love, and it was immensely gratifying to reach such a large audience even if it did mean many stupid Youtube comments. Two weeks later, it got a cover art and uploaded to the Bandcamp as Megalovania FUSION COLLABORATION the hit song by toby "dont call me radiation" fox off the hiveswap soundtrack ft silver gunner and james roach.

The most recent release is Xoro’s solo fihgt each OTHE, coming out during Makin’s (far shorter this year) 10/25 stream again. Xoro, like so many other composers on the team, improved drastically over the past year and a third, going from mediocre to capable of making a solo album themed as the CANWC equivalent to Tensei’s Strife without disappointing. Two days earlier, we kicked off the special Youtube event Canrival week, dedicated to (mostly) BobTheTacocat’s rips of Noisemaker’s song from volume 8, and on the anniversary of the Carne Vale Fusion Collab, released a Le Canrival Fusion Collab.

After the burst of activity from late May to mid-July, CANMT has been mostly dormant, but we have never stopped working entirely. We don’t know when the next volume will come along, or what it will be named, but we do know that it will happen eventually. CANMT’s popularity, and activity, have always waxed and waned with CANWC’s; and that in turn has often depended on how fast o is able to update. He was an absolute speed demon in the summer of 2016, and so were we; but since then, in his words, “o is slow.” Maybe someday we will both return to that level of activity.

Internet Communities and Homestuck: A Retrospective (Unfinished)

Cookiefonster - 6^th of November, 2017

Introduction

Though I have joined and left more than my fair share of online communities over the

years, there is one that I feel has become an important part of my life: in loose terms, the

community centered around Andrew Hussie’s cult-popular webcomic, Homestuck. The comic is

hard to succinctly describe (four teenagers play a mysterious video game blah blah blah), but it is

noted for having a uniquely complicated plot and a very distinct sense of narrative humor, featuring a swath of commentary on and deconstruction of common tropes in media that always seems to be both serious and flippant at the same time; while the comic has more than a few issues to it, especially in later parts, it is an incredibly fun read overall and a story very much worth merit.

Though the comic officially concluded back in April of 2016 with only sporadic official content

since then, a few lucky moves have given me a rather strong relationship with not so much the

comic itself as the community that has built around it.

I have had numerous interests over the years, some completely normal fanbases but others

very obscure and in retrospect more than a little embarrassing. Despite these differences, they have one feature in common: I always invested in them to some rather extreme degrees. Many of those interests I left out a large amount of content on the Internet on and chatted with people for large amounts of time on, and as it so happens Homestuck is probably the strongest example of this. My YouTube channel is rife with videos related to the comic and some of its fanworks and almost all of my online profiles are branded upon Homestuck, proudly boasting an avatar of a SBaHJ-ified Spades Slick chewing bubblegum and discussing Homestuck-related things on a regular occasion. I even maintained a Blogger page which, for a while, ran an extensive re-read liveblog where I commented on the comic in a way that started out rather shallow, worked its way into a very enjoyable amount of depth, but then got so out of hand that I was no longer able to properly focus on working on those posts and abandoned it. Despite that failure to finish such an ambitious project, the comic’s impact on my life is not to be ignored; it was the thing that finally killed my bad habit of skimming works of fiction in a poor attempt to consume them, and it sports a fantastic soundtrack that inspired many remixes (and on rare occasions, original compositions) out of me and taught me a huge amount about music. More on that later. If nothing else, Homestuck is still a part of my mind enough that I find myself reminded of it on regular occasion, and moreover that I am writing this in the first place.

Considering that I first read the comic back in the summer of 2014 (three years ago as of

this writing), if it was any other work of media my interest in it would be long dead by now. But

one very curious fanwork based on the comic gave me a months-long phase where I constantly

outputted music and bonded with people over it to the point where, unlike my prior relationships

with communities where my interests drifted apart from theirs, these bonds will likely last far

longer. I’ve come to chat with people I knew from those times and share experiences on life (or

anything, really) very regularly and I cannot see those interactions ending any time soon. The

connection between this and Homestuck is that my interactions with those people are always on

Discord chat servers themed around the comic. The people I met there have had similar

relationships with the comic, where it impacted their life in one way or another. As it so happens,

there are plenty of cases where I unexpectedly share an old or current interest or similar life

experience with someone there, leading to a huge amount of engaging conversations.

