Several People Are Typing

Notes About Structure

The physical layout of the server is fairly organized; as of this writing there are 28 channels, 14 of which are used for public discussion of various topics. These channels in descending order as of this writing are: #general, #social, #homestuck, #hiveswap, #art-music, #gaming, #cartoon-tv, #anime, #mspa-literature, #coding-tech, #serious, #voicechat, #altgen, and #botspam-radio.

The purpose of most of these channels is self evident enough: #general is meant for (mostly) unfettered discussion about anything, and also doubles as the welcoming channel for new members; #social is meant for socializing and talking about more personal matters of a non-serious variety; #homestuck and #hiveswap are for discussion about the comic/video game themselves; and so on.

The channels whose purposes are not immediately clear or are otherwise misleading are: #mspa-literature, whose name changes at random into many different things (the name as of this writing is #read-worm) and whose purpose is the source of many controversies. This channel will be discussed more in depth later; #altgen, short for “alternate-general”, which is basically a containment channel for people who habitually post things unrelated to discussion or otherwise “low-quality content”, a practice known as “shitposting”; #botspam-radio, which is where one goes to utilize the channel's automated “bot” functions, such as giving yourself a color role, looking up information on a particular user or the server itself, and commanding the bot to play a piece of music in the appropriate voice channel.

The other channels consist of an #announcements channel, which true to its name is used for informing the userbase when a community-relevant or otherwise significant event occurs, or for administering server-wide polls, etc. There are also a few channels dedicated to mod and pseudo-mod use, only visible by them: #mod_moderation_log, where the aforementioned are expected to log all instances of user bans and unbans; #bot_moderation_log, where the same is done by an automated bot named Spectra tracking the server (this redundancy makes for more effective bookkeeping), and also logs name changes, user avatar picture changes, etc.; #illuminati-not-hangout, a joke name for the channel dedicated to mods discussing internal issues away from prying eyes; #spoopy_ghost_channel, which is functionally the same as #bot_moderation_log but run by a different bot named Aradiabot and maintained by the moderator Cerulean; #mod-chat, which is for communicating on an official basis with staff from related businesses or otherwise important figures.

The other seven³ channels are completely unused: hidden away from the general populace, they have completed their purpose or otherwise been decommissioned without being deleted, usually for archival purposes. These channels are: #serious-old, #nsfw-old, #nsfw-older, #survey-talk-old, #radio-old, #aprilfools-old, and #r-place-old. Very occasionally one of these channels may be lifted back into service, usually on a temporary basis; in particular, #survey-talk is used whenever Makin initiates a server wide poll and wants to talk to people about the results and their thoughts on the matter. Otherwise, these channels will probably not be discussed further except in extenuating circumstances.

Of note, the #nsfw channels in particular were decommissioned in favor of establishing a separate sister server named “Homesmut”. The reasons for this will be discussed at another time, and if prudent the layout of that server will be detailed elsewhere also. In short, its purpose is as containment for adult content, both related to Homestuck, Hiveswap, and in general.

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Background Information

My Personal Internet History

There are two things to explain: my history on the internet and my involvement with the Homestuck community.

The first is relatively straightforward, or perhaps I just remember it as being so because enough time has passed. I was born in 1994, only a couple years after public internet had begun. My parents were accepting of the rapidly developing, new technology but still a little old fashioned, so it took awhile for me to gain full and unrestricted access to the internet. By the age of 10 or so, however, I was using the internet for several hours a day, usually aimlessly wandering about in the old internet of 2004 trying to find primitive flash games and news relating to console video games.

The Gamecube had just come out 3 years prior and I was still stuck on the Nintendo 64, often replaying The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and a handful of other titles. The Zelda series probably is the most responsible for me becoming as invested in video games as I have been--I often say that I learned to read by playing Ocarina of Time when I was 4 or so. Naturally, since I was such a fan of this series I decided to search for any sort of community that was actively discussing the topic. It was thus that I stumbled upon Zelda Blog, an old and true to its name web blog where newsposts about the series were shared.

It was unlike anything I had ever seen before; I didn't use MySpace because I barely knew it existed and didn't have anyone to talk to on it anyway, but people had already gathered here and were talking about something I liked so much. It was almost too much for my 10 year old brain to handle. I immediately made an account, my first and incredibly embarrassing internet persona "uberzeldamaster" (yes, I know), and began participating right away. Being so young and inexperienced with the ways of internet culture I made blunder after awkward blunder, and yet the users of this place were willing to help me learn what I was doing wrong and improve. I owe a lot to their patience and understanding.

As things go, Zelda Blog shut down shortly after Twilight Princess came out. I was heartbroken; the first place I had ever been able to call my internet home was now defunct, and in a show of camaraderie myself and a smattering of other users all made our own individual blogs to try and stick together. None of us had any experience in producing quality content or even basic web design, and despite our earnest attempts to educate ourselves and make it work we too all fell away eventually.

I didn't know what to do with myself for a couple of years. I went back to what I was doing before, but old flash games and reading random news on various websites with no community participation was now blasé, paling in comparison to the interactive experience I had on Zelda Blog. However, things changed once I got into high school or so.

At some point in 2009 I had given up on finding a solidly based community by chance and was trying my best to make friends with people in real life. I had moved recently from another school but, given to my habitual use of the internet, it wasn't hard to keep up with the people I had met in middle school. In the process one of them told me about emulators; I was ecstatic to learn about them, because I had lost my Nintendo 64 and all of my old games in the move. After gorging myself on all of my old favorites for a while, I looked deeper and quickly figured out I could emulate any old titles I wanted. I had never owned an original NES and my SNES had been lost way too quickly for me to develop any meaningful memories of it. I had no idea where to begin, so I looked up a list of games for these systems that it was recommended to try. This is how I stumbled across Sydlexia.

Edit as of 10/31/18: I have written a brief retrospective about the Sydlexia website and community, with a lot more detail than I provide in SPAT. It may be found at the following link:

Sydlexia Retrospective

Sydlexia didn't immediately seem like it would be anything great to me; the only thing I was interested in was finding a list of games to try and emulate, which I did. The website's "The 100 Best NES Games Ever" list was one of the first results on Google at the time (a quick Google search reveals to me that it's still on the first page of results for "top 100 NES games"). I looked into it and ran through the list of titles, occasionally reading the descriptions of why certain games were ranked the way they are. Some of them made me laugh, and I decided to explore the site further. The main feature was blog-like, with the owner of the site Syd Lexia writing articles about various pop culture icons or items. Some memorable articles I can still recall involve McDonald's toys descriptions, reviews of certain kinds of cereal (especially ones that are no longer produced), and an incredible array of video game articles. I ran through the archive, reading as much of it as I could. Syd had an incredible, almost decidedly Sean Baby-esque style to his writing, and it was addicting to my highschool freshman palate.

After reading these articles for a while, I decided to see what other features on the site existed, and I found the dedicated forums. These forums are still around if you wish to look at them yourself, I won't describe them in excessive detail. To me, seeing them for the first time, it reinvigorated my love for online interaction. These people, a small community by all accounts with less than 1000 people, were actively participating with each other and talking about all manner of things, from video games to movies to music even to politics and other things I had never even considered at that point. It was a cultural enrichment the likes of which I had never seen before. As with Zelda Blog, I immediately made an account and started participating.

My handle at this point had to change: I was smart enough to know that "uberzeldamaster" is probably not a title you want to be stuck with. I thought for a long time about what I wanted to be called, and remembered something from Zelda Blog. The webmaster for ZB ran a sister website called Nintendo Land, which had a feature parodying Drew Carey. The webmaster wrote in a host show format and interviewed various characters from an assortment of Nintendo games, and on ZB we all looked forward to this and would discuss the "episodes" at great length. The altered name of the host of the show was Drew Linky. As a memento and a way to permanently remember this place I liked so much, I adopted the name as my own.

With this, I went into the Sydlexia Forums and was subsequently thrown into a much bigger pond than I was used to. I had been taught some etiquette by members of ZB but it wasn't nearly enough; these people had rules. I had to relearn a lot of things, but I made less mistakes and was trying my best to earnestly participate and contribute to this community as much as everyone else. At one point in 2010 I discovered that there was an associated IRC group, which is how I took my first step into the world of real-time chatting.

It's a strange but really big step to make that leap from timed, singular posts to chatting in real time with a big group of people. I hadn't used AOL live chat and I don't think I used Skype yet, so aside from Facebook Messenger this was an entirely new experience for me. I joined and some people recognized me from the forums, and thus began a multi-year stint of getting on IRC every single day, talking to these guys about who knows what for hours. It was through these discussions that I discovered more content than I ever possibly would have by myself.

Highschool flew by of course, and I talked with these guys even in my first couple of years in college. They were actually the first people I was able to talk to about Homestuck, which they were all stunned that I hadn't heard of by the time I did in 2012. In mid 2013 though, things seemed kind of bad. Syd Lexia hadn't posted a new article in months and people were running out of things to talk about. Zelda Blog had ended swiftly and without warning, so I wasn't familiar with the signs of impending internet-community-death. People were frustrated that Syd hadn't posted anything, and a few members even decided to make their own website, where anyone could post articles if they wanted to. This seemed like a great idea at first, and for a time we actually managed to make the site seem busy enough that we were satisfied with our efforts.

Unfortunately, as the weeks and months trickled by, it quickly became apparent that our replacement website would not last either. No one was as talented or engaging a writer as Syd, and people were joining the IRC room less and less frequently. Finally I gave up the chase and consigned myself to drifting once again.

I had started using Reddit around the time I started college at the suggestion of one of my friends from Sydlexia, and this was more than enough to satisfy my desire for new information. It was far more efficient than trying to learn from the guys at Sydlexia, and for a little while I was okay with it as a replacement for my now gone community. Unfortunately it lacked the essential element of individuals coming together to talk on a personal level; Reddit is far too big for that sort of effort. As a result I felt vaguely unsatisfied with my time on Reddit, as useful as it was. This changed once again in February of 2014 with the miracle that was Twitch Plays Pokemon, or TPP.

TPP was one of those things that you had to witness to understand completely. It seemed to pop out of nowhere; one day absolutely nothing, and then by chance you learned about it from a news post or word of mouth. For those who aren't familiar, Twitch Plays Pokemon was an event held on the streaming services website Twitch, where the owner of the stream set up a game of Pokemon Red version on an emulator. Rather than playing it themselves, they made it so that Twitch viewers watching the channel would be able to input commands for the game and play it themselves. With a few people this is a relatively straightforward process, but the stream rocketed up to several thousand people very quickly. The game became a manic, anarchic and frenzied process—thousands of people vied for control to go where they wanted or accomplish certain objectives. What would be simplistic and straightforward for someone playing normally became nightmarishly difficult to accomplish. Yet, despite this incredible confusion and overall frustrating format it became an object of fascination and a widely celebrated internet phenomenon.

I was very lucky and managed to join in on TPP Red on the second day. For my first time watching I was content to participate with everyone else, inputting commands and trying to generally progress the game as normal. However, I was still missing that community feel and decided to check out the dedicated subreddit during the more boring hours. In doing so I discovered that the moderators of the subreddit were looking for people willing to report on the progression of the game through a Reddit Live Thread, where anyone looking at the live thread would immediately be notified of updates. I happened to be available at times they needed and was greatly enjoying the process so I applied to help and was quickly accepted as a live updater.

TPP Red continued for a total of almost 17 days, and the level of energy involved only ever seemed to increase dramatically. Every success made more people join, which made the next goal even harder to achieve. Many people thought we would never complete the game, and some pretty incredible events we would never have expected to pull off only served to stir an already frenzied crowd. Eventually we did complete the game, and the question of what would happen next immediately came up: if the streamer decided to do more, we would stick around right?

Of course, we decided to do so. I became a moderator for the subreddit, at its peak boasting a membership count of over 100,000. I live updated regularly for the next 3 games, greatly enjoying my time with the community and involving myself in the affairs of the people playing the game. However, by the end of the Platinum run the symptoms of community death were appearing once again; I could see people talking less and less or debating the same points ad nauseum. The reasons this happened so quickly are difficult to describe exactly, and I won't go to great lengths to try. Suffice to say the community was dying, and I could see it coming from a mile away. Eventually I renounced my modship, only occasionally coming back when asked to live update on special occasions.

Once again, I was homeless, so to speak, and I was rather upset about it. It felt like every community I was a part of would eventually fade away, and I would be stuck forever trying to find another one until it too failed. With this I went back to reading Homestuck, whose community I had avoided getting into up to this point for various unimportant reasons. My involvement in that regard remained largely unchanged for several years, from 2012 up to the tail end of 2016. I will now describe my involvement with the Homestuck community at length, and to a lesser degree Homestuck itself.

My Involvement with the Homestuck Community

Homestuck is a multimedia webcomic started in 2009 by Andrew Hussie, multimedia meaning it's not just an ordinary webcomic with pictures and text bubbles and the like. It often incorporates other types of media--music and animation, sometimes even small games--in an attempt to further the narrative of the story. It updated in a serial format stylized like a text adventure game, and is about four kids who play a game together on the internet. At the risk of writing a synopsis, instead I urge you to go read it for yourself. It's confusing and perhaps hard to like at first, but even so I feel like it's worth the read.

I started reading Homestuck at the tail end of 2012 in October or so, I had just begun college and was pointed towards the comic by a friend. I was immediately taken with the style and subject matter of the story; with my history of engaging in online discussions with people from around the world, I felt like it was something I could immediately relate to. I had always wanted to meet up with people I had met on the internet and have a good time together, so why wouldn't I enjoy such a story?

Ironically, despite my preferences in online community and the very nature of the story, I was not interested in trying to interact with people who were also interested in Homestuck, at least not at first. There were some occasions I tried to do so, but they were either half-hearted or outright not what I was looking for, such as a brief stint on Tumblr looking at dedicated blogs (a decision I still lament to some degree). Occasionally I would go to a con in the area and I even became friends with a group of people in my geographical area who were really into the comic.

It was nice to have such people to talk to, and I still remember my time spent with them fondly. Unfortunately, I'm an awkward person in real life and socializing in a context like that exhausts me very quickly--I didn't meet up with them terribly often. There also wasn't much room to speak with them online because they were typically busy, so it wasn't as satisfying as the Sydlexia community had been. I was more or less content in this, because I had other things to focus on anyway such as surviving college.

I went through four years for the most part like this, casually engaging in the Homestuck community if at all, mostly just focusing on doing my school work or actually working. Homestuck itself was experiencing some extremely big gaps in the serial format; it went an entire year without any updates at all from October 16th of 2013 to October 17th of 2014, and then experienced numerous halts and stutters from there to the end. By the beginning of 2016, it was clear that the comic was drawing to a close. There were faint rumblings that even I in my isolated state was not immune to—this giant of a story was approaching its end.

All too soon its anniversary approached again, and the long awaited time struck: the comic ended on April 13th of 2016, not with a bang but a whimper. The supposedly final page was a 9 minute long animation rendered beautifully, but with a subpar treatment of the story. The most succinct way I can describe this was a hesitant disappointment; the feeling I can distinctly recall the most was a simple “Wait, was that it?” I almost felt guilty for even letting those words cross my mind, because the quality of the animation was far superior to anything else seen in the comic. However, my feelings were very swiftly and completely echoed across the few affiliated places I did bother to keep up with at that point. The dedicated subreddit in particular was in absolute disbelief; the animation, again, was superb, but the story had been completely washed out and effectively destroyed. Shocked disbelief pervaded, and eventually outrage. People were not happy.

Intrigued and pleased at seeing my sentiments in so many others, I decided to look into it further. I started participating on the subreddit a little more, but even so I still remained distant. It wasn't until the very end of October 2016 that I decided to take a leap and clicked on the invite link to the Discord server that this journal is about.

The Homestuck Discord Server

My first impression of the place immediately reminded me of the Sydlexia IRC. It was a decidedly public place where people talked to each other casually in real time, surely a sight for my sore eyes. I was quiet at the beginning, not sure how to participate appropriately. My doubts were assuaged by various people, and especially by the then regular user Toast.

Toast was an older member of the server, which had been established in February of 2016. There was a lot of history in the place despite its relative youth; I was directly exposed to the massive amount of history in a sudden flurry one night, when other regulars who had since stopped using the server came back and reminisced about various events that had occurred earlier in the year. This was the sort of thing I enjoyed so greatly about the Sydlexia IRC, the incredible wealth of in jokes and camaraderie. Naturally I began trying to participate more, and Toast was kind enough to direct me to #mspa-literature, where I started talking far more often. I quickly became recognized by people in the server, including its owner and other mods.

As one of the older people on the server (being 22 at the time of writing where most people are teenagers), I developed a reputation for having comparatively good opinions and being a fairly stable individual. I would like to think that my input on all manner of topics was valued, and I tried my best to refrain from speaking unless I had something meaningful to say. This process continued undisturbed for a few months; the new year came and by that time I felt I had familiarized myself enough with the community that I could consider myself an actual part of it.

Additionally, the server itself was experiencing some growing pains. When I joined the server was around 6000 people in size, and it had grown considerably by the time 2017 rolled around, reaching 6500 and then some. In light of this and in preparation for the highly anticipated release of the Homestuck-associated game Hiveswap, which was slated for a January release, the owner of both the Discord server and the affiliated subreddit Makin revealed upcoming moderator applications.

Given my history with TPP and my position as an older person on the server with more or less respectable opinions, I decided to give it a shot and apply. I figured the worst that could happen was that I wouldn't be accepted, and if not then nothing would change. No big deal. As things go I was not accepted as a moderator because of my lack of activity on the subreddit, which was fine. I continued as normal, disappointed but otherwise unaffected. However, the increase in numbers had drawn the attention of an assortment of people who wanted to get a rise out of the members of the community, and we started experiencing very frequent raids from outsiders.

There was the space of a few weeks where it seemed every single day had its raiders. All manner of porn, gore, and other disturbing imagery would be spammed by people joining en masse to try and drive users away from the server. Eventually it was clear this was taking its toll on the moderator team; even despite the new addition from the recent modship applications, frustration was mounting over the constant attacks the server was experiencing. As a result, Makin reached out to me on the 28th of January 2017 and said, “would you still like to be a moderator?”

As one can see, I said yes. Since then I've spent months trying my best to contribute positively and keep things running as smoothly as possible. A lot of things have changed in the server, and I came to the startling realization that I don't actually remember many of the things that have amused or frustrated me so greatly. As such, here I am writing this journal.

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Foreword's End

There's a high likelihood that I'll forget or otherwise stop bothering to write this at some point in the future. As it is, I suppose I would like to chronicle the happenings of this place to my best effort; I enjoy being a member of this community and participating in it, and I think the people involved in it are a colorful and interesting sort. The occurrences in this server have managed to make me feel a wide variety of emotions, ranging from incredible laughter to sincere anger to deep comfort. As such it has managed to affect me on a personal level and leave a significant impression; it deserves to be recorded and remembered, by myself if nothing else.

Based on my previous experiences with internet communities I'm sure it is fated not to last, but unlike my previous online homes I will not let this opportunity go to waste. I feel personally compelled to preserve as much of this culture and feeling as I can, while I am still able.

I hope the day this place ceases to exist is a long, long time coming yet, if ever. Help it be so, whoever may be looking at this.

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2017

9^th of July 2017

Part of the reason I decided to begin recording this at all is because of the events of the last few days. Due to various elements of the server, there is some inherent volatility involved, a few contributing factors of which I will attempt to describe now.

#mspa-literature as a channel is difficult to describe; as plainly as I can state it's a clique group. The moderators use it far more often than the other channels of the server, and if one must speak to us it's advised that they come in and see us in #mspa-lit. A number of regular users also inhabit it on a frequent basis, and it may seem intimidating to people who aren't familiar with the layout of the server. As such, #mspa-lit has developed a reputation for being cliquey, as I stated before, and this has garnered the ire of some. While most people using the channel are content, WoC is notably an advocate for completely abolishing it.

WoC himself is an interesting character and is widely regarded as the most crass member of the mod team, with a blatant disregard for the sensibilities of other people and a gung-ho mentality about almost everything. He has injured himself in ridiculous ways and bounced back with remarkable aplomb, and it is common for people to mock him for these often idiotic mistakes.

On one particular occasion, WoC managed to cover his hand in superglue, and he wasn't sure how to remove it. Naturally, WoC decides the best way to do this would be with electricity. He then proceeded to remove the cover from an electrical socket and stick his hand into it, shocking himself violently. After he did this he came onto the server and told everybody, which led to us making fun of him for it for weeks afterwards. Truthfully, he's lucky he hasn't died yet; other acts involve drinking small amounts of kerosene by accident (not technically his fault of course), purposefully putting kerosene in his mouth so he could spit fire with it, and arranging no less than five firework mortar shells in a hole to blow up a hill that was inhabited by a prairie dog (because, in his words, “fuck those pests”).