The Early Days: Discovering Homestuck

The way I first found out about Homestuck and became interested in reading it is not

particularly interesting: in a nutshell, it amounts to me wanting to read the source of a handful of

amusing reaction images and videos I found online, in particular on one of the forums I used to

frequent. When I first read the comic, I read it (or rather, “read” it) as at the time I did any work

of fiction: skimming it just enough that I had a vague impression of knowing what was going on

but missing out on basically everything that happened ever. It did pique my interest enough for me to read things about it on a regular occasion, in particular the comic’s Wikia (a telltale sign that I am in an early part of an interest phase). By a certain point, I realized I had missed enough things that I actually went down and reread the comic, this time paying some semblance of attention to its events. Though I caught far from every detail in the comic that time, my third read in which I ran the aforementioned blog plus browsing through the comic’s search pages and rereading random parts was my way of gaining a full understanding of and investment in the comic. Going by patterns of my prior interests, I started to lurk on the comic’s official forums,

better known as the MSPA forums, in early 2015; a few months later, I started posting regularly

on those forums. I would regularly discuss the material in the comic’s updates, which was a great

source of enjoyment for me; reading other people’s interpretations and revelations about the comic was a delight like few others. The discussions there managed to stay strong not only during the solid three months of comic updates, but even during the following eight-month pause before the comic’s long-anticipated final leg, fittingly dubbed the “Omegapause”. However, tragedy struck when the forums were hacked the day after the Omegapause ended, leaving them gone probably for good. So many useful threads and pieces of online history could now only be found in skimpy web archives that were an absolute hassle to navigate.

This major loss is what led me to start talking on the Homestuck subreddit instead, a place

where I had lurked for quite a while. The structure of that place was far different from the cozy

message board forums I had been used to for years, and just something about it caused me, from

my point of view, to be flamed seemingly every time I brought up something about the comic, no

matter how insignificant. It didn’t help that by that point, I had started not to like late parts of the

comic very much and had developed some strong opinions on topics of debate. My annoyance led to a few occasions where I was That One Annoying Person and posted angry rants in which I said I would leave the subreddit but never followed through with those.

This negative experience was cooled somewhat when I found out that Blaperile, a regular

on the MSPA forums with a notably positive opinion and genuine love for all things Homestck,

founded an unofficial replacement forum known as the Omegaupdate Forums. Though those

forums were active for a fair while, they were never quite the same history-ridden place the MSPA forums were, and by the time the first act of Homestuck’s long anticipated sister project, a video game that explores new aspects of the comic’s continuity called Hiveswap, came out, the massive community of active MSPA forums posters had dwindled down to a very small group of dedicated users. The only other common use for those forums now is suggesting commands and

communicating with the elusive author of the curious fancomic I mentioned earlier, which I will

elaborate on soon. Disregarding that gem of a comic, I still lurk on those forums occasionally, and those users’ dedication to maintaining what is now an obscure corner of the Internet is just as

admirable as it is heartbreaking.

I did continue to post on the Homestuck subreddit and managed to be there to discuss the

final stretch of updates of the comic, which had a share of amazing and very fun moments, but a

very underwhelming ending that invited more questions than answers and was a whole different

beast of controversy. It was not a controversy I was flamed quite as much for, and even managed

to bond with some people on, but it still led to far more heated debates than fun discussion.

Enter cool and new web comic

In June of 2016, I noticed something odd happening on the subreddit. Everyone was

buzzing about some strange thing called “cool and new web comic”. As I am prone to do when

everyone keeps blabbering about a random piece of media I know nothing about, I waved it off at first as some dumb thing that wasn’t worth my time. But when I got around to reading the comic, I was absolutely awestruck. Written by a mysterious figure only known as “o”—an anonymity that, in my opinion, only adds to the charm of the comic—cool and new web comic first presents itself as a retelling of Homestuck in the style of its crudely made comic-within-a-comic Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, already hilarious in its own right. But the comic became something completely (cool and) new when it turned out that one of the characters (Rose to be specific) was unchanged, and acted exactly as she did in the original comic. The first act of the comic concluded in a three minute animation featuring, among many other great events, a plot twist that shocked me in a way that transcended words: late in the act, Rose talked to a mysterious person under the handle “anonamousVengance”, but the flash revealed that character was none other than Hella Jeff, or as the comic called him Hecka Jef. Since then, the comic has continued with a plot every bit as enticing as early Homestuck, and though the updates are nowhere near the frantic rate Homestuck originally was, they are a delight that is part of what continues to fuel my interest in (at this point broadly speaking) Homestuck.

Following such a unique comic is one thing, but just a few weeks later, out of nowhere (to

me at least) some names I recognized from the subreddit put together a musical album called cool and new web comic voulem.1 (now called cool and new voulem.1). The album spawned out of an idea by a well-known community member known as ostrichlittledungeon, or ost for short. At the time, the Homestuck music team had just released the comic’s final album, Homestuck Vol. 10, on Bandcamp. Inspired by this incredibly well-received album, ost had the idea of making a soundtrack for cool and new web comic (CaNWC). Over two weeks, an album of 52 songs was put together, and it was truly like nothing I had ever heard. Most of the songs were incredibly weird intentionally bad pieces of music, but many of them were bad in a charming way: to name just one, there is the infamous licord nacrasty, brought to the world by a user named Sir Felix (now known as Jaspy). The song starts a very poor transcription of the Homestuck song Liquid Negrocity (a song that was later reworked into the iconic Black) played on the infamous DVS saxophone sample, but then segues into an unsynced mashup with a muffled version of the song Continue? from a bootleg Felix the Cat game, complete with the melody from the start of the song played in reverse at the same time and a bunch of random doodling notes, leading to a horrific but oddly charming mess of a song that would soon be regarded as the pinnacle of songs that are “bad in a good way”.

But more interestingly, voulem.1 had a few legitimately good songs. My favorite was 25x

SHOWDOWN COMBO, an extremely well put together song featuring melodies from 25 different songs, most of which were from Homestuck but with a few foreign songs thrown in for good measure. Though songs made of so many melodies would eventually become very boring to people (myself in particular) because they were done so often, 25x still holds a special place in my heart because it was the team’s first song of its kind and brings much nostalgia whenever I relisten to it. The song was arranged by Cryptanark (with some instrumental help from ost), who would continue to produce amazing songs for the team.

After hearing just a few bits of songs from this strange album (I don’t think that even

included the two songs I mentioned), as soon as a team recruitment thread was posted to the

subreddit I immediately signed up and became part of the team. There weren’t even any

requirements to join the team at the time, though I had dabbled in Homestuck-related music at the time through making some chiptune covers of the comic’s songs, most famously a cover of Oppa Toby Style from the comic’s second-last animation, [S] Collide. The team was, and is to this day, organized through a server hosted on Discord which is an excellent and versatile place to communicate, share ideas, or just chat about life. I found it very easy and fun to talk to people on the team’s server; many users there had a large amount of interests in common with me and, after nearly two years, I had finally found an online community related to Homestuck where I could connect to people and know them to a significant degree. With this new discovery, the subreddit became considerably more pleasant for me as well.

Makin's List of Shills

http://recordcrash.com/shills.html

Shill List Leaderboard

https://recordcrash.com/leaderboard.html

Memes of the HSD (Unfinished)

Hbthebattle - 22^nd of October, 2017

Most up to date version as of the 9^th of November, 2017: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eooEHsA0WfPtbUEkmujjK-xTkrFHxNL-Hc989ZxOGxg/edit

(A preemptive thank you to TS, Deus, Ngame, Toast, MrNostalgic, and everyone else who reminded me of these memes.)

As with any online community, the Homestuck Discord is full of memes. Altgen in particular is infamous for its memes, but every channel engages in them. This page is to record the memes the HSD has generated over its existence.

One side note. This page is to record the memes originating from the HSD. While memes such as Baneposting, Metal Gear Rising quotes, and the videos of SiIvaGunner and videogamedunkey are popular, their memes do not originate from the HSD, and as such will not be covered.

CANWC: Ok, so this isn’t HSD original, but it’s too important to leave off. Cool and New Web Comic is a parody of Homestuck, made by an author simply known as “o”. The comic features shitty versions of homestuck characters interacting with each other in amusing ways, but also characters, that, for some reason, are normal and non-shitty. Many of its events and characters have become memes for the community.