Naturally WoC's demeanor also puts him at odds with a significant number of people in the userbase; he is often pointed to as one of the most hard-to-get-along-with members of the team, specifically because he seems to derive pleasure from purposefully messing with people on occasion. Despite all appearances, this isn't out of malice or spite, it's more just the kind of behavior WoC grew up around and is used to (he has described himself openly as a redneck). It is definitely difficult to stomach on occasion, but it's simply the sort of affectations associated with him. WoC is the pseudo-mod for the #gaming channel, and of course is very familiar with video games in general.

For future reference, the process of deliberately trying to get a rise out of whomever you're speaking to is called “baiting”, or more commonly “trolling”. This isn't always for purely antagonistic reasons, it's also weirdly enough a display of camaraderie depending on who you're speaking with. The exact nature of this practice is difficult to understand unless you've actively engaged in it and/or been on the receiving end of it. The results can be hilarious, or they can be exceedingly dramatic if the person being baited cares too much about the topic at hand, or even if they just find the technique itself to be distasteful (I've often been baited myself and I personally never enjoyed it).

Makin, the admin and owner of the server, is vaguely similar to WoC as far as reputation is concerned. He is an extremely secretive person, absolutely refusing to relinquish details about who he is in real life, and often intentionally obfuscating the matter further by providing “false leads.” I don't even know if he's actually male or not; one of the only things I can say that I probably know about him is that English is not his first language. He has a penchant for dedicating himself to “rationality”, which is paraded as an in-joke or meme on the server. Rather than being a joke, however, I think he actually takes the notion of rationality seriously. There have been innumerable discussions involving the practice and ideology of rationalism with him, although some conflicting behaviors on his part makes this tendency frustrating for various regulars of the server.

Another interest of his is fanfiction, which is not altogether unexpected given the nature of the server's existence. At any given time, #mspa-lit is used by him to discuss the fanfics he's discovered recently, or even for him to request more from anyone who happens to be familiar with them. On occasion he'll jokingly refer even to “rational fanfiction”, shortened to “ratfics”. Honestly his interests extend to most topics, including most elements of pop culture. There have been many discussions with him about all manner of art and forms of entertainment, such as video games (an incredible number of conversations about Dark Souls have popped up in the past), movies, music, etc.

Makin's exact reputation on the server is difficult to ascertain: for some people he is utterly mysterious, for others he appears to be nothing more than a wacky zany jokester. His penchant for secrecy regarding his real life and his subsequent love for unpredictability can bleed over into his position as admin of the server, and many people find his complete inscrutability frustrating, including myself sometimes. It appears that he will often try to do the thing he deems most unpredictable or interesting in various situations, an act that delights many and infuriates just as many others. I'm personally not sure what to make of his behavior sometimes. I am immensely frustrated with him at times but at others it is easier to go along with what he says and does. I'm reasonably certain that his intentions for the server are positive, otherwise I don't know why he would bother running the place as he does. Sometimes the problems that ensue involving him make maintaining that belief a challenge, however.

As I started this entry with, I wanted to begin writing this journal because of events that happened a few days ago. Makin's tendency to be unpredictable by itself is already cause for tension in the server on occasions, but he also has an unfortunate record of being difficult to understand. If it were one or two users then it would be fairly isolated and we would assume nothing of it, but this issue is rather consistent; it seems as if almost every problem involving Makin is the result of some sort of miscommunication. This problem is almost certainly exacerbated by the fact that English isn't his first language, but a lot of it is due to his unwillingness to accept anything but well argued logic as a good basis for change or what have you (perfectly in keeping with his preference for rationality). On this particular day, as has happened numerous times before, Makin made a grievous blunder when trying to express how he feels about a topic and managed to greatly offend a user.

The user in question, who I shall refer to as Alex, is sometimes problematic for us. They are a figure of some infamy in our server because they are also a prominent member of a rival server of ours, which I will describe in detail another time. Alex was never banned from the HSD, but actually took the unusual route of joining the rival first and then joining the HSD. They stick around in both places but will often leave the HSD when they get into fights with other users here, and as of this writing are actually on their last warning for repeatedly causing several-hours-long, heated discussions (usually referred to as “discourse”).

They are also a firm advocate for the rights of LGBT individuals, something we sympathize with of course. Unfortunately, they pursue their stances on this topic to the point of what can only be described as absurdity. This was more often than not the source of arguments involving them on HSD: Alex would initiate the discussion and ruthlessly fight people who may disagree with them on the topic. While well-intentioned, this practice often led to discourse and generated considerable ire for a large number of people. There is still ongoing pressure from various members of the mod team and the userbase at large to ban them because of it, especially from WoC and a couple other pseudo mods.

Alex's propensity for defending LGBT rights extends to other things as well, and they are overall a very outspoken and opinionated person. Extremely passionate, Alex will quickly become upset if you demonstrate that you don't care or dismissive of what they have to say, or how they feel. Makin acted this way a few nights ago, when the two were having a typical discussion about some of the characters from the comic. The two have been through their song and dance enough times that Makin knew it was approaching time to cut off the discussion, both because it probably wouldn't go anywhere meaningful. Instead of the intended effect, however, Makin shoved his foot in his mouth and pissed Alex off considerably.

Alex left the server, another power user named Putnam left the server in similar disgust, and thus began the multiday shitstorm of trying to figure the situation out and keep it from getting worse. After a while of this, Makin openly requested assistance in trying to improve his behavior; he had a moment of clarity and realized he was making other people upset and wanted it to stop. This sort of request from Makin is almost entirely unprecedented, so naturally I seized upon it. We moved to #serious to try and help him understand why people get so annoyed at him, most of which was just informing him and helping him realize that his communication skills are garbage, all things considered.

After some time of this it seemed we were making a little progress, but then another outspoken member of #mspa-lit, tipsy, came online and decided to speak her mind without bothering to learn anything about what was going on. She's often tried to chide Makin for some of the things he's done, and without any context she simply said, “you just don't care is your problem”. It's not an easy thing to hear, especially after you've just tried to demonstrate you do care and are trying to change your behavior to better suit the needs of your community. Makin got really upset at this and went offline almost immediately, effectively leaving the server. The severity of this is not to be understated--Makin has only left in a huff a handful of times, and I had never personally witnessed this happening.

Things have quieted since that point, but there is a more or less pervasive air of awkwardness surrounding the fact that Makin stormed out. We're not quite sure what's going to happen, if anything. It’s likely that he will simply return and nothing significant will occur, but there is always the element of his unpredictability to consider. We will see exactly what happens when the time comes.

I'm going to end this entry here, I've just realized I haven't explained anything about how or why I came to this server in the first place. I'll go ahead and explain that more in a future entry, probably the next one.

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10^th of July 2017

More Makin related drama, although relatively minor. I was directly messaged by a person on the server, saying that an outspoken hater of the Discord and especially Makin posted about his disappearance on Twitter. Normally this sort of thing wouldn't be worthy of the slightest mention, but the person in question is James Roach.

James Roach is also a content producer, a musician who created various pieces that were incorporated into Homestuck itself, as well as included on its official album releases. As if this wasn't enough, James is also an active member of the team developing Hiveswap, as one of its sound designers and composers. These things gives him some considerable clout in the community, especially as one of the few people from the Homestuck team who interacts with us at all. He used to engage with us but there was a considerable falling out between him and Makin for reasons I’m not familiar with.

James is a fairly outspoken individual, to the point that it seems he will combat you if you so much as hint at disagreement on various issues--my experiences with him have been plagued by a sensitivity to criticism or questioning to a level I would consider absurd or even irrational. This attitude has led to a lot of chafing and negative relations between him and Makin, the latter naturally fomenting arguments and leading to excessive discourse on all manner of topics. Yet, it’s important to note that James on his own appears to radiate a particular aggression or hostility, towards some at the very least.

About a day after Makin left the server, James apparently tweeted about something he said just before leaving. Makin specifically stated “not to assume bad things of him” shortly before he left, and the tweet says: “I like when people say “don't assume the worst of me” or w/e and its like my guy I don't have to assume anything its right there you suck”.

I don't find these sorts of things professional. For someone of his stature in the fandom to wield his opinion like a cudgel and strike at someone who is already down is unsavory at best. There is already tension between James and the community, and he is viewed by many as somewhat of a nuisance because of his attitude. This sort of thing only serves to stoke that animosity further, and there have been clear responses from the rest of the mod team condemning his actions.

At any rate, this development has only served to sour the mood even further. Luckily, there was an alternative development that significantly improved how everyone felt. In the announcements channel, an unknown bot named Smug Trizza posted the image of the cave after Jesus's resurrection, with the caption (stay tuned). It is widely assumed that this was Makin using webhooks or similar methods to post, since he is still technically absent from the server. We assume he is feeling well and planning to return soon, in keeping with the “rise on the third day” theme. Excitement abounds. I'm going to go ahead and end the entry here though, I am exceptionally tired and I have a lot to do tomorrow.

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11^th of July 2017

Makin returned at 5:23 AM CST with a post in announcements declaring the creation of a new channel, #news. #news will be serving the same purpose as the announcements channel, except that news is specifically reserved for information regarding Hiveswap. Announcements will continue functioning as it has, serving as a way to inform the community about relevant fan adventures, generally important events, etc.

Makin himself seems largely unchanged, utilizing his return to the server after three days as a meme to portray himself as the Messiah. I'm personally just glad he's back and talking, it was a very strange few days with him being solidly gone. Of course, there's no telling if any of the reforms we were trying to help him with will have gone through. My bet is on “no”, but time will tell.

There seems to be little else of note happening, so I'll go ahead and describe some more regulars of the server that I'm personally familiar with.

To stay organized I believe I'll finish describing the mod team first since I've already described Makin and WoC at length (edit as of 2/13/18: I have moved the character descriptions to coincide with the first event in this journal relevant to the person being described for pacing reasons. People who do not appear later in the journal are still described here).

Lucky Red Seven, or just LRS, is one of the most enigmatic members of the team, through a combination of not inserting his opinion and not interfering with policy at all. He frequents #gaming a lot with WoC. As far as being a moderator I don't think he's terribly active, but that's not really my call to make. He could be perfectly active and I'm just not around to see it. He's nice enough anyway, if somewhat disinterested in the more dramatic elements of the server. And who could blame him? Sometimes this place is utterly festooned with horrid, unnecessary highschool level garbage. If I had to leave it on an honest and positive note, I'd say that LRS is just an overall chill person.

Difarem is much like LRS to me except even more enigmatic. The #coding-tech pseudo, I barely see him speak elsewhere. Being one of the channels I frequent least, I end up never talking to the guy. By all accounts though, my few interactions with him have been amicable enough so I can't assume he's not a nice person. Unfortunately, I don't know what else to say about him, and rather than pretend I know anything I'll just go ahead and move along.

For the last few days in the server and elsewhere, a new internet phenomenon has been in the works called 17776. It's a curious story about the Voyager 9 probe gaining sentience and talking with other probes, such as Voyager 10, JUICE and once Hubble. These satellites spend their time floating through space watching humanity, in a post-scarcity society where people stopped aging and dying sometime in the mid 21st century for unknown reasons. After a technological development that keeps people from dying in unnatural ways as well as through their now limitless longevity, humans have moved on to passing the millenia by playing football in new and strange ways. The subject matter of 17776 is largely about these games, and what they mean for humanity's place in the universe. I'm actually a huge fan of such stories, and I eagerly await each update now. I'm curious where they intend to go with it.

The rest of the community seems to enjoy it as well. There has been a lot of talk about the ingenuity of the story using satellites as characters, among other elements of the story. This is only the latest in a long string of various stories that have been lauded by the community, and which will be discussed in some part for ages to come.

I believe I'll end this entry here and pick it back up tomorrow.

---

12^th of July 2017

The flow of conversation in mspa-lit is really strange and captivating to me sometimes. Topics can be discussed rabidly for hours with no change or we can flit from idea to idea rapidly, almost as if trying to settle on something but not sure what to go with. Today the latter has been happening; all day it seems we've swiftly moved from topic to topic, not quite stopping on anything for more than a few minutes.

For a while we simply talked about whatever came to mind, often enough that 17776 story. Other topics that we crossed paths with included sports in general, the InCel (short for “Involuntarily Celibate”) and Redpill communities, garage music bands, space, humanity's purpose in the universe if it exists, what we ate today, youtube meme videos, and so on. Without a focus we're perfectly content with drifting among the various possible things that can be discussed, and almost nothing is off limits. The sheer eagerness to speak with each other is palpable; we enjoy talking together, and it's immensely gratifying to me.

An interesting and unexpected development today, as well: the Official Homestuck youtube channel released a song, written in the style of a band called The Grubbles that exists in Hiveswap. This is the third such song by them, and each one has actually been pretty nice to listen to. Predictably though, this steered the course of conversation to Hiveswap’s interminable delays and mishandling by What Pumpkin.

Hiveswap is a subject of intense controversy and polarization in the community. Only a sparing few months before I got into Homestuck myself, back on September 4th of 2012, Andrew Hussie launched a Kickstarter project called the Homestuck Adventure Game. Obviously I wasn't around for this, but it caused quite a stir. The project had a fundraising goal of $700,000 and managed to raise almost $2.5 million. People talked about it for years, so that even if I wasn't around for the initial splash I was still subject to the waves and ripples. We were treated to various announcements on progress and promises of things to add based on stretch goals being reached. It was very exciting for a long while.

However, time went by and people started to notice something was wrong. The original intended release date was in 2014, a 2 year wait. This seemed daunting but more than acceptable for most people; they waited, content that the fandom going above and beyond the call of duty would secure a lovely product for them. Three years after that initial deadline, we're still waiting.

In late 2016, after I joined the HSD, we received a trailer for “Act One” of the game that advertised its release date as being January of 2017. Finally, an end to the long wait! People were ecstatic, and yet others still hesitant. We had been burned a number of times before this--promised a release date only to have it pushed back, sometimes with no specific date at all. While some celebrated the news, a lot of us were cautious and outright cynical. No one wanted to be disappointed again.

The appointed time came, and disappointment is indeed what struck. Instead of being graced with Hiveswap: Act One, we got an update post saying it would be moved back “several weeks”. People were outraged, some renouncing the game in its entirety out of disgust. Others bounced back with optimism anew: “it's only a little farther away guys, the post says 'weeks'!” Of course, six months later we're still waiting. There is very little room left for such optimism.

One of the facets of this conversation that comes up is how it's been delayed so many times. We're aware that at one point, the development company Andrew Hussie had signed on with to produce the game, The Odd Gentlemen, took a sizeable portion of the money that was meant for Hiveswap and used it on another project, setting them back considerably. This information, I believe, is not widely known outside of the HSD, and in that scenario of course we're more sympathetic. Some are still harsh, saying that Hussie should have been more careful with the legal wording of any contract they had with The Odd Gentlemen, which is a sensible and fair argument. You don't squander $2.5 million with bad legalese. After this debacle it seemed Hussie created his own game development studio from scratch using his already existing brand What Pumpkin, which immediately struck people as a bad idea.

Hussie has a tendency to overpromise on things and then burn himself out in the process. This was noticeable during the later portion of Homestuck, where in the last year or so it seemed he stopped talking to fans completely, and engaging in all of the typical behaviors we had come to associate from him. Many speculated that he was simply done with trying to fulfill Homestuck to the best of his abilities, that he had created a monster he could not control. Many people speculate that this too happened with the game, where he promised a lot to people and then ran out of stamina. In the time since What Pumpkin started developing the game, Hussie himself has had little to no extensive interaction with the Homestuck community, and this unspoken policy of horrendous public relations has extended to the development team as well.

There was some shuffling of the devs, including Hussie hiring a fellow named Cohen (who long ago actually participated on the HSD, like James) to write Hiveswap instead of himself. Cohen does not have the reputation Hussie does, and this decision was met with a significant degree of skepticism. With only a smattering of developer interviews in recent months to tide us over, all of this has combined into a very agitating slurry that has left people feeling apathetic, if not outright spiteful of the project.

This agitation has actually been the source of some intense friction between the HSD and members of What Pumpkin. James Roach left because Makin tends to relentlessly criticize Hiveswap's development process (which is completely understandable). All of this controversy serves to extend the conversation long past its apparent expiration date, a fact that some people are getting noticeably tired of. However, the rest of us are perfectly content to stew in our collective agony. It's a very peculiar brand of enjoyable, as long as you're not one of the people who still eagerly anticipates the game's release.

This all having been said, the song that was posted and the developer interviews do make it a little easier. Despite our collective complaints and tendency to argue about it, as a whole we want Hiveswap to come out, be good, and be successful. It's almost five years in the making and it's one of the last things we have to look forward to as a Homestuck-centric community. If nothing else, we cling to that idea that it may still be what we've been promised and are looking forward to.

The song aside, the scheduled developer interview has not been released today. It's currently 9 PM CST as of writing this, and if I'm not mistaken the interviews are usually released earlier in the day. I wouldn't be surprised if the interview has been moved due to the song being released, but the song taking the interview's spot is not necessarily an equal transaction for us. With as little information as we've received about the project, we take every scrap we can get and are onerous when it is taken away. The song may have been a good move, but if it is not associated with the regularly scheduled interview then it still robs What Pumpkin of some legitimacy.

Ah, and here it goes. 9:05 PM, and the discourse has officially begun. All it took was one off handed statement about a lack of substantial news in the developer interviews and now the shit is flying.

There's a lot of history and interpersonal politics tied up into these discussions. Alex, Makin and Putnam are all currently discussing Makin's history of association with members of What Pumpkin, with Alex and Putnam insisting that Makin is the biggest reason that WP doesn't communicate with the HSD. This seems unfair, but I personally am not familiar enough with the history of HSD or Makin himself to know if that's accurate or not.

The discourse is now effectively over, and WoC has finally crossed the line. Makin demodded LRS to gaming pseudo for relative inactivity and WoC is now the first ever gaming janitor. While unfortunate for both, this was not entirely unexpected. I'm kind of worried about how they'll handle this; WoC is already aware of it and seems more or less resigned to it, although I'm sure he's actually somewhat bitter even if he hides it. LRS isn't around at the moment, and there was actually a scare earlier in the day about whether he would be demodded or not, so this is going to come as a bit of a blow when he comes back.

I actually feel really bad for him. I just got done informing him and he's upset; to his credit, he's mostly upset at himself for not being more active. He feels like Makin never trusted him, or at least didn't trust in his competency for whatever reason. He listed off reasons the other moderators are viewed favorably (to my amusement, saying that my attractive quality is that I “have opinions”), and said he was always just kind of quiet. I can tell he genuinely wants to just do a good job and wasn't sure how to do anything else. Additionally, WoC has left the server. I'm sure he'll be back, but in the meantime I guess I'm disappointed that it turned out this way.

Tomorrow, assuming nothing extravagant is happening, I'll go ahead and describe some of the regular users of the server.

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13^th of July 2017

There are a lot of people to describe (like I said, a varied and colorful assortment of people), I'm not even sure where to start honestly. I guess I'll pick whoever's talking in the chat currently (edit as of 2/13/18: as with the mod descriptions, these have been moved to more appropriate locations if possible).

Putnam is another figure of fame, but less so for the Homestuck community: he's an amazing programmer, and most of his time is spent in developing mods for the game Dwarf Fortress. Putnam's understanding of the game is unreal; the creator of the game, a guy named Toady I believe, is actually impressed and slightly intimidated by Putnam's comprehensive knowledge of the inner workings of Dwarf Fortress. Thus, Putnam is extremely notable within the DF community. As far as HSD is concerned, though, Putnam is just an extremely mathematics and computer science oriented person. I'm currently playing Minecraft with Putnam on a regular basis, the amount of optimization and efficiency increasing activities he delves into are kind of mind boggling in their complexity and depth. His input is extremely valuable to Makin since it's usually pretty rationally oriented, given to logic and the like. Since some recent personal events, Putnam has definitely unleashed some of the more emotional aspects of his behavior. This isn't necessarily bad, it's just unusual. I'm sure eventually this will either change or we'll get used to it, but for now it's a different element in play than what we're used to. Putnam is also extremely outspoken against the concept of people dying in general—he fears death above all else, “the only true evil to exist in this world”⁴. The way he presents his argument makes sense on a logical basis but I and some others think he pursues it a little too relentlessly at times. This has happened for other conversational topics with him as well, such as drinking alcohol. Overall I really appreciate Putnam; he may be strange in some ways but he's a good person at his core for sure.

Griever is a fun individual; he runs a fan adventure called Jojostuck, based on the the manga/anime Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. This fan adventure is a direct recreation of one of the parts of the show, except involving characters from Homestuck based on official Homestuck tarot card placements. It's exceptionally well crafted, and the community has adopted it as one of their staple works. Its popularity is such that asking people if they've read it the moment they join the server is a meme; we've actually started receiving complaints because of how commonly the sentiment has echoed at times. We try to keep it under wraps but we secretly delight in its spread and popularity of course. Griever himself is a very nice individual, with a calm head and more or less rational opinions on things. He has Makin's ear because of Jojostuck, although if it's been a while since the last update Makin frequently dismisses him with “go write more Jojostuck already”. Griever does have a tendency to repost his artwork long past its expiration date; he'll leak art from an upcoming update if he's satisfied with it, but then he'll keep posting it over and over again. It usually takes us some time to catch on to this, but when we do we have to scold him. He's been warned against doing this multiple times, but sometimes it slips through the cracks. Aside from the reposting, Griever is indisputably a great addition to the community.

Nights is an interesting person. If it wasn't for the fact that his points are often cogent he would be taken for a habitual shitposter, because his messages are so often fraught with typos and misspellings. This is just an effect of his keyboard structure apparently, but it often manages to obscure what he's trying to say because it's so bad. He's kind of the community doll in a lot of ways—not least of which because he’s physically small, maybe one of the shortest people in the HSD, a fact that I’m unsure of how it became public knowledge. He's got that “smol” demeanor that people like so much, where he often posts cute things and argues for the most agreeable position in lots of cases. Not interested in causing waves, he just wants people to get along. He is also very important for keeping some of HSD's side projects going, being probably the most consistent running head for Cool and New Music Team where he organizes projects and releases them officially. He often plays Overwatch with Tensei and I, although right now he's gone on vacation for a couple of weeks. In addition to frequenting mspa-lit, he's often around in social; he really likes that place. The server always feels a little quieter without him around.

Rune is a tragic person; diagnosed with a mysterious terminal illness, there is a high likelihood that they will die in the next few years. As such, they have resolved to live as much as they possibly can during the remaining time they have, and often travels to cons or to meet people. They have a particular fondness for RJ, another musician for Homestuck who doesn't frequent the HSD as much, although he does visit occasionally. They will often plug things they want to see succeed, which can be annoying to others. However, due to their illness, I think we're all a little uncomfortable with telling them to stop when this happens. If it becomes very excessive then we step in, but generally a lot of leeway is afforded to them. They are extremely fond of ocarinas, sporting an incredible knowledge of them in general and making purchase recommendations to people who even remotely express interest. They are also a huge fan of Yugioh, especially the character Atem. We've suffered to no end listening to them describe how much they like the show and especially Atem, but at the same time it's a thing we've grown fond of. We all hope that they persist and manage to make some sort of recovery (if they survive their illness they will probably become better in a few years). Until then we try to make them feel as welcomed as we can.

There are tons of people in the HSD like these: WHATISLOSTINTHEMINES, Kal-la-kal-la, Kayjeth, Olkiswerve, Gnawms, Nikki, tripheus, IAMTARA, Twonks, Mad-Juggalo, Archiewhite, Andrew, Aradia, CynicallyCritical, Red, Interrobang, Barry, akaTrickster, VDNW, Skyplayer, BitesizeBird, Hadron, Tainted Angel, cloudaria, cookiefonster, Dawooya, Tetrahedron, MrNostalgic, Dingus, hb, octacle, Proto-Man, akaTrickster, Shoktherapy, OneDragonArmy, Solarsail, fashionableSpirit, Dap, Dickle, sock, molly, Squarewave, ech, 47x5, Somerandomguy, Saeko, austinado⁵, and so many others. Too many for me to possibly name and list them all. If they become relevant to what's happening in the moment, I will probably choose to describe them then. I hope I get the chance to talk about all of them at some point; these people are wonderful in their collectivity, making the HSD an interesting and subsequently better place to be in. I hope they all stick around for a long time to come.

Also of minor note today, Medixum and Ifnar changed places; Medixum now moderates #social and Ifnar now moderates #serious. Nothing else to report.

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14^th of July 2017

The HSD has been a little quiet for a few days. I think this has to do with it being the specific time of year—I thought summer would mean everyone is free and talking more, but of course it doesn't turn out that way. Nights is currently on vacation and Cait, I believe, is finishing a summer term of school. Whatever the reasons are, it's been a pretty slow week. Or perhaps I'm simply thinking of it as slow because I'm here all the time. There are definitely points during the day where activity spikes considerably and people come out of the woodwork to talk. Maybe I need to spend some time away from the HSD to resensitize myself or something.

It's times like these that I fear the community may be suffering a little bit for whatever reason, but the other symptoms of impending community death are not present. Channels are more or less active at all times, I guess it's just the people that I'm most familiar with and care about are not on. I suppose I'm also still upset that WoC is gone.

It was discussed whether or not WoC would regain his modship status if he came back to the server, but Makin has solidly stated no (“i don't negotiate with terrorists”, in his words). If WoC comes back he'll receive his new janitor position but a mod spot is not in the works for him, so I don't see him bothering to come back. Time will tell I'm sure.

I suppose now would be a good time to elaborate on the origin of a rival server I will call Hiveswap Discord, or HVSD. Around the time that I joined, when I was still definitively unknown, one of the mods of the subreddit was a fellow I’ll refer to as Elvish for reasons of privacy. Elvish was a younger user and becoming increasingly unstable as time went by. There were significant disagreements between them and Makin over the way the subreddit and the discord should be moderated. Eventually Elvish's discontent grew to the point that they left the subreddit, which itself led to a whole slew of greater problems. Public confrontations began; at some point Elvish threatening people with suicide, which culminated in them leaving the HSD (I forget if this was a ban or voluntary).

In their anger, Elvish apparently began utilizing HVSD as their own splinter server to express hatred of Makin and become more successful than him. This attracted a lot of people who were also banned from HSD, and it led to the official declaration of rules over there that seem fairly draconic or unnecessary to us—the nature of HVSD is thus alien to us. Members of HVSD state that their server is for people who feel uncomfortable in the HSD, and as such they maintain that they simply exist as an alternative. This does not alleviate the very real rivalry that exists between the HSD and HVSD, however.

Elvish recently in the last few months stepped down as owner of the server, turning it over to a user I will refer to as AlexIcel, again for reasons of anonymity. AlexIcel and others from HVSD will occasionally come over to HSD, either in response to Makin throwing shade on them first or just to start shit themselves. This is frustrating to no end for me personally, and many of the others in the mod team agree. Makin likes fierce debate and argumentation and doesn't know when to stop sometimes, so he doesn't view this as a problem. It's a source of friction between him and the rest of us, but admittedly in the last few weeks the problem has been rectified somewhat.

Hiveswap Discord functions somewhat as a beacon for those who can't tolerate the HSD, and today boasts a membership around 400 people or so. Makin is of course disdainful of them because of their very nature as a splinter server and their dislike of him. He views the HSD's far larger member count as a sign of definitive success over HVSD, which leads to him being boastful and causing still more problems. However, it's become a pretty predictable song and dance now, one that I even look forward to sometimes. It certainly manages to make things more interesting.

There are other circumstances surrounding the HSD that are fairly controversial such as users like Daddy, who was an intense creep and had to be banned just for making people uncomfortable. Manatee and recursiveSlacker are other insufferably toxic characters, principally exhibiting behavior that suggests professional help is needed (unless necessary, I will specifically avoid describing their malignancies to avoid inadvertently feeding them attention). However, there is one name that comes to mind that may be worse than all others--even worse than those mentioned so far is a user named Talons.

Talons is a force for destruction and chaos unlike any other in our pocket of the internet. Where those like Manatee and recursiveSlacker mostly deserve to be forgotten from collective consciousness, Talons’ various abuses of people deserve to be brought to light so that he might never hurt anyone ever again. He was banned long before I became a member of the server, and has a whole host of mental problems that culminate in an individual who is singularly obsessed and manipulative towards anyone who will even give him the time of day. He has generated hundreds if not thousands of alt accounts that he uses to spy on the server and harass its users. He used to date a user named Flare, a fact that now makes Flare incredibly uncomfortable, and who is now often the target of Talons' scheming and intentions.

Flare himself is a figure of much controversy. Usually he's fine, not malicious or anything, just excessively weird. However, he and Alex have a mutual hatred of each other, and Flare especially just takes it way out of normal boundaries. I think Flare suffers from a bit of a language barrier problem, but some of the behavior is explicitly not acceptable. Alex and another user started talking to each other and being closer, and Flare would consistently interrupt them and make it impossible for them to speak in public. It was basically targeted harassment, so naturally we had to ban Flare for a few days. He's calmed down significantly since then, but there is still that threat ever looming I suppose. Aside from this, Flare is just a generally weird and confusing guy to talk to. Again, I think he means well but it's hard for him to control his emotions occasionally. Hopefully in the future he can clean up his act.

Someone that merits description is the banned user Talons. Words lack the parameters to accurately describe how disturbing Talons' ethos is. He actively colludes with other people who were banned from HSD in an attempt to find a way to ruin things for us. Talons actually conspired with another user named Itoan in this regard: Itoan created an alt account impersonating a woman to catfish members of the NSFW server and gain nude pictures of them. After doing this, he compiled them into an album and these pictures have been used for blackmailing purposes ever since (this event, alongside another involving WoC, eventually culminated in the complete removal of the NSFW channel and the creation of the Homesmut server).

Once Talons had acquired these images from Itoan, he began using alt accounts to join the HSD and spam them relentlessly in public channels. We've reached out to the Discord Abuse Center to try and have this taken care of, but unfortunately we just don't have enough information about Talons to help them get rid of him completely. There is also talk of Talons having a sister, and many people who are aware of Talons fear for her safety. He is a wildly destructive and incredible poisonous person, and I mean it in complete sincerity when I say that I hope he is apprehended by law enforcement in some way and carted to jail. He is a menace to himself and others and the sooner he's gone the better.

This unpleasant description out of the way, I think I'm done for today unless anything else happens. There are numerous other incidents to describe, which can happen another time.

---

15^th of July 2017

Today was pretty tumultuous in a vaguely annoying way. It begins with old drama cropping up—a couple weeks ago we banned a regular, Frost, for engaging in a group of sexually active minors. Frost is 17, so not exactly pedo age, but it's still bad and really illegal. To keep ourselves safe we decided to ban him, hardly a controversial decision. It’s important at this point to establish that Frost is a friend of Cerulean.

Cerulean, or just Ceru, is an interesting person: he is extremely earnest, but with a significant degree of anxiety and a lack of self-esteem. For all of this, Ceru is extremely talented at programming; one of the server's main automated bot accounts, Aradiabot, is written and maintained completely by him. It boasts an incredible array of functions and in no small way keeps the server running smoothly. Ceru also has an interest in electronic music, which shacks up with my own tastes. He is very kind to people and cares about them greatly, defending his friends to great lengths if something against them arises. This has occasionally put Ceru at odds with the rest of the mod team when we need to ban someone that he is close to; however, Ceru is also thankfully reasonable and it's not hard to bring him around and help him see why it must be done. For all of this, Ceru is probably one of my favorite fellow moderators.

Unfortunately, Frost was and still is a friend of Ceruleans (picking up friends that Ceru would be better off being an uncanny talent of his). Ceru also runs a private server, where Frost remains to this day. This seemed to be fine for a while, but Twonks was invited to the server earlier today.

Twonks is a very temperamental individual; I don't say this lightly. She is given to incredible bouts of anger that do not suit the level of provocation, which has obviously caused significant problems. All of this is at least somewhat surprising—generally she tries to put out an air of being happy and nice to others, which makes this all feel vaguely more sinister in light of her intense anger management problems. She expressed to me that she feels that her tendency to anger goes way too far (obviously) and that she needs help for it, but she doesn't know how to fix it. I managed to gain a promise from her to seek therapy or a psychiatrist, which I felt relatively good about, but I've been told that this had already done before and nothing even happened. Very disappointing to be honest.

At any rate, Twonks was invited to Ceru's private server and noticed Frost was still there. This naturally led to a shitstorm of ridiculous proportions: Twonks demanded that Frost be banned from Ceru's private server; Ceru obviously declined this and told Twonks not to insult Frost again; Twonks continued to rage despite the intervention of ost, tripheus, and another individual in a different server. Yazshu and Twonks both demanded that Makin reprimand Ceru for defending Frost, an act they called “supporting pedophilia”; Makin definitely declined this; Twonks threatened to report Makin to Discord developers for “victim blaming” some of the people involved in the original situation (an incident I will explain another time); Makin bans Twonks from the HSD; Twonks rages at Makin and ost in private messages and is promptly blocked by both of them.

Twonks is now more or less calm but I don't know if they can be allowed back. While the fundamental source of their anger is more or less understandable, the actions that she took following that are clearly unacceptable. She's damaged her standing with a lot of people today and it's likely she won't be allowed to return to the HSD. I wasn't even home for this, I was out all day with family. I ended up coming back to over 30 private messages from various people asking me to handle the situation. I'm not explicitly clear why I was put in charge of handling all of the petty nonsense that happens here. But, if it helps, then I try my best anyway even if I find it distasteful or dumb (up to a point I guess).

I think the other people on the mod team and maybe even Makin are convinced that this isn't that big of a deal, but Twonks is appearing increasingly unstable as a person. We'll see how this plays out later.

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16^th of July 2017

As predicted, this has gotten worse. Yazshu felt the need to DM me about this while I was out again today, when I got back I learned that Twonks had been contemplating suicide about being banned from HSD all morning. I'm afraid it'll make me seem horrible but this is more just frustrating than anything else; again, I'm not sure why the burden falls on me to deal with this. What's worse is that I've dealt with people who threaten suicide like this before. Less than being an actual suicide threat, it's more a manipulative tactic; it garners sympathy or at least makes people pay attention to them. I have no idea if that's what Twonks is doing in reality but it would shack up with the rest of what's happening and her overall behavior.

My prediction is as thus: the chances of getting Twonks back into the HSD is really low. She's burned her bridges thoroughly; it takes a lot to be blocked by two members of administration. I think it's clear to everyone involved, more or less, that Twonks will not be allowed to come back. However, if I can get her back, then it would be a one strike policy; if she fucks up even one time, she's out for good. This is what was done for Flare, who by all accounts should not have been allowed to come back to the server for his generally creepy behavior towards Alex and his vehement shipping nonsense.

The main barrier is probably the fact that she threatened to report Makin. Makin is capricious at the best of times; I don't think he'll be too excited about risking letting this sort of thing happen again. I have to at least try and appeal, in the interest of doing the right thing and representing people fairly. Guess we'll see if the effort pays off.

All of this negativity aside, I've been reminded of why I'm okay dealing with all of this. I've been discussing the incident with Red in addition to Yazshu and Twonks herself; Red is of the same opinion I am of this entire debacle, that it's pointless and extremely disturbing. However, after the conversation progressed like this for a while she told me that people really appreciate that I'm around to help out. Said something along the lines of “people think you're one of the few people who genuinely helps out around the place”.

It's immensely gratifying to hear things like that. I enjoy being able to do a good job and help people out, even if sometimes it feels like I'm not making any progress or doing very well. It makes me want to continue helping as much as I can. As long as there's still a community worth protecting and helping, then I guess I'll be found here trying my best to do my job--they deserve that much I think. I think I'm going to end it here for tonight, there doesn't seem to be much else to report as of yet. I'm going to bring Twonks up to the modchat and see what I can do, hopefully the proposal isn't shot down immediately.

---

17^th of July 2017

I was shot down immediately. However, after talking further with Twonks, I think that not reinviting her to the server was the wiser decision honestly. Over night and especially after telling her that it was a no, she grew increasingly despondent and had another fit of rage. She also unleashed this on her friends, which I explicitly asked her not to do.

It's honestly just a messy situation all around. I ended up spending some time today trying to calm her down and explain to her what was going on, and I spent an equal if not greater amount of time doing the same for Yazshu.

Yazshu is a temperamental guy; he's not nearly as bad as Twonks and his impulses are guided more by a desire for justice and fair treatment than anything else, but he often clashes with the mod team in what should be deemed “correct” or how to handle a given situation. He is also given to protecting his friends fiercely and loyally, which is something that I can of course sympathize with. Unfortunately this tendency also gets in the way of actually solving problems, or even creates more. Yazshu has an almost fetishistic desire for disturbing and excessively sophomoric humor, a leaning that I greatly enjoy talking to him. Sometimes too fiery, Yaz simply cares about the right things being accomplished.

Thankfully, I was able to talk Yazshu down a bit and help him understand the inherent difficulty in helping Twonks in this particular scenario, given that she shot herself in the foot so badly. I even managed to talk Twonks herself down after her anger subsided, which was nice. Sometimes I'm okay at what I do, or at least I think. I feel bad that I can't help more but sometimes it's prudent to just let go and have people figure it out for themselves.

Aside from this, Makin started some debate today about splinter servers. Splinter servers are nebulously defined, it may depend on who you're talking to—generally speaking a safe definition would be that it's a separate, external server that is made by people from a host server, usually because they are disgruntled or otherwise upset by something that happened in the host server. Sometimes the splinter isn't made from any negative reasons, it's just made as a hangout spot for people who enjoy talking to each other. There are tangible benefits to having these splinter servers in some cases, but unfortunately in a lot of other cases there are an exceptional number of problems that occur because of them as well.

Usually drama that has nothing to do with HSD at first can fester and eventually transform into something that affects a lot of people on it anyway. This is usually what happens to me in regards to splinter servers—inevitably there is some sort of dramatic nonsense that becomes a huge problem and I'm left to try and talk sense into people after the situation falls apart. To be completely fair, not all splinter servers are dysfunctional like this; it's usually the ones that are created in spite and/or run by people who are habitually trouble makers anyway that make it problematic or troubling to deal with.

Of course, outside of this narrow range of splinter server experiences, it is not uncommon to find a burgeoning or otherwise healthy community in what is otherwise a relatively unnoteworthy server. These places aren't so bad and I fully admit that I'm okay with their existence. Makin is not so forgiving and thinks that splinter servers are categorically bad, deserving to be removed completely from the system. This stance has gained him a lot of negative will today, unsurprisingly.

More tomorrow, I'm falling asleep here.

---

18^th of July 2017

Funnily enough, in the wake of Makin's tirade against splinter servers, it feels as if more have suddenly popped up. I'm not sure if their appearance is as a direct result of his complaints or if they're unrelated but it's amusing how this happens. Nights, while still on vacation, has started posting again recently and invited me to a personal server filled with a bunch of other people I know and a few that I don't. I was also invited to Red's new personal server, which she created at the same time as rejoining the HSD.

I've mentioned Red a few times but neglected to explain her: Red is a fairly reasonable person generally speaking but is prone to fits of irrationality when she gets upset. She's fun to talk to, being very playful and easygoing about things, but isn't afraid to tease people over small affairs. She's very interested in science and space, much like myself. Her inability to handle being upset appropriately gets in the way sometimes though. She tries not to be too open with others, which is understandable, but I personally feel as if this can get in the way of establishing or improving relationships with others. Ultimately, I guess it's not my place to speak on that.

Two months ago she was so thoroughly embarrassed and upset by something and, in conjunction with some personal blunders and being yelled at by Makin, she left the HSD completely. I started talking to her in private messages, trying to make sure she was okay and so on. Eventually she began improving considerably and it's been a bit of a struggle to follow her desire to go back to HSD.

Today she finally did rejoin, and as I've told her over the last couple of months people were definitely happy to have her back. I think the response was a boost for her, she's seemed happy since. I haven't had a chance to talk to her about it yet since she went to bed, but regardless I'm glad that it's working out in her favor.

Honestly, the HSD has been experiencing a slow few days. When this happens, I'll meander into channels I don't use so often, such as #altgen. Being the designated shitposting channel it's a gamble trying to use it; it can either be really fun or it can immediately be annoying. Since it's such an easily abused channel it's also gained a thoroughly negative reputation to all people on the server, even the ones who use it regularly.

On the few occasions that I pass through, I always make sure to mess with the people involved as much as possible. On a few occasions I've even “deleted” the channel after an hour or so of warnings. This involves hiding the channel from public view so that only moderators can see, which to all others involved appears as deletion. This predictably led to shock and outrage, and most importantly chaos as altgenners were forced to leave and go into other channels, shitposting as they went. I'll also arbitrarily ban people over the silliest or most unrelated reasons possible (temporarily of course), and my particular flavor of mod abuse involves spamming something asinine over and over again. This genuinely aggravates some people because it's against the rules, so it's a flagrant abuse of my power as a moderator.

But it's altgen, so who really gives a fuck? That having been said, I do have an honorary altgen ban from Tori, because “everytime you're there it's legendary”. I appreciate having that sort of reputation for wanton chaos when I want to be reckless and have stopped giving a shit.