WackyZany: WackyZany refers to a distorted image of Jared Leto’s portrayal of the Joker from Suicide Squad. It’s normally used as one of two things: symbolizing something that is trolling/baiting, or symbolizing server owner Makin, who is infamous for trolling and baiting.

Tensei Face: Tensei Face is a picture of a Chinese butterfly toy that used to be Homestuck Music Team member Tensei’s profile picture, that has come to symbolize smugness.

Sucking Toes: This meme comes from an infamous incident when a very nervous user asked pseudomod Toast if he could “kin” him. Toast, obviously weirded out, politely said no. The user than asked if he could RP sucking Toast’s toes, and then left before he could get an answer. The server was never the same.

Funny License: This meme comes from an incident on the Hiveswap Discord, when former HVSD Owner and general annoyance Elvish asked user Sylandrophol if he had a “funny license,” likely because Syl’s jokes had offended her in some way. Due to the absurdity of the statement, it became an instant meme in altgen, and quickly grew into the other channels as well. (As a side note, Syl now himself hates the HSD after being banned, and is constantly plotting to destroy it. Weird.)

The Physical Return of Jesus Christ: This meme originates from a raid on the server, where a user and his many alts spammed a video of Biggie Cheese from the movie Barnyard, prefaced by the words “The Physical Return of Jesus Christ”. Due to the absurdity of the raid, it swiftly became a meme.

Rationality: Rationality is the philosophy Makin is infamous for subscribing to, including the ideals of logic-based decisions over emotion. The emote refers to the face of Eliezer Yudkowsky, author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and a renowned rationalist. Though the image was meant to mock Makin, he has embraced it.

Eridab: The image refers to an image of Homestuck character Eridan dabbing. The image reached memetic status thanks to former shitposter and current moderator Sea Hitler, whose shitposting about Eridab here and in the Altgenstuck server reached memetic heights to eventually become a real emote. The image itself is used to refer to Shitler himself. Other Eridan memes have also become popular.

kill40000: kill40000 was a user who, after joining, immediately started posting bizarre and garbled messages in #gaming. After his banning, he made a server called “the real Homestuck Discord gaming channel” and began sending invites to random users, including the mod who banned him.

Read Jojostuck: Jojostuck is a fanventure created by Griever, combining Homestuck and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders. He was infamous for shillig his fanventure to literally anyone who joined the server or talked to him for more than a minute. Though he has stopped doing this as much, other users, including Makin, have started doing it for him. This meme has gotten big enough that even What Pumpkin is aware of it and makes jokes about it. Other variations for other prominent fanventures have also occurred, most famously Read Altgenstuck. Eventually, Makin co-opted the meme for his new naming scheme for the original #mspalit, now renaming it “read-x”, x being whatever literature he has recently enjoyed, most famously Worm.

Anervaria and Vore: Pseudomod Anervaria has become infamous for her enjoyment of vore, a type of fetish porn involving eating people. To her credit, she has embraced the meme, often changing her name to “Anervoria” or something similar, and her profile picture to a black hole.

WoCposting: Gaming janitor enforcer Wizard of Chaos has become infamous for his absurd actions, including but not limited to: shitting in someone’s chimney, having a threesome with his ex and his ex’s sister, and tying a deer to his truck and forcing it to run itself to death. Due to these and more, and his shameless acceptance of them, their sheer hilarity value has become memetic.

Pinging Makin: The idea of pinging Makin has become a meme for the idea that pinging Makin for dumb reasons will get you permabanned, and that anyone who pings Makin is a badass. While the real punishment is likely not going to be harsh if the ping was important/was for an amusing reason, pinging Makin for stupid reasons is still a very bad idea.

#AAAAAAAAAA: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/366729936834265088/371831639677992961/aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.png

I don’t think this needs any more explanation.

MNEO Alts: An infamous altgen user named MNEO’s banning prompted him to attempt to create alts to get back in, but his sheer inability to not make his alts extremely obvious has made him a butt monkey and a joke. However, other users like Talons is not as memetic, because of some of the awful things Talons has done.

Milk: Altgen regular Jude Harley once drank an entire gallon of milk, becoming very openly distressed afterward due to a wicked nasty stomach ache. It was made fun of for awhile until she did it again, it became obvious this was at least a little concerning. She no longer milk binges.

Hi I'm Molly: Altgen Janitor Molly uses this as her greeting to any and all new users, many altgenners have noticed it's repetition and circlejerk with it when the chance arises, similar to reading Jojostuck above.

Trumpet Refrain: A meme that came from the ICP-made movie "Big Money Hustlas" subreddit stream almost a year ago; wherein every time the protagonist Sugar Bear's name is said a trumpet can be heard. This was spammed very much at the time, but since the stream was long ago, many newer users don’t know of the meme.

Derse Doesn’t Exist: An older meme stemming from a theory by former pseudomod Linkslittlefriend, who made a MatPat-tier theory on how the Cherub’s session did not have a Derse, because we never saw it. Sadly, due to LLF’s irrelevancy and relative inactivity compared to olde days, the meme has fallen into obscurity.

Deleting Altgen: Makin has used deleting #altgen as a threat before, but a couple weeks ago he actually did it… for 40 minutes. The idea of the deletion of altgen for real and the reaction it would cause has become memed in almost every channel on the server before and after the prank.

Fuck Raid: Another infamous raid is the Fuck raid, where a bunch of bots all named Fuck all joined the server at once, and spammed an invite to another Discord server. Like the Physical Return of Jesus Christ, the raid has become memetic for its absurdity.

Jadequius: https://imgur.com/a/I7V85

Altgen is weird, and its not exactly getting any more sane.

XRAposting: The show Xavier: Renegade Angel, and its quotations have reached memetic heights on the server for their sheer ridiculousness and surreal nature. The show’s insanity has caused it to become a meme for many, even those who do not normally watch those types of shows.

Broccoli Dave and Fat Karkat: Both of these a headcanons used by attempted Homestuck rewriter Act 8, which became memetic for their extreme differences from canon. Broccoli Dave later made the subreddit and Discord blow up (whether that is good or not is up to interpretation when someone posted an infamous /co/ baitcomic.

Cursed Tavros: A wacky doll of Tavros that has become memetic for it’s sheer… well, just look at it! The ridiculousness of it led to it becoming a major meme for a while.

Bowman: Music Team memeber Michael Guy Bowman has become a massive meme among the community, especially his video Bowman’s Credit Score. Every single line from this video has become a meme, and I do mean that literally. Say the number 720 or the word buttocks will instantly gain you an army of video quoting the video. Also related is his friend Scott Stutzman, who he does meme videos with.

Who’s Jane: Jane got totally screwed in late Homestuck, and ends up not getting much screentime or focus. Due to this, the joke arose that Jane simply doesn’t exist, and this meme is quoted at anyone who even mentions Jane.

Boss Baby: Music Team member James Roach is the other music team member to talk in the Discord now, though he has not done this in ages. He used to constantly force the meme of the existence of the Dreamworks film Boss Baby, and it eventually gained relevancy. Related is “Yikes”, James’s reaction to anything out of the ordinary, which also became a meme.

Fat Husky: Another memetic emote, this time of a smiling dog(go) created by yaz. It became popular because of its sheer adorableness and the ridiculousness of it of all things becoming an emote.

Kek = Ban: Kek is essentially 4chan’s version of “lol”. A user named Lognes became so infamous for spamming it that he got all uses of the work “kek” to become banworthy. Though the ban has been lifted and was never really enforced, the meme still remains in the form of an emote.

Grimblunt: This meme referred to the instance of Jade smoking weed. Though I have no idea how it started, it became prominent enough to convince Tensei to make Heel, Girl, a Jade song on Strife II, exactly 4:20 in length.

Gremlining: Gremlining is the act of searching through someone’s posting history to grab pertinent information. It became infamous on the HSD after one of Cohen’s PR debacles threw the entire server into drama.

Unban Daddy: Daddy was an underage user who constantly asked for nudes and access to #nsfw. After his banning, people constantly ironically asked for his unbanning, so much so that Daddy was unbanned temporarily on the anniversary of the server.

Geromy x Union Jack: Geromy x Union Jack is a meme ship created by tripheus to mock to constant shipping wars going on in the server and subreddit. It quickly reached high velocity in its appearances when used to mock shipping and shipping threads.