Now that 17776 is over, Makin has renamed mspalit to “read-tnc”, tnc being short for The Northern Caves, which is some kind of strange fanfiction that's not actually about anything in particular from what I can tell, but is more accurately just a short story. It's about a group of people online who still talk about a set of stories from an author they all like, and they end up theorizing on one particular entry that is completely and horribly confusing and seems to have no real direction, and they go crazy because of it.

Obviously the irony is not lost on us. Personally, I found the story kind of weird and flat because of the ending, which involves someone dying for magical reasons somehow. Makes no sense and kind of ruins the otherwise realistic and oddly relatable core of the story for me. This isn't the first time Makin has shilled the story so I'm already over it, but it is nice to see what people think of it; there's a lot of people in HSD who enjoy the story, it speaks to them in a way.

Tomorrow is Wednesday, which is when Hiveswap Interviews from the dev team are supposed to come out. Last week when I wrote the entry it was clear that, while we got a new piece of music, the interview that was supposed to be released was not forthcoming. I predict that, regardless of whether the interview comes out or not and/or it is of good quality or not, there will be someone or something that stirs up drama in the HSD over it. I'm almost looking forward to it, it's become a kind of scheduled event. Wednesday rolls around, interview comes out (or doesn't) and people lose their minds over it. I'm excited. More tomorrow when we figure out what happpens.

---

19^th of July 2017

AS PREDICTED, the interview today brought a whole host of discourse. I'm not even upset about it either, it's quite entertaining.

Throughout the day, people were audibly wondering whether an interview would even come; it was a sore issue for both sides involved, those who unquestioningly defend What Pumpkin and those who are unendingly skeptical. Time dwindled away and each of these sides continued to grow still more agitated. As the midnight bell started its toll people began to openly argue with each other about it; passive aggressiveness turned to more open hostility and insults were flung. It seemed no peace would be had tonight.

Finally, at around 8:30 PM CST, the interview did come out, which alleviated the concern from myself personally and generally mollified the people who were upset with no interview. However, the more defensive people, including Alex, were not content with it. Alex in particular said: “finally. People can not whine about no interview.”

This annoyed me severely. I don't appreciate being condescended to, and many other people took offense to this as well. And so despite an interview actually coming out, discourse began anyway. The topic of What Pumpkin's unwillingness to associate with the server and Makin's role in that unwillingness has been the topic of discussion for the last hour now.

There are of course those of us who are pushing back on it, because we're tired of constantly dealing with this passive aggressiveness and being blamed for things going wrong. We've been arguing back and the opposition has tried to paint us as The Bad Guys, a position we basically laugh at them for holding over our heads. Their lack of cohesiveness is distasteful to me personally, it's like they argue for the sake of arguing itself. But, I shouldn't continue on in this manner. It's not about what I care about myself, I'm just trying to report what's happening.

This has continued on for some time now, and Alex described “3 main points” about the HSD that need to be changed for it to be more receptive for WP staff. The first two were explained as thus:

“Okay, so, firstly, the lack of any clear and precise definition for what constitutes a violation in terms of the server and no clear definition of what consequences are required where. (This has already been memed about in ther form of "lol who needs a rules tab!" but anyway)”; “Secondly, the fact a channel exists in which the point is "less moderation" leads to people being 'ironically' bigoted and getting to be so under that guise which just creates a further repulsing atmosphere.”; the third reason has yet to be elaborated on. Alex has specifically refrained from saying it because “it would be too much of a drama bomb”.

This behavior very quickly led to the rest of us, meaning most of the mod team, to become resentful. Why bother to bring up the problem in the first place if you're not actually going to explain it fully? The first two points themselves would be valid but we've already explained why we take a stance against them before. Repeatedly. We don't have a rules channel or defined punishments because we judge things on a case by case basis. We also maintain altgen because that content would simply be distributed to other channels. There are a whole slew of other reasons we don't agree with the propositions they've come up with but I don't feel like explaining fully at the moment.

The third point was in fact elaborated on (through Griever) as:

"Basically the idea is "Makin's authority lets him say what he wants without any thought for consequences". Specifically, it does not seem to be the fact that he cannot be challenged at all by users or anything, it's more that he feels at home saying whatever he wants and this can often lead to like...dissonance or something”

This is frustratingly vague and unhelpful.

Even with the elaboration, the drama petered out and things feel back to normal already. I guess it's good that things didn't escalate too much but I was genuinely looking forward to a rousing discussion about things. Instead it seemed to be a huge nothing burger. Oh well.

The likelihood that we'll adopt any of these changes is so low that I'm not even going to afford myself the chance to wonder about it. The possibility has been discussed before, with no actual results forthcoming.

Makin did exhibit more behavior that has been deemed hard to deal with in the past. We were trying to talk with him seriously about this feedback and what people feel about these things but he wouldn't stop joking around. I guess it was due to Putnam talking to him in direct messages, so I'm not sure if it was him willfully being obtuse or if it was just him being distracted. Not much I can do about it either way at this point.

Guess I'll end it here unless anything else extravagant happens.

---

20^th of July 2017

Today was a rather nice day; there was no drama, necessary or otherwise, and we had a community stream. Streams are important community events where a bunch of us gather together on a website called Cytube and stream movies or music produced by LOFAM and CaNMT.

Today the content we streamed was actually two albums: CaNMT's “Greatest Hits 2” and then a solo album by ost called “One Week Older”, which is a parody of an existing Official Homestuck album called “One Year Older”. Both albums were constructed carefully and I would consider them each successful.

Community streams typically garner between 50 to 100 people, although at times may be as great as 150 people. Often viewership will peak during the “prestream”, which is actually dedicated to content that is not the main focus of the streaming event. During the prestream we do a wide assortment of movies and youtube videos, passing the hours until it's actually time to stream the real event in question. Today we ended up streaming Life of Brian and Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey—I'm not sure if there were any others or if it was only those two. In between these movies we did an assortment of youtube videos by two community figures that I had not thought to explain until now: Michael Bowman and Scott Stutzman.

Michael Bowman, like James Roach and Tensei, has made music that was used in the comic itself. This alone is enough to vaunt him to pseudo-celebrity status for many people in the server, but Bowman is also the creator of several really distinguished and long standing memes within the community as a whole, partially induced because of his musician status: in particular, a 10 minute long video about his credit score has given him meme immortality for us. I don't know quite how or when this happened, but that video in particular spawned a whole slew of related projects and memes, including a full length feature album from CaNMT called Bowmania, which was released earlier this year and watched live by the man himself. It's kind of insane to think about honestly, and I'm sure to many it appears downright creepy that we idolize this guy so much and in such a strange way. However, it is an important facet of the culture of the community, so to speak.

Stutzman is kind of only tangentially related, and expressly by dint of his relationship to Bowman. Stutzman himself is an internet funnyman and also a musician, whose videos are not related to Homestuck in any way. Instead, once Bowman stopped writing music for Homestuck, for some reason the two began to make videos together, including several skits where they pretend to be radio talk show hosts or similar. Their collaborations together are probably what put Stutzman under the frenetic gaze of the HSD community. In fact, for Bowmania, CaNMT approached Stutzman and asked if they could get some audio straight from him for the album in a narrative piece, to which he gracefully agreed. That was one of the definite all-time highlights for CaNMT in many peoples' eyes.

Aside from the community event today, I mentioned there was no drama. This was true, but I've developed an eye for this sort of thing and I see the danger of it cropping up all the time. Today the problem seemed to be with Red. She's come back recently and has been fairly successful in talking to people, including Toast, but occasionally I see the way they talk to each other and it makes me vaguely nervous that some nonsense will occur again and make someone offended enough to leave.

I mentioned in the foreword before that Toast was the one who pointed me to mspa-lit, which is probably the majority of the reason that I've stayed in the server for as long as I have. Toast is one of the server’s more historic members, joining early and developing quite a reputation for himself. Unlike many other oldies, though, Toast is still around and kicking. He, like Shitler, used to be an unmitigated shitter; people were actually quite hateful of Toast for a while, who at the time was more sinister and apparently annoying to deal with. He was briefly modded once before as a joke, which led to a few people leaving the server in outrage. He was quickly demodded because of the backlash, but the damage was done. I wasn't around for this, but I think it actually helped Toast realize that people didn't like him that much, so he started to change. Since then, and especially since I've joined, Toast has matured considerably and shown that he appreciates his position in the community as an older regular. He was also remodded as the #homestuck and #hiveswap pseudo-mod for April Fool's Day, which the rest of the mod team fully expected to be reversed by day's end. Makin's unpredictable tendencies struck once again though, and in addition to Sea Hitler becoming a full mod Toast was kept as a permanent addition to the team. He is a solid individual, interested in self-improvement and being blunt over kind, at least when necessary. I can sympathize with this; when it's important to be, he is fairly no-nonsense and isn't afraid to speak what he perceives as the truth of any given matter--it's a valuable skill we've specifically asked from him sometimes. However, when not required to be serious, Toast is fond of hassling lesser users for his own personal enjoyment. He and WoC get along well in that regard.

It's a weird dance to try and toe the line between all these people and help them understand things about each other. Toast is aloof and generally given to the “who cares” method of dealing with issues of an extensively personal nature, at least from what I've seen. On the other hand, Red does care about this, immensely. This combination is difficult to predict, and I could be wrong about the approaching doom, but I've seen similar scenarios play out multiple times—it's a pretty familiar play at this point.

I'll have to keep an eye on them. I don't want to intervene unless absolutely necessary, and I'm sure that any intervention at all will be seen as mere interference instead of an attempt to help. Toast doesn't like being coddled, appropriately, but if argued with well enough he can be persuaded to see reason and improve himself. That is his ultimate goal, after all—self improvement.

Nothing else to report today.

---

22^nd of July 2017

It's been a mellow couple of days in all honesty. There has been a record low amount of drama occurring in the server and I'm not one bit sad about it. A large reason this has been the case, we think, is because Alex left shortly after being banned from mspalit. We aren't going nearly so far as to flaunt this fact to people but it's strongly suspected regardless. People outside the mod team and mspalit have independently thought this must be the case as well. Whatever the real reason, it's actually been possible to talk about things in a more open and agreeable fashion for the last few days. We've had more engaging conversations and the channel has been way more active than it was previously. We've also had like 3 or 4 people older members, including ViceroyofMonteCristo and Mad Dog, come back after being missing for weeks. It's even less clear if this is the result of Alex leaving but the correlation has not gone unnoticed by me.

Honestly I'll take what I can get. The chat feels better than it has in a while and I'm enjoying it greatly. Rune contacted me a bit ago today to warn me that a problem user was preparing to go on a tantrum, possibly. This guy, Xena, is an absolute shit meister of the highest degree. He flits around the HSD and Hiveswap Discord will rant in their respective serious channels for hours. This would be fine ordinarily—many others do this in fact, it's just that they are particularly recalcitrant with literally any advice given to them. It is a futile and frustrating effort to try and convince Xena to do anything, especially if it happens to concern their improvement as a person.

I remember a number of months ago trying to talk to them in serious. They were frustrated because they hated their job and we were trying to ascertain why. Like, whether it was just a terrible manager, the particular type of job, the customers, etc. After so much of this literally the only thing that was clear was that they hated working there. That's totally understandable; working sucks sometimes, it's alright to hate your job just because it involves doing work I guess. However, we kept talking to them and trying to figure out if there was anything else they wanted to try and do, such as do art or go learn things or what have you.

After another hour, it was clear we were getting nowhere. Xena obstinately refused any advice we offered. We were largely confused about this so we kept trying to figure out what was going on, and finally it reached a point where Xena was saying that they wanted to quit their job so they could go do nothing. They literally said something along the lines of “I want to do nothing and be paid for it.” Actually, this isn't extreme enough—they were implying that, if they in fact did stop working, the universe would conspire as such to make them successful somehow. This kind of illogic was enough to drive me up a wall, it was literally impossible to convince them that it would not work out the way they wanted. So eventually I washed my hands of the conversation and moved on after calling them lazy. There's only so much I can do I suppose.

Now, months later, Xena has predictably failed to improve. They're still working the same job but are becoming so disgruntled that they're threatening property destruction and violence against customers/coworkers. This is becoming more serious as time goes by but it's still not at the level that I've got to deal with it yet, so I'm trying not to think about it that hard. Honestly it wouldn't be that big of a deal to handle anyway—a warning and a ban if they don't stop, and then it's no one's problem.

Ost's temporary demodding also ended today; they’re back on the team. Ost, short for ostrichlittledungeon, is a #general pseudo-mod. They are also a participant in a couple of Homestuck fan music servers, Cool and New Music Team (CaNMT) and Land of Fans and Music (LOFAM). They're not unlike wheals, having a wide array of commentary on many things and being overall a reliable member of the team. Additionally, they seem to have a proclivity for finding very obscure and otherwise un-noteworthy internet phenomena and managing to appreciate them deeply. There's an old, commonly known meme called “Potato Knishes” about some odd character named Ratboy Genius. Most people watch that video and leave it at that, never to think about the oddity of what they've just seen, but not ost--they deliberately went and sought out more from the person who developed that video, and managed to find their discography. They even go so far as to say it's “genius song-crafting” (other people hold this sentiment, but ost was the first person to bring this to my attention). I personally don't see what the buzz is all about but that's the sort of thing they really appreciate. Their status as an esoteric memester is pretty well established at this point.

Ost actually brought themselves back for a few minutes earlier today to say something, which is troubling. I think there's a problem with the way we've organized the roles in the server, so I'm going to take a look at it and see if there's anything that can be optimized or changed around to make things more secure. We have a “raidmod” role that is given to especially trusted pseudo-mods, who will then assist the mods during raids. They are the only people aside from moderators with the ability to fully ban users from HSD.

Since the raids stopped being so frequent or intense a long time ago, it's less clear why we've kept the raidmod role around but it's not exactly hurting us either. WoC used it to unban himself from mspalit and ost used it to give herself access to illuminati hangout, but ost's offense was way less serious because they were due to be remodded today anyway. In fact, I guess this demonstrates that they can be trusted with the mantle; unlike WoC, they haven't abused it to really accomplish any ends. This is definitely a point in their favor.

Nothing else to report for today.

---

24^th of July 2017

Today was yet another quiet day for the most part. Not a lot happened except for an event on the subreddit actually, which then became relevant to the HSD through historical extension.

The event that happened today was a small comic that someone posted; this in itself is not unusual, the subreddit is somewhat frequently used to post original works or mirror them from Tumblr. This comic was 4 pages long and had one of the characters launch into a diatribe about “compulsory heterosexuality”. The author apparently intended this to actually be a joke instead of a lecture, but the punchline fell flat and the joke itself wasn't constructed well at all, if indeed that wasn't just an excuse for posting the material in the first place.

Whatever the case, it was not received well. The post has a negative score and the comments range from negative to outright scathing. The reason this is relevant is because one of the comments references another, similar comic posted months ago infamously entitled “Not On My Watch”.

Not On My Watch, or NOMW for short, was something that transpired throughout 2016 as a whole. It depicts the main character going on a ridiculous shooting spree and killing all of the characters in the comic that can even remotely be said to be involved in a gay relationship. With the nature of the comic and the community being what it is, it immediately started a comprehensive dispute that can only be considered war in our pocket of the fandom.

It was updated throughout the middle of the year and finally completed around the time I joined in October. The conflict occurred between two primary groups of people: those who thought its content was blatantly homophobic and grounds for being banned from the subreddit/discord, and those who thought it was distasteful yet acceptable shock humor. I personally found the comic distasteful (obviously, I don't approve of anyone killing anyone else), but it never seemed like much more than shock humor to me. To others though, it seemed to be explicit “anti-homosexual propaganda”. I'm not inventing this phrase, it was actually one of the main points used against its existence. There were significant calls to outright censor any appearance of the comic, which is not something Makin or even the rest of the mod team is okay with doing.

This comic is actually a significant reason why Elvish left the subreddit mod team and formed HVSD: to people like them, the comic was too gross an offense to abide by. Eventually the comic caused so much disruption of conversation that Makin finally had to get rid of it. It is now considered one of the few Taboo Topics; the severity of such a status is not to be understated, Makin and the rest of us are firmly against censoring conversation so the fact that it's needed to be relegated as such is a sort of monument to just how disruptive and polarizing NOMW can be.

Despite this status the comic is still mentioned occasionally, such as during today's brief nonsense on the subreddit. It's also a really quick and effective way to stir the pot when conversation lulls, although it's generally seen as unwise to start NOMW discourse because you can easily get banned for it. Still worth a laugh every once in a while though.

Not much else happened today; Jon Bois, the writer of 17776, released a Q&A and we briefly discussed some of his responses. Of particular note was a question regarding the future of humanity; in the story, all humans mysteriously become immortal, so over the course of hundreds to thousands of years, they strike out to achieve everything they can think of. For various reasons, they stop and then withdraw, seeking ways to “perfect” life on Earth. Makin and I, including some others, have serious personal problems with this kind of idea. We're all taken with colonization of other planets in the solar system and in the galaxy as a whole, we're concerned with the future of humanity as a species. Bois' answer indicates that he is more concerned about the spiritual and interpersonal aspects of life, which of course is fine. And as far as the story goes it's still great, it's just that the exact reasoning provided for its setting isn't very sympathetic to us. It's not like the end of Homestuck, which is more or less objectively poor in quality writing-wise.

These moments of clear-headed discussion are really important to me; the community comes together sometimes to discuss content like this and it's not disruptive or dramatic. I really enjoy that this place has been home to that sort of feeling and these kinds of people. Hopefully this continues; Alex will probably return to the server sometime soon and we're all silently waiting to see what the effects of this are. It may be fine, but we'll see for sure when the time comes.

---

25^th of July 2017

Today was interesting; Makin had one of his server wide polls to see if anyone has input on how to improve the server. I've mentioned before that he has these periodically, and will occasionally have a channel that is temporarily dedicated to discussing the results of the poll. This time it was rather straightforward so no discussion was really necessary, but the results were still fairly humorous.

The questions of this poll included: “Are there any channels you've muted?”; “Is there any reason in particular you've muted these channels and what would it take for you to unmute them?”; and “Are there any other suggestions you might have for improving the server?”

These questions are not nearly as exhaustive as some of the other polls he's conducted in the past, so this was a rather short ordeal comparatively speaking. The results as always were filled with jokes and nonsense, which makes this a little harder to do but also more enjoyable overall. In the “general suggestions” question we received, as always, a significant number of responses saying to demod Makin. I'm sure a healthy number of these responses are more or less jokes, but I'm also sure there are those that are genuine, and that troubles me. Other responses ranged from well thought out to incoherent or completely unrelated, and we even received a few song lyrics (including the theme to the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air).

Makin will take the suggestions that are serious and or memey responses, screencap them, and respond or otherwise make fun of them in the temporary channel he sets up for doing so. This is usually regarded as a Community Event and people enjoy it accordingly.

The one serious response I'm aware of that was actually taken into account was to consolidate rules. We had a system where we included spontaneous rule changes in pins instead of the channel descriptions, which is (in my opinion) still a useful tactic to employ when the rule change is temporary or extremely important. However, all long standing rules are supposed to be moved into channel descriptions instead, which is honestly more appropriate. No one is going to trawl through pins for possible rules they may have missed, better to include them in the spot where they're supposed to be in the first place.

That aside, not much else happened today. Yesterday I informed a few people I was keeping this journal and they have predictably started asking me to put things in here on their behalf, mostly as jokes (Red says “Today, LLF sucked.” and carlarc has requested that I say “carl is cool”. You're both welcome). Some people expressed that this was a neat idea, others think it's not really that important. Rune talked with me about it for a while, I think they had the idea that I'm afraid of the server dying. This may be true, but it's not the primary focus of the journal. I assured everyone who asked that this is just a bookkeeping effort, and that I hope the server of course remains active for a long time to come.

Frequently it's hard for myself and numerous other members to stop talking in the chat. It's currently 4:15 AM CST and the conversation has only just now stopped, despite most of the participants being Americans and thus way overdue for sleep. There is a common energy between all of us to continue talking for as long as possible, to which end all manner of things are brought up in an attempt to stall the inevitable end of a discussion. This often takes the form of parroting memes or “baity discussions”--the former on this occasion took the form of some Fesh Pince of Blair nonsense (look it up if you're not familiar, it's a classic) and the latter was the common and infamous case of 0.000.....1 = 0. This is a mathematical principle stating that a value infinitely small will be literally equivalent to zero (I'm probably mangling this description, again just look it up if you're not familiar).