#food: #food was an infamous former channel that people constantly asked for reinstatement after its deletion. It was eventually brought back during the April Fool’s Day extravaganza, but now thanks to Drew and Makin’s Patreon, it’s become a real channel once again.

#wadesworld: wade5454 is an user infamous for hating Makin. Eventually, to shut him up, Makin locked him in a channel only he could talk in, which was eventually memed by the rest of the HSD’s populace.

#rules: For a variety of reasons, Makin is adamantly against the idea of creating a #rules channel. The meme became major during April Fools, where a overly-harsh #rules were created as used as an excuse to “ban” users to the newly unlocked parts of the server. However, this is also the source of much controversy, as those who believe that #rules should exist feel like the prank was insulting towards them.

RPGStuck

A History of RPGStuck and its Community - 12yz12ab

https://docs.google.com/document/d/15KnIBe8DlC-bcLdJwTKYNaqHoSKJlOixO11kqsRO44A/edit

Player's Handbook

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zfIuxFmrjKHAA2b0Jj7o2f0wAwz7Uv6CIo_zC35PIvs/edit

Pillars and Paths

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ncMbV0RalmeAprA4gZeGRkCLLwysH2dV0--NNTamB-Q/edit

Slotted Psionics Powers List

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o5YclplopcOt2RxWxufw5s_ZfPIajFT6UVyVS8UjbDE/edit

What is a quest? (Unfinished)

Gitaxian - 6^th of November, 2017

Most up to date version as of the 16^th of February, 2018: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zjCMeI6tzNSbC1pAXAMdAm4wyQEUcwdbnHvNkhihIjI/edit

What is a quest?

Quests are a unique medium straddling the line between narrative and game. A quest is both a work of fiction to be read, and a roleplaying experience to be played.

Quests are usually hosted on internet forums, though some have their own websites. In a quest, the audience shares control over a character or group. The author posts a section of story, and then the players respond with suggestions for what the character or group should do. Because control is shared, players can join or leave at any time with no effect on the narrative. How this shared control operates differs from quest to quest.

The key factor that differentiates a quest from normal roleplaying is that they are narrative-driven rather than player-driven. Roleplaying games sometimes have a person in a similar role to the author such as a Game Master, but their job is to server the player’s experience. Any narrative is a product of that. In a roleplaying game you can replace the GM without altering the narrative (provided there’s a wider plan they’re following) but not the players. In a quest, you can replace players easily but it’s impossible to replace the author without altering the narrative.

In terms of content, quests represent a massive variety of themes, tones, and genres. Quests based on existing IPs are common, but there are just as many entirely original stories. They can incorporate a variety of types of media in addition to text, most commonly images but sometimes animations and even small interactive applications or games.

The majority of quests will never be completed. This is expected. The same is true of any art form - there are millions of unfinished novels, games, and paintings that were never finished. The difference is that by their nature a failed quest is public. An incomplete quest shouldn’t be considered a failure; some authors have found success converting their incomplete quest into another format.

Types of quest

As of the time of writing, quests exist in several separate communities. These communities sometimes have different terminology and standards. All of them follow the basic structure described previously. I’ve chosen to use the term “quest” because it’s the most widely-used one. The terminology used for each type of quest is a mixture of my own terms and ones from various communities.

Narrative Quests are quests with no game mechanics. The results of player actions are determined entirely by the author.

Example: All Night Laundry by jackfractal

Mechanical Quests use some form of game mechanics to determine the outcome of many actions. The mechanics in question are usually analogous to tabletop RPGs, although I’ve seen a couple that use video games to determine outcomes.

Example: Cherno Alpha vs The World by open_sketchbook

Voting Quests have each player vote on what to do. The option or options that get the most votes are chosen. Usually the author will provide a list of available options to vote on. The options can also be weighted to represent the character’s personality.

Example: A Hedge Maze is You by Chandagnac

Adventure Quests (Adventure is the term used for quests in the MSpaint Adventures community and its offshoots) have all players share control, but instead of voting players submit commands and the character follows all of them. To prevent silly commands from dominating the story these quests are usually Meta Quests. If the quest gets too large the author may be forced to selectively ignore commands.