The overall point is that such a line is usually baity enough to drag at least one person into a lengthy and more often than not heated discussion about the idea in question. In the case of 0.000....1 = 0, the discussion has occurred enough times that people have begun to recognize it and it's losing its effectiveness. It still pops up on occasion but it's not nearly as easy to start discourse using it as it used to be. Smarter individuals or those who are generally fond of japery and drama will find new ways to initiate such discussion, however—it's not exactly difficult to find a topic someone cares about and mangle it sufficiently. I've often been on the receiving end of this tactic, which is no small source of frustration at times, but ultimately I'm fine with it when it's only intended as a joke and not done through spite.

Nothing more for today.

---

26^th of July 2017

Today was a “good discourse day”. At one point in the afternoon, Makin and I got into a deeper discussion about the nature of truth. This came about because Makin made some broad assumptions about the motivations of people in general, and I went to great lengths to try and convey the idea that he might not actually know why all of these people do the things that they do. He has this tendency to reduce everything to its constituent parts, and I think it's hard for him to see the forest for the trees.

His overall argument was that, because the human brain is something that can be studied and understood, that all human interaction is therefore able to be studied and understood. While I agree with him in principle, I disagree with the idea that we can do this now in any sense. Some of the things he was saying about why people pursue art or put their own out there seemed to be based on his own motivations and feelings, and it bothered me that he was projecting in such a way.

I don't think I conveyed my point, and naturally the discussion got sidetracked into something else. We started to discuss the nature of science and what it does or does not seek to do. At one point the nature of his area of study, computer engineering and computer science, was brought up and I insinuated that computer science isn't actually a science. I regret this statement now, both after talking with him a bit and his linking an article explaining the nature of computer science in a more detailed fashion. I apologized for the statement, but he didn't seem bothered at all. I'm reminded that he appreciates argumentation like this, it's a kind of way to expose himself to the rigorous activity of self defense. He enjoys being forced to come up with explanations for what he likes and feels, as it helps him to cover gaps in his knowledge or rationalizations. I can definitely appreciate this mindset, although I feel as if the language barrier may interfere heavily at times.

At any rate, I feel as if the net result of the conversation was positive. It's always invigorating to have discourse that isn't motivated by feelings of antagonism or frustration. I guess at that point it isn't really discourse, it's simply a discussion. Whatever one might call it, it was nice. Other people also participated and managed to get their own viewpoints in at times as well, which is always refreshing to see.

Just a bit ago we had a problem with a user named Sora. They've had a long history on the server with experiencing debilitating depression and ranting at length in serious about how much they hate living. It's become something that we're all more or less wary of, and Sora's behavior manifests in strange ways sometimes.

For the course of about two months or so recently they championed this attitude that was positive but almost clearly not genuine. The idea of a positive attitude not being genuine struck a lot of people as a strange idea and myself and others who voiced concern were promptly shushed by people who felt that “fake it 'till you make it” was an acceptable coping mechanism. We went along with this for a while and admittedly it did seem as if it would be a consistent increase in mood for Sora; however, tonight that was proven wrong.

Sora is treated badly by their friends and family in various ways (which I will not go into detail about for privacy's sake), and tonight apparently the stress just became too much. Sora has, as they have done a few times in the past, brought up suicide as a possibility of dealing with their problems, which automatically puts most of us on High Alert mode.

For the last half hour we've been attempting to talk to Sora and bring them out of this mood, but unfortunately none of us are trained professionals. None of us are psychologists or therapists, especially not licensed to help people. We have no suicide specialists on hand to help deal with emergencies such as this. It's intensely frustrating to encounter a situation like this, it makes me feel helpless. Usually the people involved are delusional or distraught to the point of not being able to listen to reason, which makes it impossible to help them effectively. I've brought up the idea in modchat of seeking a specialist that may exist on the server already or elsewhere to deal specifically with such things, but there's no telling if that will be possible. At any rate it's clear to me that some sort of policy must be instated to help deal with such cases if they continue to increase in frequency, but otherwise I have no idea if anything will be done to help with these issues.

Nothing else to report for today.

---

30^th of July 2017

My access to the HSD is a bit spotty at the moment; I will be unable to personally keep track of any events happening up through the 4th or 5th of August. I will be asking another mod or a user I trust to keep an eye on the place and keep track of significant events to report to me.

In the meantime, this really has been a quiet week. Makin and Difarem are both taking care of things in real life as well. With the sudden lack of people, naturally the HSD is experiencing a shortage of discourse or problems. This has been kind of nice; the slowness is infrequent enough that it's not a serious problem. If this continues for a while, I'm not sure what might happen, but it could lead to people feeling bored and stirring trouble to alleviate the boredom.

There is a tendency among the younger users of the server to start talking about themselves in a more personal capacity. What I mean by this is that they start to flirt, basically. It's kind of an interesting display, if somewhat tempered by my own immediate annoyance. For what reason this annoys me I'm not sure—it may be my age is making me jaded or crotchety in response to such things or if I'm becoming more emotionally stunted, or perhaps I simply don't appreciate the unrestricted, public flirtiness these people display for each other. I'm not sure if this is a reasonable reaction or not; whatever the case, it's not just me who feels that way about it either.

The mod team collectively decided this behavior was disruptive a number of months ago. This is actually the reason we created #social, was because too many people were flirting and being open about themselves in mspa-lit. It's a very strange set of circumstances to me, personally, as the act itself isn't even that egregious. It's just that it tends to dominate the focus of a given conversation for a while, and Makin finds this distasteful (especially when he has something he wants to talk about instead). For that purpose #social is a containment channel, although the containment will often fail if no one is around to enforce it.

I don't usually have the heart to tell them to move, both because I'm not sure what constitutes needing to be moved and because I get complaints for actually requesting they do something. This sort of thing has been the source of problems before—people don't appreciate being told to relocate their conversations, even if it explicitly belongs in another channel. In particular, Tipsy has committed this conversational sin innumerable times already. The offending topics are usually one of two: the Dragon Ball series or Pokemon.

Tipsy is a definitive power user; her full handle, tipsyGnostalgic, is taken directly from Homestuck and she has a solid presence on the subreddit and Tumblr. As such, she's more or less a famed figure and lots of people recognize her. She’s a staunch advocate of LGBT rights and an avid gamer, complete with her own stream that she does occasionally. Like most regulars of mspa-lit, she is strongly opinionated on most things, although she is hard to convince to change her viewpoint on things sometimes. She always means well for people and wants to see the server improve, which I can sympathize with. Sometimes she can be a bit oblivious or hasty in her judgment of others though, which leads to difficulties when trying to discuss things. In fact, this tendency is what led Makin to leave the server for a few days last week.

The amount of times that Tipsy has brought up the aforementioned things in mspa-lit and dominated conversation for ages is unreal. I'm honestly kind of impressed that she manages to find so much to say about it. Unfortunately this makes it difficult for others to try and talk about what they want. If it becomes clear to us that she is disrupting conversation or keeping it from advancing into something else, we will tell her to move the conversation to #gaming or #cartoon-tv. However, once a conversation is told to move, it usually does not survive—I guess it's understandable that people complain when being told to move their conversation because it's usually a death sentence for whatever topic was being discussed.

Putnam is also guilty of this with Dwarf Fortress. Both he and Tipsy are just really enthusiastic about these things but they clutter up the channel for hours with their stuff. I'm sure this also happens with many other people and I would be surprised if I haven't personally committed the offense at least once, but they pop out at me as the worst offenders of this rule by far.

My unwillingness to enforce this rule is also a problem to be fair. I should be taking charge more often and setting aside my skittishness in regards to telling people what to do. I've been told before that my ability to lead is in question because I'm too nice. While I refuse to stop being kind to others of course, I can still do so while being more firm in my position and authority. The users of HSD tend to be more skeptical and difficult than the people from Twitch Plays Pokemon were; they need a stronger hand to deal with them than I was required to use those days. This leads me to two possible conclusions: the way I present myself as a part of the moderation team may be fine since it is ultimately a team, and my perspective fills any blind spots in situations that may require my perspective; alternately it may be time to rethink how I approach situations as a moderator here.

I guess time will tell which of these are true, or if it matters at all. Nothing else to report today.

---

6^th of August 2017

Toast didn't do a very good job of keeping notes unfortunately. However, not much happened while I was gone anyway. The most notable events were some discussion about a writer for the website/news source Polygon, and a new rule in #serious that I helped write anyway.

The writer is a man named Nick Robinson, who is undergoing some newly developed controversy. I'm not sure why this became a topic of discussion for the discord server in the first place, but it blew up a little bit because there is disagreement between a few of us as to how it should be treated/handled. The controversy itself is that Nick Robinson has consistently been a weird fellow, often tweeting things that are vaguely creepy.

Recently, however, the creepiness has been amplified by a number of people coming forward and describing personal interactions with Robinson that transcend simple creepiness and enter the territory of insidiousness. The schism is about whether or not these reports should be taken with a grain of salt; myself and a few other people think that there is at least some credence to these stories since there are many of them all coming out, but there are reservations among people like Makin who think these claims borne of jealousy (Robinson is apparently one of the more famed writers for Polygon, although I personally don't consider this status worthy of note). Cait’s position is that these stories are likely, but concedes to Makin that they cannot be verified--it’s important to note that at this point there are no available textlogs or other evidence that might firmly settle the matter, instead we are working with testimony from a number of individuals involved.

At this point it would be worth describing Cait. Also known as ndividedbyzero, Cait is like a calmer Tipsy—she has very solid, reliable opinions on most things, and is geared towards LGBT rights and equality. She is often looked to for input from Makin and myself; I'd say she's probably one of the most highly regarded regulars of the community. Last I checked she has no interest in moderation however. She gets along famously with Tipsy and Nights, among many others of the server. Naturally she didn't like how WoC handled things; this sort of clash became predictable but amusing in some ways, depending on the situation.

Lambda speaks less frequently in mspa-lit than elsewhere. She is the running head alongside Cait and a few others of LOFAM, the Land of Fans and Music server. Both LOFAM and CaNMT are dedicated to creating fan music of Homestuck, and they've gotten extremely good at doing so. LOFAM is in the process of preparing for the release of their 4th album, which will include a preposterous amount of music. I don't recall exactly but it's something along the lines of 6 hours. I could be wrong, I'll update that figure if I ever find out. Lambda herself is oriented similarly to Cait, but is less calm about it; she suffers from a tendency to get overheated discussing things, especially involving education or LGBT rights. She is also outspokenly dirty minded; I've had some conversations with her in the LOFAM server's NSFW channel, and there have been some incredibly disturbing but hilarious conversations that have come out of it. I miss talking there a lot.

Moving back to the HSD, we’ve got a new #serious rule. I mentioned before that Sora's increase in suicide discussion was coming to be viewed as problematic, and over the course of my disappearance this only seemed to worsen. In fact there have been a number of people, 3 or 4, who have also started using #serious to rant at length about their personal problems. This would be more or less fine if they also listened to people, but they aren't interested—generally they are simply looking for a vent and don't want to be told how to fix their problems. Between this and the fact that no one on the staff or in general is trained to handle suicidal people appropriately, all discussion of immediate suicidal tendencies and experiences are forbidden. I personally drafted the rule change up and passed it by the rest of the mod team to make sure it was as inoffensive and thorough as possible. All things considered I think we did a good job; there have been no complaints of censorship or that we don't care for the people who use the server, so I assume that the wording of the new rule is acceptable to everyone who cares.

With this, hopefully the problem is resolved. No more to report for today.

---

9^th of August 2017

It's been a tough few days. Makin is still not back and we're experiencing a heavier than usual amount of shitposting in #general. There has been some tension between mods about this problem, as well as other things. Medixum is upset at the way the Twonks situation was handled, although I think we managed to convince him of our side of things.

Actually, it may be a good opportunity to describe Medixum in some detail. Medi is the #serious pseudo, which is a tough and often thankless or aggravating job. His main objective is to let the discussion continue no matter what, save for keeping it peaceful and civil. Otherwise, all bets are off, and the results are often times annoying to the core. If two people are discussing a preferred romantic pairing between various characters (called a “ship”) and it gets heated enough to warrant being moved to serious, it doesn't matter that the subject material itself is inherently ridiculous—poor Medi must deal with it. Given to being calm, uually he's pretty elegant and takes such things in stride, but occasionally it becomes too much for him to handle and an outburst ensues. I've seen this once personally, where Medixum yells at whoevers arguing about “dumb shit in serious” and tells them to fuck off elsewhere. Aside from these outbursts, Medi is usually pretty quiet in general, only occasionally commenting on things, and can usually be found hanging out in #social, which is obviously a far less stressful environment than his native channel. Sometimes when server chaos approaches a high, Medixum will seem to take active delight in the confusion and frustration of people running amok in the server—this odd streak in him has given me pause before, but I'm not sure if he actively delights in the misery of others in these cases or if he's just basking in the glory of hazy confusion. Certainly an odd one, but by no means a bad fellow I suppose.

Putnam is also going fucking crazy for some reason. Flare was finally full banned again for a month, which we thought would mollify Putnam. Unfortunately today he does not appear sated at all; we've been in a discussion for the last hour or so now about random crap that he's dissatisfied with and it's seriously beginning to annoy some of us. I've taken the opportunity to dip out and fill in this journal a little bit.

I'm worried because I don't know how to assuage their feelings sometimes. Putnam, Cait, and a few others all have cogent points that they argue about, but those points rely on Makin being a faithful operator and caring about administering the place in a proper fashion. The problem with this is that I (and many others) do not trust him to have good faith about running the place in the way an admin should. He is prone to making hasty statements and relying on some extremely questionable conversational tactics so that he can “win” at discussions. I've made my position on this topic clear numerous times but it never feels like it'll improve sometimes. I can never be sure if Makin legitimately wants to run the place well or if he's treating it as his own personal playground.

Today I lost my patience with Putnam over it too. I tried to avoid being too detrimental to the conversation but I feel as if my temper has been really short lately. This may be due to some stuff in real life as well, but in the case of this conversation today regarding Flare/Hiveswap it was simply that I'm tired of this discussion cropping up over and over again. It seems as if any time any Hiveswap news comes out at all, or especially if none comes out when it's supposed to, this discourse is started up again involving people whining about Hiveswap and people whining about people whining about Hiveswap. It's a really pitiable and aggravating conversation to have every single Wednesday.

Not much else is happening thankfully, so that's all to report for today.

---

13^th of August 2017

Makin returned today, and activity has appropriately increased as a result. It has also been easier to discuss certain things with him since he's no longer restricted to mobile typing and all that. There was actually a pretty productive conversation where we came to a common understanding about Hiveswap and its development issues.

Earlier in the night, I had to go and ban a user named Elle because she's underaged, as in under the age of 13, which is against Discord's Terms of Service. She was pretty understanding about the whole debacle, which made it feel worse. We had a user named Teal a long time ago who was far worse about it.

Teal is an 11 year old who spent a long time going around and shitting up various channels and trying to gain access to the NSFW server. This went on for months, maybe over a year even, before we finally realized what a problem it was and decided to ban her. She still lurks in many splinter servers, which is bothersome but not our problem.

Due to the situation with Elle, I talked it over with the other mods and decided to put out a general reminder with the people in the main channels, namely gen, altgen, and social. I mentioned the ToS rule saying that if you're under 13 you can't be using Discord, but made it clear that I wasn't targeting anyone in particular or trying to out anyone. This is the same policy we have for the NSFW server, where we give everyone the benefit of the doubt but treat ambiguous jokes seriously. As I said to the others, “People who don't want to be banned from the NSFW server don't joke about being under 18.” It feels harsh but I'm hoping that people spreading this news via word of mouth will prevent people from speaking up about it in stupid ways.

Of course, the official policy is that we should be actively banning people under the age of 13, but that's an extraordinary amount of work and is honestly a bit too hunty for our liking. I left the reminder open ended purposefully so people have the opportunity to maintain themselves even if they're actually underaged. Kind of a weird set up but it's worked for us so far. Like I said, if someone does reveal their true age and they're not old enough we ban them, but otherwise we just don't ask unless it becomes prudent.

Since Makin came back from vacation today, it calls to mind for some people the last time he came back from a vacation, which spurred a community event called The Reckoning. I've asked Toast to comment on what this event was exactly, since he was around for it. Taken verbatim:

it was like makin came back from vacation
and wanted to do something super zany
so he unmodded everyone, locked all channels but gen and the channel for nominating mods, and deleted all roles
in about may 2016

There has been a lot of speculation as to when “The Reckoning 2.0” might occur. Makin himself frequently referenced it as a means to appear crazy and unpredictable, but also to maintain control over the more problematic elements of the server. For example, he would mention using The Reckoning to systematically get rid of large numbers of alt accounts, as per a message dated 12/29/2016: “if you don't have an alt in the server by the time of the Reckoning 2.0 then you have nothing to worry about”. Unfortunately as of today, it seems as if no real plans to enact The Reckoning 2.0 have come about, or it may still be in the works. Makin also references a Master Plan sometimes, which may or may not be related to a new Reckoning. It may also be completely fake and yet another layer to his unpredictability. No one really knows at this point.

Of course, the likelihood that anything like this will happen is completely unknown at any given point. The Reckoning could happen again tomorrow or it might never happen, it just depends on Makin's mood. It is very unlikely that we'll receive any warning for it, which makes the possibility more exciting. Part of me hopes that it does occur, if nothing but for some turbulence to shake up the server a little bit. I think I do enough of a good job that I would be reaccepted as a mod anyway, but even if I wasn't I would still have a good time with it. That might actually be a blessing in disguise anyway, it'd mean I don't have to deal with anyone's petty affairs anymore. But, I would also be unable to legitimately help in some cases, which is not what I would prefer. Guess we'll just have to see what the future holds.

Wheals wanted me to include a note about his color in the Discord server. Every person has the opportunity to adopt a color role in the server, and for the vast majority of people we have a list of colors based on characters in Homestuck. Pseudo-mods get to pick custom roles since they all get individualized roles based on the channel they moderate. Full mods ironically do not have custom roles, since we all share the same one, so typically we just have regular color roles as well. For instance, I have a generic green role called “maryam”. Up until today, Wheals had “hellajeff”, which was a piercing blue that was not very easy on the eyes. He cycled through the other blue options, being “serket” and “ghostyTrickster”, but neither of these were appealing either. Instead, he adopted the “video-pseudo” role, which actually wasn't being used, and gave that a custom color. He wanted this to be marked down so that we could see how long it would take for Makin to notice and revoke the privilege.

Wheals is a really reliable person, although I don't talk to him terribly often. As a result, my knowledge of his interests is halting at best and fairly incomplete. He seems to participate in discussions often enough; he displays meaningful commentary on all manner of things, ranging from video games to music to sports, etc. He's been a member of the mod team for a while, and I think at one point he was able to edit the emojis that the server had at its disposal (although Makin disliked having them changed so much that he eventually removed this permission). I view Wheals as a stable and personable guy, easy to get along with and definitely responsible enough for the position.

Today I was asked to share the journal with a large number of people, which I did. These people include Toast, Red, Barry, OneDragonArmy (Oda), Nights, Ivy, Putnam, Cait, Somerandomguy, Dupeb, Wheals, Ngame, Dap, minish, sea hitler, Tensei, and Makin himself. The response has been generally positive, and a few of them actually gave me some corrections regarding the historicity of certain things such as Talons/Itoan. I have since gone back and made the corrections to avoid inaccuracies. Thanks guys. It was also requested that I pass along these tidbits:

“add in that I said that ur a nerd drew” - nights
“'Barry is the best in the server' add that” - Barry
and a special message from the big man himself:
You're welcome guys. Nothing else to report for today.

---

14^th of August 2017

At one point in the last couple of months, it became evident to a number of mods that we would all be relatively close to each other geographically, being myself, Ngame, Wheals, Sea Hitler, and WoC. Thus we made plans to meet up in the Washington D.C. area, an event that I was actually looking forward to. Unfortunately, as time went by and the appointed date came closer, it felt increasingly apparent that this wasn't going to work. For one, not enough communication about it was occurring, and I'm not financially capable of pulling off the trip right now. This is more or less okay, we all recognized that the chance to pull this off wasn't very likely. Besides, there will surely be better opportunities in the future. Rune often travels to Washington D.C., I'm sure that it would be easy to implement them into the plan somehow if we do it right. Maybe some time next year.

After showing all of those people this journal yesterday, I received some good feedback on things to correct, and have since been taking care of minor notes that were inaccurate or needed to be tweaked in general. Unfortunately, a side effect was that Makin decided to change the name of the private mod channel from #illuminati-not-hangout to #modchat and #spoopy_ghost_channel is now #userlog because he thinks that “it looks silly in drew's journal”. I was afraid of this sort of thing happening, it really jeopardizes the integrity of the nature of this journal. I made it clear that I don't like the change, especially in light of the fact that it's my observations that caused them, but I guess there's no helping it at this point. I hope the names are changed back, or at least get changed to something a bit more organic later.