Example: Terrene Spire by Dexexe1234

Meta Quests are quests where the character is aware of commands. They will directly respond to commands and sometimes refuse to follow them.

Example: Waterworks by Lufa

The History of Quests

There isn’t a truly comprehensive source on the history of quests yet, and I have no doubt there’s still more I don’t know. Most of the information here comes from three people: Mark Keavney, proprietor of cityofif.com, Sufficient Velocity user Ralson’s own essay on the history of that site’s quests, and the users of the MSpaint Adventures Wiki.

The City of IF

The oldest information I can find on quests comes from the about page on City of If. There’s plenty of information on the philosophy and goals Mark Keavney had when creating the site which I recommend reading, but that’s not what I’m going to focus on. He created quests as an evolution of tabletop roleplaying games, which kept their narrative freedom while removing their limitations in terms of audience. His idea was for players to freely suggest actions, with the author choosing multiple to be voted on. He referred to it as “storygaming.” In November of 2001, he created the now-defunct Interfable.net. There, he ran the first quest. At first the site was private, with only those he personally knew allowed to visit. After taking a break from April to November in 2002, he reopened the site to the public. However, the site had no real sense of community: users could submit suggestions and vote, but there was no social interaction between players.

In February of 2004, he moved the process of suggesting and voting to a forum where users had public identities and the ability to discuss decisions. This still didn’t have the effect he wanted, however. Eventually he came to realize that rather than creating a community to run storygames he needed to have storygames exist within a community. Between fall 2004 and March 2005 he expanded the scope of the forum and rebranded it as cityofif.com.

Mark Keavney continued to try and expand the scope of storygames in as many ways as possible. In 2005 he converted his first storygame into a published novel, The Archer’s Flight. He published a second later and the site lists several published by other users, but I can’t find copies of them anywhere. The about page describes a grand vision of storygames with multimedia elements, teams of creators, multiple interlocking games, and more, with thousands of them running concurrently. Unfortunately, the site never reached his high expectations. As of now, the forums are devoid of activity. I’ve attempted to contact him by the email he provided but got no response.

I won’t speculate on why the City failed, but ultimately it did and without influencing the medium in any way. Many of Mark Keavney’s predictions, such as multimedia quests, have come to pass and time will tell if the rest follow.

MSPA

The second beginning for quests started with the work of one Andrew Hussie. He and his friends, known as Team Special Olympics, created the Gangbunch Fora (Later renamed the MSPA forums) as a place to discuss their webcomics. The forums themselves and the site hosting the comics are gone, can be found in MrCheeze’s archive. On September 25, 2006, he would create his first quest. The original forum thread was called MSpaint Adventures. Jailbreak, as it would be later titled, was inspired by text-based adventure PC games rather than tabletop RPGs. This was reflected in the format, which had no voting system - every command was accepted. Jailbreak itself was little more than a series of gags with little logic behind them, but it was also the beginning of something much greater. On February 23rd 2007, Jailbreak was put on hiatus.

On March 23, 2007, the MS Paint Adventures website was launched. Jailbreak was archived there and a new “adventure,” Bard Quest, was launched. It was an abortive experiment in branching narratives. Finding it to be too much work, Hussie left it unfinished and started Problem Sleuth on March 10, 2008. It kept the sense of humor and comedic focus of Jailbreak but had a stronger focus on plot and included puzzles for the readers to solve inspired by those in adventure games. Problem Sleuth was a success, running for 1,673 pages until April 7, 2009.

4chan

Now, let’s head back to 2005. 4chan is known for its lax moderation, but even on 4chan /b/ was infamous for allowing practically anything. In that festering mess, a sort of “proto-quest” formed. Artists would post characters, and then take suggestions on what to draw the character doing. These characters became extremely popular. (One, a stick figure wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, became an unofficial mascot of the site) However, /b/’s lack of moderation caused it to grow increasingly toxic and drove away many artists. In December of 2008, inspired by Problem Sleuth, a user known then as Weaver (currently tgweaver) created Ruby Quest. After a failed attempt to run it in /b/, Weaver found success in /tg/, a subforum meant for tabletop games.