Today, a peculiar circumstance arose where James Roach made a tweet that said simply, “big news incoming”. Makin found this and posted it to the server, which naturally caused a fierce increase in hype for Hiveswap news. There was significant excitement about this, both from myself and many others. After a few minutes though, Roach posted a picture of a cat and nothing else. This led to a lot of confusion and disappointment. This disappointment is the result of a lot of layers of miscommunication.

It's important to note that James Roach is not an official spokesperson for Hiveswap dev team despite working on the game. It even says on his twitter that he is specifically not able to speak in any official capacity for What Pumpkin. This alone should have precluded us from becoming excited, and yet after the severe lack in any significant communication from WP, it's also not surprising, even if misguided, that we would latch on to any hope of “big news” coming out. Unfortunately it wasn't just a private disappointment to ourselves: Minish and I'm sure at least one other left angry tweets in response to Roach's innocent tweet of the cat that was frankly embarrassing for us as a group. Tensions/relations between Roach and the HSD are notoriously bad, and this just made it that much worse. Overall it is a very awkward and dumb ordeal and I think we all agree we would like to put it behind us.

On an unrelated note, there was some more talk about altgen's position in the community today. There has been a lot of controversy about it in the past because it harbors some of the most repeat offenders and notorious shitposters of the entire server, which automatically gives it a negative reputation. However, sometimes an errant epithet or other manner of speech that indicates radicalization may occur. I'm personally comfortable with the conclusion that these incidents are not indicative of real efforts to cause disharmony or racism or what have you, but are instead just an extension of the “no holds barred” nature of the channel.

The exact nature of when we should interfere is unclear; as I've stated before in this document the fellow mods and I do not appreciate or advocate censorship, especially not of simple jokes. For some reason though, there has been considerable pushback at times regarding keeping altgen around. I've also explained in a little detail why we keep it around, but I guess the nature of that channel means that we will always have a problem with people wanting it to be destroyed.

Earlier in the day there were a number of people in #serious who, at the risk of sounding conceited, were woefully under informed about the topic they were discussing. I could tell Oda, Rune, and a couple of others were getting legitimately agitated at dealing with their ignorance, so I decided to take a peek and see if anything needed to be done. What I saw was kind of interesting: they were having a discussion about white privilege, which is almost always a powder keg waiting to happen. This brand of identity politics is important to a lot of people on the server since we're an inherently diverse group; although I don't necessarily care much for identity politics myself, I recognize their importance and utility in various discussions or situations.

I stepped in because the people who were causing a disturbance wanted “proof” of stuff like “white privilege”, or at the very least for Oda and others to explain themselves fully. No offense to those involved but the discussion was not progressing in an effective manner. Thankfully I was able to phrase myself in such a way that I feel like I genuinely got through to them, at least in some small way. It was gratifying to see them make realizations about the way culture and society works on a more fundamental level. I also ended up discussing subjects like the reputability of news media sources and North Korea's current presence in politics with them. Obviously I'm not an expert in any of these matters but I've gone out of my way to inform myself to at least the bare minimum, and I think I helped encourage these guys to do the same for themselves. I can only hope I did anyway—they seemed kind of recalcitrant about it up to the very end when I went to bed, but there is the possibility that they will learn from these experiences. It would make my job and so-called influence worthwhile if they do.

Nothing more to report for today.

---

15^th of August 2017

I want to take a little bit of time to explain a couple of the regulars that I haven't touched upon yet, namely Gnawms and Olkiswerve.

Gnawms is a moderator for the Undertale Discord Server, a position that nets him a lot of targeted jokes and sympathy. Some of the stories he has told us about his time there have been simultaneously riotous and horrifying. Recently he told us about the NSFW section of the Undertale server; in a fandom that is infamous for being obsessed with perverting its characters in obtuse and often strange or even disturbing ways, it is not unexpected that something dedicated to such content would be a source for some equally disturbing stories.

Today he mentioned that a reporter from Kotaku had come by and asked to interview some of the people on his server. It's a strange circumstance that was amusing to some of us; I believe Makin mentioned he had been asked for an interview by them at one point, although it may have been another news group. Gnawms himself has a penchant for bringing up very NSFW and intense subject material frequently, a habit I have no doubt is due at least in part to his time on the Undertale server. Or perhaps he's always been this way and was just well suited for the job as a result? In either case, he has a fondness for this and posting really shitty memes on occasion, or tossing out cheap insults to people who are behaving particularly foolishly in the chat at the time. It's usually pretty interesting whenever he comes around. All of this suggests a generally impish demeanor, which is nonetheless amusing whenever he decides to drop by.

Olkiswerve, or just Olki, is a fine fellow. I personally appreciate him a lot—he and I have some rapport due to similar musical interests. Olki himself has organized and produced music for an album on CaNMT called CANWAVE and its sequel CANWAVE 2. I'm not personally into music all that much, but these albums were both of a genre that I actually enjoy, so they're some of the few from CaNMT that I've listened to extensively. It was pretty exciting to learn that Olki was explicitly in charge of creating those albums, and when I found out it led to a pretty amicable conversation between the two of us. He even sent me a small album for my birthday, a present that I appreciate immensely. Olki can often be found in social flirting with some of the other regulars there, which has solidified his stance as a sweetheart in the community.

My journal was brought up again in conversation today, and at one point Gnawms supplied a comment that transformed it into a discussion about the eventual end of this server. The idea of this happening at some point has been brought up before, both in the community and in this journal itself. It seems obvious to most of us that the server will fade some day, although none of us could say when or how. It's always a sobering conversation when it comes up, although Olki stepped in to change the conversation to something a little more lighthearted, namely the ownership of the server.

Occasionally the topic of Makin owning the server comes up, and the possibility of it transferring to someone else is brought up as well almost every time. As time has gone by, partially as a result of the April Fool's Day Prank (which I still must explain at some point), it has become an oft-repeated joke that I am being groomed by Makin to have the server transferred over to me, or that I will otherwise inherit the server somehow. This used to distress me more because I didn't want to jeopardize my position as a mod, but I've since become used to it since Makin plays along. A common response of his consists of “drew will never get the server”, and thus the joke continues.

More recently today, there was another conversation with Putnam concerning Makin's behavior, in which Putnam desired some validation that Makin's behavior towards others (especially Putnam at times) is reprehensible and that Putnam is not overreacting by being upset over it. It took a painstaking hour or so to come to a more or less common understanding of how we feel about this. Putnam's initial displeasure at Makin's behavior is understandable and I would go so far as to say I agree, often times I don't enjoy how Makin treats others. However, in his desire to validate his feelings, the lengths to which he pursued the conversation seemed far and away an overreaction. It was honestly extremely tiresome to try and fulfill the conversation to its fullest extent.

In addition, Makin came on shortly after it seemed the conversation was winding down, and I was afraid that the conversation would never cease. Indeed, at first it seemed like Makin was going to agitate the conversation much worse than it already was, but after a short time it became clear that he was trying to reach a common understanding with Putnam as well. They both try to operate on principles of rationality, but Putnam's friendship with people who explicitly don't operate on rational principles leads to some strain. It seems as if Makin is trying to warn Putnam away from double standards, and even said as much at one point during the conversation, but the true extent of Makin's desires or motives are honestly still a mystery to most people, especially myself. The more important point here is that their conversation was able to proceed in a well mannered and constructive fashion, which is always something that I will be thankful for.

Honestly I have to wonder if there is too much dedication to Putnam and Makin's dealings with each other in this journal. I hope that they settle down soon. Nothing else to report for today.

---

16^th of August 2017

An amazing thing happened today. I've mentioned before that What Pumpkin? is the company that Hussie established to take care of Homestuck branding, such as shirts and other merchandise. However, there is another company called that is also licensed to sell Homestuck merchandise, called We Love Fine (there's actually even one more called Topataco, but that's not really important right now). We Love Fine brands itself as a merch company “for fans, by fans”, boasting a significant array of products that are actually designed by the members of various communities.

WLF releasing new products is always noteworthy to us, and it's usually announced pretty quickly when we become aware that they've added more products to sell. Today is such a day, with WLF announcing the release of a couple of Homestuck body pillows. Body pillows themselves are the subject of innumerable jokes already, so the announcement was doomed to derision from the start. To make matters infinitely worse, though, the people that were chosen to be on the body pillows were two of the most reviled characters in the entire comic.

It's almost impressive how bad the coordination is, which has led many of us, including myself, to speculate that WLF chose this mix of characters on purpose to maximize the potential controversy. For many hours after the original post came out, there has been an unceasing tide of negative comments aimed at WLF for “glorifying horrible characters”, without going into too much detail. Based on some choice screenshots that have been provided to us, we've come to the agreement that the reception is skewed about 60 or 70% overwhelmingly negative, with the remaining responses being split between neutral or positive.

On the other hand, there is a lot of indication from various people, including Makin that this selection of characters was unavoidable. Since WLF is based on fan content, what may have happened is that there was a length of time where designs for body pillows could be submitted, and then after the submissions close the suggestions they get are reviewed for quality and suitability. When they were done reviewing the submissions, the two we have now were the only ones appropriate for sale.

Whatever the reason for its occurrence, there is of course the clear sentiment from some in the HSD that this decision was terrible. Still others are happy about it, but I would say the vast majority of us are more or less neutral. Most of the people in mspa-lit, including myself, are enjoying the animated and almost vitriolic responses, much for the same reasons one enjoys watching a bar brawl after a football game. For us who aren't that fazed by the selection of characters, we recognize that the choice is a poor one but can't bring ourselves to care overly much because the nature of these characters is obviously fictional. We treat this with the same kind of questioning amusement as we would a Doctor Doom or Lex Luthor body pillow, for instance; it's certainly strange and arguably distasteful, but not something that anyone really deserves to be vilified over.

There was also some speculation that this is what we would be receiving instead of an interview, which managed to set off discourse almost immediately. It never fails; Wednesday brings this conversation to the table every single time. Eventually an interview did come out, but by the time it happened the damage was already done. It's progressed from being an amusing pattern to an immensely tiring one, by dint of too much repetition.

I spent a lot of recently trying to come to a common understanding with the main perpetrators of the “anti-circlejerk” argument, Cait and Putnam, regarding who is actually bashing What Pumpkin unnecessarily. After a lot of miscommunication and misunderstanding, it was evident to all involved that the complaints about people whining harshly and unfairly were not even centric to the HSD itself, but rather were focused towards people in the Homestuck fandom at large, such as on Tumblr, Reddit, and Twitter. This was pretty frustrating for myself for a number of reasons, particularly because if this is the case it doesn't answer the question of why What Pumpkin will not initiate communication with us, “us” being the HSD specifically.

The topic has been brought up before a couple of times, but there is some indication that the HSD may be the largest centralized repository for Homestuck fans left. Fans do exist in other pockets of the internet, but they are not organized—rather they are scattered about, with no collective power available to them. The subreddit and the HSD, since they are related, together comprise a group of about 25,000 people, give or take. While hardly representative of the total number of Homestuck fans that may exist in general that is still a very sizeable block of people, and it confuses me that What Pumpkin has not attempted to establish at least the semblance of some rapport with us. It would significantly promote brand loyalty and assure that there is, at the very least, a number of people who are guaranteed to buy Hiveswap when it is released.

To this day no communication has really occurred, for what reasons I can't really assess in their entirety. This fact has bothered me consistently, because it feels insanely obvious that having such a relationship between the HSD and WP would be mutually beneficial. Unfortunately I guess the devil is in the details for this particular scenario, and it doesn't do me much good either to worry about it. I did harangue the other mods once or twice, attempting to convince them that trying to strike up relations with WP was a good idea. Their inaction is not a sign that they disagree, I believe that they do think it's a good idea. The reality is simply that WP does not communicate well with fans about such things.

It has been said by Makin that non-disclosure agreements are what prevents the workers of WP from reaching out to fans, although Makin will not, or simply cannot, release where he got this information. We thus have no ability to verify this (I believe anyway; he may have mentioned that this information is available if you know where to look for it but none of us taken him up on that).

Nothing more to report for today.

---

18^th of August 2017

Today was not the greatest it could have been.

Several months ago, LLF and I decided to try and start an activity wherein we and anyone who wanted could watch movies or shows together. It was a collaborative effort, which each of us dividing the responsibilities to try and make things as easy as possible for everyone. Despite some frequent difficulties it was enjoyable, and often enough we had a sizable number of people joining us for whatever it was we decided to watch.

As things go, people stopped showing up or we ran out of ideas for what to watch, and we effectively disbanded. I confess that I lost interest myself, although I'm not sure why—by all accounts I enjoyed the activity greatly. None of us questioned it too much though, at least at the time. Months passed with no reconvening of this group, rendering the community streams the only way to enjoy a similar quality of entertainment. For a time this was fine—too much of a good thing is a bad thing as well, I suppose.

Very frequently though, the subject of movies or television crops up in the HSD, and it is often a fine time rabble rousing on each other for what our favorite movies are, perceived poor taste, and other assorted conventional things you make fun of each other for. In the course of these discussions it was discovered that Nights has never seen an incredible number of films that are thoroughly ensconced in popular culture, among them Star Wars and Harry Potter. Naturally, we wanted to rectify this horrid injustice, and it was thus that movie night was revived.

The task was often up to me to find a way to help everyone watch these things—we have a common streaming platform, but so far I have sourced all material myself and made sure that it is accessible to everyone. While exhausting, it was clearly worth it; the Star Wars stream was an immensely popular event, which I'm sure that everyone who participated remembers fondly still. In this way, Movie Night grew from just being a friendly showing to catch Nights up to speed into something that we wanted to make more inclusive and enjoyable.

After we completed Star Wars and a few other movies, we turned our attention away from movies for a while, but then rejuvenated the idea and even doubled down on it; I was personally tired of having to go through a ludicrous number of splinter servers to inform people that movies were beginning. It was thus that I conceived, ironically, another server for the purpose of making this task easier.

This may be that principle of too much of a good thing at play; it feels as if the interest that people display in movie night is inversely proportional to the amount of work put into organizing and setting up the related events. It's kind of frustrating to see it work out this way; I may be judging prematurely, but it is nothing short of agitating to go through such painstaking effort only for others to flake out in the end.

To make matters worse, I think I meddled in matters that were not strictly my business. I'm friends with both Nights and Red, and without going into overt detail the exact nature of their friendship has been strained for a rather long time. They were both fond members of movie night, however, so I wanted to see if there was some way I could help. After I created the movie server, they both were happy to help setting things up, so along with a couple others I modded them both—the hope was that they would be able to work together and eventually overcome whatever weird and disruptive nuances there might be to their friendship.

Unfortunately, the exact opposite happened. In the midst of a longer argument about scheduling, Red started to cross a line and the nature of the conversation shifted from one of mutual understanding to one of enmity. The long and short of it is that she was removed from the team and shortly thereafter she removed herself from HSD and all of the related splinter servers I'm aware of. After so long of coaxing her back and attempting to understand her thought process, this is pretty upsetting—a member of the community, who was already driven out once, is now gone a second time due to what feels like totally unworthy circumstances. It's maddening trying to keep things harmonious at the best of times, and I'm afraid that this is one of those situations where it crossed a threshold and was officially beyond saving. What's worse, I feel as if I'm personally responsible for this debacle, seeing as how I tried to draw them closer. I should have realized that this was probably unwise, but as it is said hindsight is 20/20. Realistically I understand that I'm not actually solely to blame for this event transpiring—Red actively engaged in multiple places besides Movie Night, and I'm sure the nature of her interactions with people was turbulent in far more than just the one place. Doesn't make it any less unsatisfying though.

I have no idea where this conflict will go from here, and I can only hope that it is effectively eradicated in some way or another. I feel as if it has cast a shadow over today, and now I feel vaguely worried about all manner of things concerning the HSD. For instance, over the last week or so it has felt as if the server is more quiet than usual, which of course is fine. However, now I am exceedingly worried about it—the signs of impending community death are not present, and yet I can't stop myself from feeling that underlying tension, the idea that it may all be gone soon. I assume that everyone going back to school is negatively affecting the patterns of social involvement I'm used to as well. Whatever the reason for the slowness, combined with the events of today it has instilled a very specific feeling of dreariness. I'm going to hope that tomorrow turns better.

Nothing more to report for today.

---

19^th of August 2017

A new channel went up today, the ramifications of which are still not fully understood: #pins was created around noon, EST. The idea of it is based on the fact that each channel already has a pinning system, where a mod can take a comment and pin it so everyone who visits the channel can access it. This is usually reserved for funny or important comments. #pins is a system where the community itself can pin things from other channels using reactions. If a message garners ten “pin reactions”, then it will be posted by the bot in #pins. Ceru has been working on a function for Aradiabot for the express purpose of facilitating this, and it can also be extended to other servers who want to create a similar channel.

The number of pins required to make Aradiabot post something can be changed but is typically 10. Considering there are about 1,000-1,500 people active, this runs the risk of brigading. Indeed, when the channel went up it presented some interesting difficulties.

Altgen is not allowed to make additions to #pins because of their reputation and nature as a memetic hazard. This did not deter them, as they simply went to voicechat or botspam-radio to pin things instead. Also after a little time had passed and people grew more aware of the pinning system, #pins underwent an explosion with people pinning things left and right, for absolutely no reason. I was away while this happened but more than several dozen pins went up in the span of a couple hours. Coupled with some difficulties in the coding leading to things such as a message getting posted multiple times, some messages not appearing correctly, and other such shenanigans, the entire ordeal was insanely prone to abuse and of course a frenzied mess.

Since then it's calmed down a little, and the future of the channel isn't clear. It experiences activity but there's not a lot of understanding just yet as to what the “right amount of activity” should be. The number of required pins may be lowered to 5 to facilitate more frequent posting, which might in turn encourage more people to use the pin system anyway. If the threshold is too high then no one will bother since it'll be too difficult to pin anything.

We'll see what the future holds. Nothing more to report for today.

---

20^th of August 2017

There's a user in general now named Tainted Angel who has been the subject of a little controversy. Tainted Angel, or TA for short, is one of the most notable gen regulars through sheer force of presence alone. It feels as if she has manifested a significant following about her, which is a result of of her posting tendencies. She is very nice to other users and is the de facto leader of gen regulars. However she is quite young, which might be the contributing factor to some problems we had to confront her about today.

For the longest time she would greet people joining the server, saying “Welcome! Please read channel descriptions for rules.” or some variation thereof. At first there was nothing else that did this, so Ceru added a welcome message to Aradiabot which now greets anyone who joins the server. However, even after this was instated, TA kept telling people the same thing. To make matters worse, she also named herself “Botspam Pseudo Mod” for months, which definitely rubbed some of the mods wrongly. She was told to stop this, and after taking a break during the summer she did come back with her current handle, but she never stopped giving newcomers the welcome message.

Ost, the general-pseudo, was the one who initially told TA to stop posting these welcome messages, and to replace this TA started greeting people by telling them to read her fan adventure instead. This is definitely not appropriate—the server has strict rules about shilling your own works (Griever being the main exception). This is due to the fact that fanventures are so common that, if we were to allow anyone to advertise them with no oversight, the practice would be so frequent and annoying that it would surely displease everyone involved. There are sanctioned ways to advertise your adventure, but TA's method of delivering it to whoever joins definitely does not fall under that umbrella.

I'm personally not that upset by TA's tendency to welcome new people, but between that and the Botspam Pseudo Mod handle, I and other mods felt she was trying to assert some semblance of authority over #general, which was categorically unacceptable. When I learned that she started shilling her adventure to newcomers after being told not to give the canned welcome message, I decided it was time to intervene; for some reason no one had talked to her about this at length yet.

Thus began a somewhat lengthy exchange where I acted as a messenger between TA and the mods who were more upset at the behavior in question. Unfortunately TA was not persuaded to agree with us explicitly, but the behavior was still inappropriate and the justification for rules placed on people is not contingent on their understanding of them. I feel as if the communication aspect of this could have been handled differently, but I'm not sure if the problem would be addressed properly otherwise.

On a lighter note, some rather interesting information cropped up today regarding a nigh mystical random that we encountered at the beginning of June, a guy named kill40000. This person appeared as if from nowhere—as Tensei succinctly describes him, kill40000 was a “legendary one hit wonder user”. Without warning on the 9th of June, this enigmatic piece of shit joined and immediately began to post in #gaming. The content of their messages was barely coherent, defying any sort of attempt to objectively parse what was being said. Their first message was, and I quote: “killkillkillkill ill kill any1 here in any game no 1 can fking kill me ill kill ANY ONE who says they can fkin kill me I dare u to kill me ANY game lets go ill fking KILL u ANY Fking game I WILL kill u," and so on. They have almost 150 messages on the HSD, all consisting of this brand of pseudo-English, and all are roughly about the same thing; after some deliberating, the rest of us figured out that this guy was challenging people to face him in literally any video game.

We watched this spectacle in fascination—and at the time intense dislike—for some time. We did not fully appreciate what we had, and kill40000 was gaming banned after a few hours of threatening people wildly and other inane nonsense. We were content with leaving it at that, but then after I banned him kill40000 created another Discord server, appropriately called “The REAL homestuck discord gaming channel”, and sent out invite links to random people on the server. He even sent one to me, prefaced with the now immortalized quote:

Theres an insane bastard admin on the loose
in the gaming discord
banning INNOCENT people
im trying to free as many as u can

and then immediately asked me if I could “handle this situation” and get him unbanned from #gaming.

Unfortunately, since shilling servers and other things like that in PMs is not allowed, he had to be completely server banned. It wasn't until a couple months later that we started to really appreciate what we had lost in kill40000. While we were extremely annoyed with his nonsense at the time, he has since been elevated into a higher status; none who were there will forget the day that kill40000 graced us with his otherworldly shenanigans. Indeed, who could forget such pearls of wisdom as:

now if someone challenged me to world of Warcraft vanilla that would get pretty retarded
any1 whos that mmuch of a gay virgin
woudlnt take any time out of their raiding or ranking to fight me in the game anyway
so its a catch 22

inserted into a conversation that had nothing to do with World of Warcraft no less.

As I said, however, some new information regarding kill40000 came out today. I believe Toast was looking through the incident and discovered that he had actually posted his Steam account for people who were bat shit insane enough to take him up on his challenges. From there we were able to dive deeper into the stultiloquent rabbit hole, discovering not only a plethora of strange writings on his Steam profile but also an associated Youtube account. This guy has been posting a series of youtube videos for over five years, an impressive series that consists almost purely of World of Warcraft videos where he ganks other players and kills them mercilessly, or other such nonsense. (Edit as of August 14^th 2019: This youtube account was not his; It was linked in one of his steam guides as a joke.)

Honestly, the new information we gained from looking at his Steam profile and his youtube account clarified exactly nothing. If anything, it only served to confuse us more and make the mystery deeper and more complex. We have no answers; is this person real? Is this all a complicated act? We will probably never know, and honestly it isn't even necessary to know—it was a privilege just to experience the discombobulating majesty in real time. Wherever you may be out there, stay ruthlessly disoriented and confrontational kill40000; compromise your honor and integrity for no man or beast.

Nothing more to report for today.

---

21^st of August 2017

It has been a very interesting day. I mentioned previously that myself, Ngame, Wheals, WoC, and Sea Hitler were all set to meet up at some point this month briefly, but that it didn't pan out. While the rest of us have been unable to participate for various reasons, Ngame and Wheals still fulfilled this idea and met up in real life. The occasion was the subject of some attention in the HSD, receiving (somewhat) mixed responses.

Ngame is in a similar vein as Wheals for me. He consistently helps out when needed and even goes above and beyond the call of duty sometimes—a number of months ago we were enduring a raid from one individual who would periodically send alt accounts into the server and spam child pornography, which of course needed to be handled in an extremely serious manner. Ngame was the only other person besides myself who was willing to collect evidence and the information of the accounts that had spammed the content and report it to the Discord Abuse Center. He takes his responsibilities seriously when he needs to, and unlike me knows how to unclench most of the time. Where I'm mostly anal retentive and unrelenting on the things I care about, Ngame is able to relax and take things in stride. He's also interested in similar things; he's going to college for a degree in chemistry, whereas I recently graduated with a degree in biology. I really enjoy talking to Ngame whenever a scientific topic comes up, or even just in general.

Sea Hitler is a funny case. A reformed shitposter, he frequents both #general and #altgen on a daily basis and actually has what I believe is the second highest post count on the server, after Makin himself. He used to do the things that shitposters usually do, was generally obnoxious, impossible to reason with, etc. As time went by, however, Shitler as we call him underwent a subtle change where the shitposting became less frequent and he actually contributed meaningful tidbits to various conversations. With the raids continuing to drag us down even after I was modded, Makin asked if I needed someone to help out with keeping an eye on #general. I was familiar with Shitler at that point and had noticed his development, and the other mods thought it would be a good idea. We floated the idea with him, he was eager to help out, and he became the #general pseudo-mod for a while. After the April Fool's Day prank, a topic to be covered another time perhaps, a few changes went through that included Shitler being made a full mod because he was consistently doing good work. It's been quite a transformation seeing him go from full time shitposter to full time moderator. I'm glad to have him around.

Makin, as oriented towards privacy as he is, has decidedly been against the idea of us meeting since he first learned it was a possibility. As far as I can tell he recognizes his relative inability to actually prevent any of us from meeting up, whether through his code of ethics pertaining to freedom of expression or because it would happen even if he punished us for it. So while he may object, I believe he treats it as more of a joke than anything else. I know less about the immediate responses that anyone else in the HSD may have had, but Ngame and Wheals posted a picture in #social at one point to commemorate the occasion, which seemed to garner some positive attention.

I am hoping that another meet up can be scheduled for some time in the future, which would ostensibly be more successful than this one was. The planning for the meet up that was scheduled to happen this month wasn't exactly carried out to its fullest extent, so perhaps with greater consideration ahead of time a more fulfilling gathering can be accomplished. I am also aware that there are other mods like Toast who want to participate but are unable to because of an incredible distance that would need to traveled, or some who do not reside in the US. While the reality of the matter is that it would be difficult bordering on impossible to include them, there might be something that can be done to facilitate this. I won't say anything else on the matter until I know more however.

Also of note was the removal of #pins from the server today. It only lasted about three days, a fact that can be attributed solely to #altgen. I have to admit, I'm impressed at how disruptive they can be. Altgen is usually more or less docile, but when they find something they deem worthy of their attention the result is often messy, damaging, and yet strangely devoid of consequences for themselves. It's like watching a particularly drunken hobo smash a store display and then somehow evade the police afterwards. Putnam had this to say about the incident:

it was quite dramatic someone from altgen came in, made an inoccuous message, minish said "GO AWAY" or some shit so i gave minish shit for that for a while then either that altgenner or some other one (i don't remember lol) just started copy+pasting the fresh prince of bel-air's opening lyrics line by line when he finished he self-reacted with pin and makin banned them and removed the #pins channel so that's the story in short: he removed #pins because disallowing altgen from pinning things meant that they went into other channels to make their altgen-tier pinbait that was makin's reasoning and after seeing what that meant i 100% agree

A strange situation, befitting of a strange channel and its even stranger tendencies. Unfortunately, after taking a cursory glance, it seems as if Makin elected not to archive #pins despite it being experimental. Rest in peace #pins, you were taken from us too soon.

Nothing more to report for today.

---

22^nd of August 2017

I've elected to provide some insight into the history of the server, both shortly before and during my first month or two here. There were two troublemakers that are quite infamous in the community, albeit for different reasons: Voidfire and Marsy. Most of the events that involved these individuals were outside of the scope of my observations, so my take on them is more personally oriented than objective in nature, at least to some degree.

Voidfire was a particularly inflammatory individual; it was apparently impossible to get them to capitulate in any discussion, arguing very vehemently for their position and refusing to cede to evidence provided by others. To make things worse, the opposition in any case against Voidfire was often harshly misrepresented in insidious and fairly repulsive ways; for example, Voidfire might bring up some principle of how they thought the LGBT community should be handled or treated, and if you disagreed in any fashion you were automatically labeled a homophobe and a significant danger to minorities. Not on My Watch was a particularly disruptive issue, the mere mention of which resulted in hours long discourse and baseless accusations against mods being homophobic, etc. A whole host of other platitudinous topics were covered in this way, which I don't particularly care to recall at this point in time.

These conversational tactics very quickly attracted the ire of a vast number of people on the server. Voidfire was finally banned on the 27th of December, 2016 for hurling some extremely loaded insults towards the people they were arguing against. At this point it seems as if Voidfire has disappeared from Discord, not appearing on any servers that we are generally aware of.

Marsy is a different beast, although similar in some specific ways. Voidfire managed to alienate people by being unyielding and extreme in their ideology, which is also true of Marsy. The difference is in the ideology itself—Marsy was extreme in the opposite direction, often expressing a profound hatred of groups such as “Social Justice Warriors” and Muslims. This extremism often manifested in unexpected or surreal ways, and signaled some other tendencies or ideas of his that were fairly alarming to many.

One particular incident that is reminisced over frequently involves Marsy at the mall. He was apparently in a hurry and rushing down an escalator. At one point he had to get past an old man, and knocked him over violently in his hurry to get past. When recounting this incident to us on the HSD, Marsy said (with some rather crass wording) that the old man shouldn't have gotten in his way, which promptly exploded into a meme that is still referenced on a regular basis to this day. There are multiple other scenarios of Marsy being an ultra-edgy individual; frequently Marsy has threatened death upon other users for disagreeing with or annoying him, including Tipsy and Mad Dog.

This behavior continued unabated for some time, but the final push was an incident that took place some time after I was modded, on the 31st of January. A discussion about someone with a Middle Eastern name was underway, and Marsy commented: “Fuck off with that terrorist shit.” Needless to say this very quickly began a discussion that he was fated to lose. The long and short of it was that Marsy could not be reasoned with and so has been banned for “a long time.”

There is no telling if or when Marsy will return, but ever since his departure there has been talk about how some people miss his vitriolic ways. For all of his outrageous invective he made a large number of comments that people still find entertaining. If he does return there will no doubt once again be significant effort applied in trying to make him see reason and why his views were wrong, but assuming nothing has changed it will not be very productive. Only time will tell ultimately.

As for what is happening today, there has been a minor yet very frustrating display in #serious. For some time there was a discussion concerning Trump, and political discussions in #serious are essentially powder kegs waiting to be derailed or hijacked by people who don't actually know anything about what they're discussing. It is possible to keep these conversations from spiraling out of control, but if you miss them as they're forming they become discourse that consume potentially hours of time and drain patience very quickly. Tonight's discussion was one such that was missed, and has developed into a full blown shit show. There are around six people involved, perhaps more, and all the participants have delivered statements that frankly make my skin crawl from how outrageous and unsubstantiated they are.

I was eventually forced to lock the channel for ten minutes or so in order to get them to stop, because insults were being hurled, usually evidence that the conversation is no longer able to recover (this is known as “Za Warudo-ing” a channel, a direct reference to Jojo's Bizarre Adventures). I don't enjoy freezing conversations because it usually means something has gone so completely off the rails that failure at multiple levels has occurred. It is difficult to point at what exactly is most responsible for this catastrophic failure, and attempting to decipher as such is often a fruitless or even pointless endeavor; whatever the root cause of the problem, the end result is that an entire conversation effectively had to be destroyed. This feels like a form of censorship, at least to myself, and thus is not in keeping with the values that we strive to uphold in the HSD. Unfortunately the alternative is allowing a caustic and often net-negative conversation to proliferate, so it is often in everyone's best interest to shut it down and allow a chance to cool down.

Hopefully these incidents are not frequent in the future. Nothing more to report for today.

---

23^rd of August 2017

To add on to yesterday's entry, I will be describing two more people who are as of now longer in the HSD, but were historically important⁷.

Revlar was a particularly interesting fellow to speak with. He prized serious conversations immensely, displaying intense acrimony towards anyone who dared to infringe upon those conversations. There used to be (and still is to some degree) a problem with people derailing conversations, especially if it felt like they had been going on for a while. This practice infuriated Revlar, who wanted to see every conversation to its logical conclusion.

His input was usually pretty valuable, having an in depth and logically oriented explanation for most topics of conversation, although he displayed some emotional traits that were less than desirable. I mentioned that he was furious with people who derailed conversations; he was often unable to bridle this anger and it would spill over in ways that were decidedly unacceptable.

I don't remember the exact content of his responses to such intrusions, but they were fairly retaliatory and even violent. Additionally, Revlar developed this notion of “what mspa-lit is about”, which often did not shack up with other peoples' desires or perceptions of the place. Revlar wanted it to be about serious and “deep” conversation all the time, and was particularly disgruntled whenever the channel discussed something silly or lighthearted. As LLF once described it, he “forgets he's on the internet and wants a forum of intelligence and quality discussion always” This conflict grew until eventually Revlar had a melt down and left the server completely.

Since then, Revlar has been sighted once or twice in another server Makin created, although I can't speak to whether he's terribly active on it or not. Revlar wasn't banned so he's free to come back whenever, but the likelihood that this will happen is pretty low from what I can see. Whether or not he would even be sincerely welcomed back is up to debate, as his departure was fairly turbulent and he seemed fine with burning bridges on his way out. He officially left on the 5th of May.

The other person to be detailed is a pretty influential figure named Thellere. He is in charge of a Homestuck-related game called The Overseer Project, which is an attempt to replicate some of the mechanics or themes of the story. The game actually suffered from an intense legal scare, when someone claiming to be a lawyer from What Pumpkin issued a cease and desist order against Thellere and the team he had assembled to work on the game. It was at this point that he came by the HSD, in order to quell some rumors that were being spread in an attempt to usurp his position as head of the project or some similar issue.

Thankfully as time went by it was revealed that the cease and desist order was fake. Thellere began talking with various people on the HSD and became a regular for a while, at which point I was informed that this was actually the second time Thell had joined the server; the first time he was around, he was actually the #serious pseudo-mod. Apparently his reign over that channel was particularly hellish, as Thell exercised an extreme degree of authority over what topics could be discussed and the exact extent to which they would be allowed to transpire. I'm not sure if once he left, the position transferred directly to Medixum or if someone else had the position in between them.

At any rate, a similar experience to Revlar occurred with Thell; unhappy with the direction that the server was going in some respects, Thell expressed that he disliked the lack of consistency with which Makin handles mspa-lit and other channels. He also stated that his feelings toward the conversational content in various places was geared away from the express purpose of those channels—for example, he felt as if people used #serious to vent instead of actually discuss anything of substance. Whatever his many reasons, Thell left the server on the 18th of July.

Stories like these are unpleasant to me. Both Revlar and Thellere were contributing members of the community, and losing them is less a matter of removing a problematic element like with Marsy or Voidfire and more like driving someone out. Realistically speaking there was an intense amount of friction between Revlar and Thellere and various members of the community, so these outcomes are to some degree predictable, but it doesn't make them feel any less undesirable.

If we're to maintain a community that will be active for as long as possible, then it requires a diverse group of people who are willing to question how things operate and express dissatisfaction with the way things are being done. Allowing people to become completely content with the way things are done is a conversational death sentence; you must have energy flowing from somewhere in order to stimulate conversation, and since we are often lacking in news on Hiveswap then that energy often comes from controversy and the input of new ideas from all manner of individuals.

Speaking of new on Hiveswap, there was no interview today. Predictably this led to the established rabble rousing, but interestingly there was actually very little discourse about it I think. I wasn't around to see it myself but from a cursory glance through most channels that would be talking about the interview, there were only a few comments that were the traditional bitching. Even more interestingly is that What Pumpkin has stated they will “make up for it” next week, which implies something big. It could be an interview with a major figure or it could be something more substantive, there's no way to effectively tell at this point. I think that this statement has excited some people again, but most people are treating it with levity, and others still with disdain. I'm not raising my hopes but I must profess myself curious as to what WP could have meant. We'll see next week I suppose.

A minor note, but today Carlarc was reaction banned once again. He straddles the line between being a habitual shitposter and just a regular user, but the odd part is that his intentions are always genuine. I'm not sure if it's a lack of understanding of what he's doing but he never intends to shitpost necessarily, he's just bad at saying what he means without appearing that way. I think it may be an age issue; I believe he's 13 or 14 years old, and it shows sometimes. If you casually insult something he enjoys, even if joking, he'll be upset by it. As mentioned above he had posting privileges taken away in the past, which he was extremely upset by. These privileges were eventually instated and, to his credit, he had been showing that he was more responsible with them. However, today he went too far and now the ability has been taken away once more. At the moment this event seems trivial, but I'm sure that this issue will crop up again in about a month and the cycle will begin anew.

Nothing more to report for today.

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26^th of August 2017

Forgot to write last night about an incident concerning Putnam. I mentioned before that he is verbally outspoken against drinking alcohol to the point of relentlessness—this finally came to a head last night, in a series of discourse that lasted for over an hour or so. The repetition of these conversations over the last several months has been personally agonizing, and I think to others as well (Tensei does not agree with Putnam at all but does not view these discussions as frustrating somehow, a fact that amuses me). Finally, Makin stepped in and has decreed that if Putnam brings up or engages in alcohol discussion like this again, he is to be mspa banned. Putnam agreed to this whole heartedly, although the details at that point are lost to me. In short, there is a decent possibility that this particular topic will not surface again, at least not in the immediate future.

More recent however, today actually had some pretty contentious events occur. First to cover is the history of a problem user named Mettaton NEO, or MNEO for short.

MNEO joined originally about a month ago and seemed to be a pretty run of the mill piece of shit: they were trying to encourage an altgen regular to commit suicide, and then shortly afterwards asked in #coding-tech how to hack into other peoples' Discord accounts, or perhaps their emails. Whatever the case, both of these actions are both clearly unacceptable offenses, and he was perma-banned from the server shortly thereafter.

For a while I thought that was the end of it, but then about a week or two ago I received some warnings from some helpful altgen regulars that MNEO was back with an alt account, and had openly admitted to being MNEO. Once we're aware of alt accounts it's usually pretty simple and straightforward to get rid of them, but it's also indicative of a much larger problem. As far as we can tell, most people don't bother to create alt accounts once they've been punished with a ban; this is because it requires both effort and because it would constitute ban evasion, which is a very serious offense and usually leads to permabanning both accounts involved. Unfortunately, if you're aware of a problem user who has decided to create one alt account, it usually means they're comfortable with making more and more alt accounts anyway. If they're smart, they do this in a way that is difficult and frankly inefficient to try and detect. This has been the modus operandi for some of the worst people to come through the HSD, like Talons.

After the first instance of an alt account from MNEO, things were quiet again for a while. Then last night there was a string of these alt accounts, all with a similar theme and behavior that thankfully made it easy to detect them. Today however, this escalated into a more troubling situation where MNEO finally abandoned all pretenses and starting joining with multiple alt accounts rapidly, which meant that at all times mods had to be watching #general for new alts. After a while MNEO presumably gave up the ghost and no overtly suspicious accounts joined, but now there is always the possibility that they will try again in the future.

There have been similar instances of this behavior in the past. One memorable scenario occurred on the 9th of March, where a user named Vsnake was trying to shill a small fan game they made. After a while of this, ost gen-banned them “for trolling, derailing conversations, and generally working people up over stupid shit”. This would have been the end of it, but Vsnake physically left the server and rejoined it in order to get rid of the gen-ban role and continue talking. Obviously constituting ban evasion, he was then permabanned from the server. Over the course of the next few hours, he then crafted a seemingly endless number of alt accounts and kept joining the server with them in an attempt to stir shit and cause more problems for us. After a while these accounts all followed a pattern that allowed Ceru to write a script for Aradiabot that would automatically detect the accounts and ban them. Even at the time, this was amusing; after the script was installed, we personally witnessed Vsnake try to join the server about a dozen times and fail to do so each time, after which they stopped. This is one of many occasions where Ceru's technical skill has been deeply appreciated.

On a completely unrelated note, there has been an unfortunate development with Minish. Young and formerly a problem user, he is now reformed. In fact, he was so reformed at one point that he actively discouraged other people from shitposting, which was mildly annoying since he would overreact to anything that could be construed as such (even deriding people for using “slurs”. That was a miserable time). Since then he's taken a more relaxed stance towards it all and is significantly more amicable to talk to.

As to the present day, it feels as if his behavior has become more sporadic, or difficult to understand. Some others have mentioned this as well, so it's not just my own perceptions at work. We're not completely sure why he's been behaving in this fashion—I'm not even sure Minish understands it, or is even aware of it to some degree. The operative point unfortunately is that it's been getting harder to communicate with him in a sincere fashion. I brought this up to him and he seemed to take offense to the idea, leaving the server completely for a few minutes. When he came back we talked more in depth about the idea, where I and one or two others expressed our concern for his well being.

I think this embarrassed him, as he left the server again at some point during the conversation. Makin does not like it when people leave and rejoin the server repeatedly; he views it as an attempt to gain attention. As such, Minish was given a temporary server ban to cool off. My earnest hope is that he'll calm down and be able to talk about this with us in a more rational fashion.

We'll see what tomorrow brings. Nothing more to report for today.

27^th of August 2017

As a follow up to yesterday, I feel it's prudent to say up front that Minish has decided to leave the server permanently. This makes me upset obviously, but there's not exactly much I can say to dissuade him. He has his heart set on this course of action, and I suppose that's all there is to it. I and I'm sure many others hope that he feels willing to come back someday, and in a better state than when he left.