Ruby Quest had none of the comedy Problem Sleuth did, instead being a horror story. It was incredibly popular, and spawned discussion, fanworks, and other quests inspired by it. This is where the term “quest” came into use as a descriptor. However, there was also plenty of backlash from /tg/ users who found them disruptive. In addition, many quests featured anthropomorphised animals, or “furries” which 4chan had a blanket ban on. In mid-2009 the administrators of /tg/ banned quests from the board. Users moved to a new site, tgchan, and continued making quests in the style of Ruby Quest.

Stylistic Divide

Back on the MSPA forums, others had already begun creating their own “adventures” on the MSPA forums. Unfortunately most of these were lost with the forum itself. On April 10, 2009, Hussie began the fourth MSpaint adventure, Homestuck. He intended to have every page be animated via Flash, but found that to be too time intensive. On April 13, he rebooted Homestuck with static images and animated GIF files, with Flash being reserved for major moments. It appeared similar to Problem Sleuth at first, but quickly grew into a sprawling narrative that took from a variety of genres. It was massively successful. Unfortunately, there was a downside to this: since Homestuck didn’t use a voting system, having so many suggestions effectively allowed Hussie to pick whatever outcome he wanted. In May of 2010, he decided to stop taking commands and simply write the rest of the story himself. As Homestuck continued to grow in popularity, so did the number of “adventures” on the forums. Many of these were based directly on Homestuck, which led to some frustration by users who felt original content was being drowned out. In 2011, the Eagle Time forums were founded as a Homestuck-free alternative to MSPA.

At the same time, the moderators on /tg/ grew increasingly disinterested in enforcing the ban on quests. It was lifted in 2011, but as the community responsible for the old quests had moved on a new style was developed. These new quests were heavily text-based and often took place in settings from works popular on /tg/. Some of these users spun off their own dedicated site, known as Anonkun at first and now as Fiction.live, for NSFW content.

Splintering Communities

Now we have to go back again, this time to 2009 on the Spacebattles forums. Originally created by a community of sci-fi fans focused on 3d modelling, Spacebattles grew massively into a general forum for discussing all kinds of media and creative projects. There was a different sort of “proto-quest” here, in the form of “what-if” scenarios. On May 23, 2009 the user Foamy created a quest in a thread called “Tactics: Let’s Conquer and Alien Planet.” It was successful, but left unfinished and didn’t spawn much of a following.

Many users on Spacebattles were also active on /tg/ when the quest ban was lifted. Quests quickly began appearing there too, but the community was different from the one on /tg/. Spacebattles already had a large fanfiction community and that bled into their quests which were almost always based on existing works. The voting system also became the standard for quests there to manage high participation. The moderation on Spacebattles was fairly lax during this time. While the rules disallowed NSFW content they hadn’t been enforced well. In late 2012 to early 2013, the moderators began to crack down. Users upset by this founded Questionable Questing as a place for NSFW quests, fanfiction, and roleplaying.

In 2014, a disagreement over moderation policy led a group of Spacebattles users to found the Sufficient Velocity forums. At the same time, Spacebattles itself was having server issues which led many users to post there. Sufficient Velocity inherited the quest community from Spacebattles, and from there diverged to have a greater focus on original quests. Both forums continue to have strong quest communities.

Next, we return to the MSPA forums. Homestuck’s popularity peaked in 2012. The forums continued to host a huge number of “adventures.” However, in 2015 the forums were deleted. The moderators from the old forums set up the Omegaupdate forums as a replacement and ongoing quests moved to either there or Eagle Time. Some quests have been lost forever, but many have mirrors on the MSpaint Fan Adventures site.

Finally, in 2016 4chan would create a dedicated board for quests. /qst/ replaced /tg/ as the place for quests on the site. It remains

That brings us to the present.

The current quest communities are:

tgchan

/qst/

Eagle Time

Anonkun

Spacebattles

Questionable Questing

Sufficient Velocity

Omegaupdate

The communities that no longer exist are:

City of IF

/tg/ (First community)

MS Paint Adventures Forums

There have been one-off quests on other sites, but this essay is only concerned with communities. You can find a list of every quest I’m aware of, and useful resources for making quests, here. If you know of anything I don’t feel free to contact me so I can add it.

Related Materials

Supplemental Documents

Table of Contents

Foreword