On a more positive note, there was a great community event today: LOFAM released a new album, titled Ancestral. It was streamed today on Twitch, and had a solid 150-160 people in attendance during its debut. Unfortunately I don’t have any concrete details about LOFAM at this point, but I’m working to secure information from Cait on the topic, who has gracefully agreed to provide a document with several key elements of the group such as when it was made, important events, etc. I’ll be sure to highlight those here when she finishes writing it⁸.

In other news, Putnam and Tipsy were having a pretty interesting conversation earlier about the nature of what it means to be “a rational individual” or subscribe to rationality. It touched on a lot of issues that have been at the heart of discussion for a while now, such as how one chooses to refer to themselves when the topic of rationality comes up. Putnam explained a specific instance of this, in the forms of “I am rational” versus “I try to be rational”. For some the distinction between these phrases is small to the point that they are essentially the same thing, but it belies a certain element that indicates their sincerity and purpose.

I won't elucidate too much on this issue since it's not strictly related to the server at large, but it is important to say that the discussion was pretty revealing in the sense that it helped me to understand the nature of everyone engaged in the conversation. I personally asked Tipsy about this, expressing the idea that she is simply “trying to be a decent human being to other people”, which she agreed with. This is the nuance to that idea of “I am trying to be rational” versus “I am rational”, in that someone who says they are “trying to be rational” recognizes that there are pitfalls and blind spots in their perception of what it means to be as such—this particular phrasing indicates that the person in question is sincerely attempting to subscribe to a given idea. On the other hand, someone who says “I am rational” is trying to give the impression that they think in a superior manner to others who are “not rational”; the very notion of someone being “completely rational” is kind of precluded by the fundamental ideas of what rationality is. Of course, the longer I go on about this the closer I get to losing the focus of the conversation that was held in HSD today, so I will forego explaining in further detail. Suffice it to say that the discussion we had today greatly increased my respect for everyone involved.

Less positive was an incident today concerning someone I've talked to semi-regularly over the last few months, named Sky2o. Sky was an unapologetic shitter who was almost banned from the server around the 20th of June because she literally couldn't stop interrupting discussion in mspa-lit. I think she was banned temporarily, but then she was let back on with the stipulation that she behave herself. This distressed her immensely and she contacted me afterwards, asking what she was doing wrong. So, over the course of a couple days, I took some time out to talk to her about her posting habits and all of the things she was doing that interrupted conversation. It was pretty swiftly evident that Sky wasn't a purposeful shitposter, she just literally did not understand that it was undesirable behavior outside of altgen. Further, she expressed to me that she was afraid her reputation was beyond repair, and that she might never be accepted as a serious regular on the server.

These talks continued for a while. It took some effort, both from myself and from a few other mods (including Toast), but she was receptive to the advice and turned a new leaf on the server. As July progressed, she steadily transformed from someone who didn't know how to interact with other people meaningfully into someone who could delve into all sorts of conversations and actually communicate with the other participants in a way that was constructive. Her progress on this matter has actually been kind of incredible, and she deserves full credit for improving as much as she has.

Unfortunately, today she contacted me and it's very clear that she's not in a good way. I won't go into detail for reasons of privacy, but I'm concerned for her well being. She's not at any immediate risk to herself or else I would have taken more extensive measures, but I'm attempting to speak with her on a more in depth basis to figure out what's going on and help her sort things out.

This actually begs the question of whether I'm interfering too much. Obviously I enjoy being able to help other people in a significant fashion, but I also don't want this to be an annoying or even detrimental habit in some cases. In keeping with the remarks earlier about “I'm trying” versus “I am”, I feel the need to question myself about my tendencies in order to make sure that I'm not overextending myself or intruding where I'm not wanted when it comes to situations like this one. Is my desire to help Sky in this current predicament well founded or is it misguided? Is it prudent to try and intercede further or should I relegate myself to listening only? Should I even go that far? To this end, I am simply trying to be as helpful as possible. I may falter in this sometimes but it is always well intended if nothing else. I'll have to see how this develops and respond appropriately.

Finally, I realized some time ago that I've failed to elaborate on arguably one of the more notorious members of the HSD referred to as MrCheeze. They’re currently a moderator for the subreddit and used to be a pseudo-mod for the server—they were demodded near the end of April for inactivity. They are strongly outspoken against things they perceive as immoral—this has led to some discourse as time goes by, with MrCheeze responding vigorously to a problem they perceive to be much greater than everyone else does (a habit they share with Putnam). They can grow upset if people do not share their concern, which is usually what begins the discourse. In the past, MrCheeze has disengaged themselves from the community and gone missing for weeks, sometimes months. I'm not entirely sure why, but I believe it's so they can focus on their own projects and life.

In the past MrCheeze has expressed that the community as it is now is a shadow of what it used to be, which is objectively true. There is some distinction to be made as to which aspect of the community they’re talking about, however—the fandom at large is categorically lesser now than it used to be, and the subreddit is substantially less active than it used to be a few years ago. As for the HSD itself, I think that it's difficult to ascertain its strength over time at this point. It feels like it fluctuates in activity too much to accurately gauge such a thing, not to mention that it's still relatively young. Its user base continues to grow every day, at the time of writing being 7,457 in number. I feel as if this is a good indicator of its strength, more or less, and that its daily activity is more a reflection of the time of year. For instance, since school is beginning around this time, things will quiet down.

As time goes by, these patterns will become more evident. It is my fervent hope that the HSD will last long enough for me to study those patterns in significant detail (or as much detail as is appropriate anyway). Nothing more to report for today.

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28^th of August 2017

I mentioned an event some time ago, the April Fool's Day Prank, which I've been meaning to elucidate on. As the name implies, it occurred on April 1st, and was a concerted event from the mod team to conduct the most wacky zany thing we could conceive of.

Makin came up with the bulk of the idea if memory serves: the biggest facet of the prank was that Makin would appear to leave the server and hand over ownership to someone else, an event that was and is often joked about, but will almost certainly never happen. He decided to give me “ownership” of the server for the duration of the prank, and tasked me with writing a statement to announce his stepping down and the introduction of a #rules channel. The change went into effect about 6 AM EST, and the mod team did its absolute best to keep up the illusion.

To aid with this and add another layer to the prank, a hidden channel was created called #april-fools, where if you caught on and mentioned something about April Fool's Day, you were immediately given a “global-ban” role which prevented you from speaking in any channel but #april-fools. Over the course of the day, several dozen to over a hundred people were global-banned and let in on the joke, although they were forbidden from interacting with others and ruining the joke.

Over the course of the day, after I announced my new ownership of the server, I received an incredible number of DMs from people. Most of these DMs had to do with the #rules channel, which included a list of “banned words” (an inclusion that caught us some flak later). Among the words that were banned were “autistic” and “pepe”, both clearly jokes, and yet I received dozens of DMs asking why they were banned.

The inclusion of the banned words list and even #rules in its entirety made some people believe that we were directly mocking HVSD, an accusation which only served to stir tension between us at the time. I distinctly remember being annoyed that the April Fool's Prank was considered a dig against HVSD; as far as I could tell literally none of us were engaging in the joke to do such a thing. I suppose that was just how the rivalry worked back then—it was hard to escape from the impression that you were trying to slight the other group for whatever reason.

We decided to end the prank with as big a bang as we could muster. I have no idea how many people were actually in on the joke and just hadn't said anything, but we announced that we were going to delete #altgen—for real—in order to make the server more friendly. This achieved the intended result—all of a sudden #altgen leaped into a frenzy, leaking into other channels, causing an immense disturbance in general, and especially in #altgen itself the pace of conversation accelerated. People were out of control—they started spamming the same messages over and over again, flying by at a million miles per hour. Chants formed spontaneously, the favorite becoming a banner for them to stake their upset: “Drew will not divide us!” accompanied of course by all sorts of images that only served to stoke their passion further. Finally, at the appointed time, we instead revealed the prank, punctuated with a final physical scream from myself in the altgen voice channel.

It was a complete rush, not unlike my time on Twitch Plays Pokemon. It was also my five minutes of fame being the fake admin for the day. In addition to all of this, this was the day that Toast was taken back onto the team as a pseudo-mod and LLF started being demoted, a somewhat bittersweet occasion. Looking back, the scope of the prank was impressive; I'm interested to see if we'll ever be able to pull off something greater next year. I'm looking forward to it for sure.

As for events of today, not much occurred. Minish came back to the server, which some people (like Tensei) had predicted in advance. I'm glad he's returned but he's since “abandoned” mspa-lit and adopted cartoon-tv as his new home. There is further speculation from us that he will eventually get bored of cartoon-tv since it's pretty inactive most of the time and come back to mspa-lit, at which point the circle will be complete.

Also notable was regular Saeko getting banned for joking about being underaged. I've mentioned previously that this was a problem, and I released statements in the most active channels to assert that people should not joke about it if they want to remain on the server. After today's incident I feel like I need to release a statement through announcements. Ceru was upset by Saeko being banned, as well as Saeko themselves obviously. I managed to help calm Ceru down and a few of us mods have lobbied for Makin to unban Saeko, since it's extremely well established that they're not actually underaged. However, I feel as if we're going to institute an “idiot tax” for people who do this in the future. They can be unbanned if they demonstrably prove they're overaged obviously, but it's a huge waste of our time to deal with things like this, so a week-long ban may be in order.

I'll figure out the details later. Nothing more to report for today.

29^th of August 2017

Very important news for today: Hiveswap has an official release date once again: September 14th! Makin celebrated by pinging everyone three times in #news, a fact that made me physically laugh when I saw it. In addition, he has taken out ad space on mspaintadventures.com (the website that Homestuck is hosted on, hereinafter referred to as MSPA) advertising the HSD.

Makin has advertised us before, and the increase in members has been substantial each time. We hit membership count of 7,500 people at 11:57 AM EST, and as of this writing at 4:24 PM EST we now have 7,523. The increased membership may prove to be a strain, so we'll see how the mod team has to adjust in order to account for this. There's even a possibility of taking on a new pseudo-mod, but I won't speculate further on that.

These advertisements also serve another purpose, which is to drive up the popularity of HSD in google search algorithms. The numbers of the server and the subreddit's position on google searches served as an indicator of our strength and popularity over other places, which to many I think was a source of pride. Makin especially is fond of asserting our dominance in this regard—again, I'm not certain if this principle still holds true to this day, but it has been a guiding idea in the “politics” of our groups in the past if nothing else.

Regardless, with the announcement of its imminent release, Hiveswap has caused an incredible stir in the community. This was also met with some interest from Makin, myself, and others: is this what Cohen meant last Wednesday when he said that they would make up for the lack of interview? Is it possible that there's still something to be announced tomorrow, Wednesday proper? Of course, if there is no interview this week, I don't think any of us would be able to complain; the game itself is far more than we were expecting.

This is accompanied by a few other ideas as well: there is a common element to Homestuck lore, something called “meme numbers”. One of the tendencies of the comic was to rely on the presence of certain numbers that gained significance through their ubiquity and coincidental usefulness. These numbers are primarily 413, 612, and 1025, which are all associated with a calendar date (13th of April, 12th of June, and 25th of October). There are other assorted numbers associated with characters or events but these are the main ones that carry significance for us as a community, because typically important events would occur on those days. Hussie was fond of releasing important flash animations or key story updates on the anniversary of the comic especially, and it is the day that the finale was released as well. Makin is fond of holding special community events on these days as well, especially streams.

All of this is to bring up the point that it's odd for us that WP announced the game at this point: neither the 29th of August nor the 14th of September are important days, so it's kind of unorthodox. That's not really a point to bring up against them obviously, it's just a note on the consistency of behavior, or tradition. Whatever the case, Hiveswap attaining a real release date is good news.

There is some doubt in my mind and I'm sure others as to whether or not this will pan out. We were given a release date before, and 8 months later here we are once again. The specificity of the date itself lends more credence to the idea that it will actually come out this time, but there is still that niggling doubt. If WP were to delay it once more at this point, I have no idea what would happen. The results of such a fiasco would be nothing short of catastrophic. I am firmly hoping it does not come to this however.

More news about Hiveswap later, I'm sure. As for the rest of today's events, our lobby for unbanning Saeko was successful and he's now back. I've crafted the message to announce to people regarding not joking about being underaged, but I have not secured permission to release it yet. Wheals thankfully condensed the message and put it in the #general channel description, so hopefully that will alleviate some of this problem. I'm going to ask to put it up regardless; the less of this sort of thing we have to deal with the better.

Nothing more to report for today.

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30^th of August 2017

In keeping with the trend of talking about past events before modern ones, I'll describe the event that brought Tensei into our fold, but first a description of the man himself is warranted.

Tensei is another pseudo for the art-music channel, and a figure of fame in the community. Tensei, much like James, directly contributed music to Homestuck, and in some very key flash animations as well. However, unlike James, Tensei is not attached to the notions of LGBT rights. This is not to say he doesn't support it, he is just less imminently concerned about the idea. Instead, he prefers things to be relaxed between people, often enjoying Makin's tendencies to confuse and frustrate people over things Tensei considers relatively minor. Tensei, in addition to being an accomplished musician, is also a practicing artist who will sometimes draw NSFW art at his discretion, usually of a community creation of some sort. Something I can personally attest to, Tensei is a fan of playing video games as well. In fact, he will play with me and a couple regulars from the server on a fairly common basis, and we always manage to have a good time (once we decided to get drunk whilst doing so, and it's probably one of my fondest memories of the HSD). He is also the source of the most heavily used emoji in the entire server, simply and ominously referred to as “tenseiface”. The image itself is the face of a butterfly toy meant to be put in the garden or the yard; it gazes out at you, and is meant to indicate smugness or cheekiness. The image has become iconic and is heavily abused in conversations involving oneupsmanship or general japery. Tensei himself is an extremely chill person, which engenders some frustration from people who want him to take a perceived issue more seriously. Tensei won't have any of it though; it's probably not a big issue, and unless you have a good reason to be personally concerned you're probably just being silly over nothing. He's also one of the older members of the server as a whole, easily in his mid or late twenties (I forget exactly what his age is unfortunately), so he has effective seniority over most people around.

Some time in 2016 before I joined the HSD, there was apparently an Ask Me Anything set up where the Music Team for Homestuck volunteered to join the server for a night and answer questions. Predictably this didn't go very well; it started off amicably enough but as time went by the pace of the questions and discussion reached a pace that was completely out of control. I'm not privy to the exact details since it was before my time, but most of the Music Team left the server by the end of the night, all except for Tensei. Perhaps he witnessed the chaos and found it more amusing than terrifying, or he saw something else that made him feel like it was worth staying. I'll have to ask him why he remained someday. Whatever the reason that he decided to stay, I'm glad he made that choice.

Unfortunately, I feel as if this incident set a precedent. One of the overaching issues of the server, in my opinion, is a lack of communication with What Pumpkin or anyone intimately associated with Homestuck or Hiveswap's production. I'm not completely sure if it was the precipitating event, but ever since the Music Team swung through it seems as if the server has gained a reputation that precludes the chance of association with official figures in the future. Perhaps if this incident hadn't occurred, there would be better relations between us. I really hope that they can be repaired in the future if nothing else.

Speaking in the modern sense, another album was released today—this time from Cool and New Music Team, entitled “YES WE CANWC”. This was of course accompanied by a community stream, featuring a number of movies. I actually got to participate in this one as well, and it was a rousing time. Makin is strangely effective at managing these streams in a way that makes them more entertaining; there's a particular blend of meme videos, music, stream polls, custom emotes, and the general atmosphere that all compounds into a massively enjoyable event. He also has an intuitive grasp over how often to have them, which keeps us from falling to stream fatigue. I often wonder whether Makin gained this experience from previous communities or if he's just naturally good at hosting things. I'm sure I would ask him more about this if I wasn't sure it'd be seen as an invasion of his privacy.

At any rate, the stream today was, I'm sure it's safe to say, a great success as usual. I've also taken the liberty of asking for more information about CANMT, as I did with LOFAM. Once I have a significant amount of information on the topic I’ll explain it at length here.

Nothing more to report for today.

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31^st of August 2017

It has become evident over the last week or so that #altgen is becoming problematic. The intense swell in fresh members coupled with Mettaton NEO potentially joining with an alt at any time has provided a bit of a headache with trying to moderate #altgen effectively. On top of this, there's been a serious uptick in shitposting in the wrong channels. Some of the regulars have expressed some dissatisfaction with this, and the mod team (especially Makin) is not pleased about it either.

Makin tasked me with writing up an announcement to address this problem. Taking all of about 45 seconds I came up with this:

This is an official reminder that #altgen is first and foremost a containment board. There have been an increasing number of problems caused by behavior that is meant to be confined in #altgen leaking to other channels. We cannot afford to let this happen because it's a great disturbance to people using them. People who enjoy using altgen regularly must begin exercising better control over themselves, otherwise we may be forced to delete the channel entirely.
This is not a joke. If you cannot keep shitposting and other #altgen related behavior localized in altgen only then we will be forced to do something drastic.
If you see other altgenners ignoring this policy, either remind them of what's at risk or tell us immediately so we can ban them. This is for your benefit as much as ours.

Shortly after we announced this altgenners naturally became pretty distraught, or at least as close to distraught as I've ever seen them get. It's been kind of a mess trying to placate them and get them to understand the actual plan we're trying to impart to them; most of them seem to think that this means they are indeed going to be deleted, which is untrue. It's difficult to get them to understand what's actually happening.

Due to the confusion and also the distinct potential to be painted as harsh or draconian, we're considering alternative methods for handling this. Outright deleting #altgen is an absolutely terrible idea in any case, so a far more diplomatic and effective solution would probably be to create a role that locks a user out of every channel except altgen if they shitpost outside of it. I'm a personal fan of this idea, and of naming that role “time-out”. Alas, Makin has not responded to the idea at all, so we can't proceed with it. We'll have to see what he says later, if ever.

Aside from this, I wanted to make a minor note of a conversation we had today. Rune's condition is worsening and they expressed serious discontent with the doctors they've gone to see, which is more than understandable. However, the discussion kind of quickened in a bad way after some disagreement regarding these doctors; a few of us were asserting that even if a doctor is rude, if they are competent and good at their job it's better than a doctor that is nice but incompetent. Tipsy did not take kindly to this, saying that even if a doctor is competent at their job, if they don't have bedside manners then they're automatically incompetent because the stress can negatively impact a patient's health. There's more nuance to this issue, but the overall point to this anecdote is that Tipsy got extremely heated about this matter, and people getting heated is usually concerning to me because it can quickly lead to fights.

It seemed heated to me at least, I could be mistaken. This sort of scenario has happened before where we'll be discussing something and Tipsy or someone else will say things that indicate they're angry, but it turns out they weren't actually angry. I don't actually know how to perceive these comments now that I think about it. I certainly hope they're not angry, but I'm pretty bad at determining which it is unless I ask.

Maybe I'm just overthinking this. No more for today.

---

1^st of September 2017

Interesting day. As far as the community is concerned, altgen is getting more upset about the warning we gave them yesterday. They have taken to insulting me and reminding me of how awful the idea of deleting altgen is. I think it bears repeating that I agree this is a terrible idea; I also think it bears repeating that deleting altgen is not the end goal here. I don't know how to explain to them effectively what's actually going on. Now though, I've thought of a second idea for handling them.

I mentioned already the idea of an “altgen confinement” role, which would be the easiest way of handling this situation with no bloodshed. However, if genocide is required, then I suggested an alternative where we hide altgen from view again and pretend it's deleted, then watch for people who go to shitpost in other channels by default and ban them all. Then after an hour or so has passed, or maybe a day, then we reveal altgen again and only the people who behaved themselves will remain to use it. This method would almost certainly be disastrous, but it would definitely be entertaining in some ways.

Aside from this ongoing dilemma, we had a nice peek at Hiveswap thanks to Somerandomguy. There's an event in Seattle this weekend called PAX West, and a playable Hiveswap demo is being provided there. Somerandomguy happened to be in the area so they very gracefully gave us a large collection of pictures of the game. This has helped stir the atmosphere a little bit: it feels like there is some actual excitement attached to this now. Many of us expressed concerns that the repeated delays had effectively killed hype for this game, which to some degree it had. Yet, as if by magic, that hype has returned now that the appointed time is nigh.

There is nothing more that any of us want than for this game to be successful. If it can achieve that even despite all of the incredible problems that Hiveswap has suffered, then we will be pretty happy I'm sure. There is some hope that it will proceed in the same manner that Undertale did—which is to say, it may spread and succeed through word of mouth. Undertale was a relative unknown that positively exploded in popularity after about a month of being around. Undertale's developer, Toby Fox (who also composed for Homestuck and is a bit of an icon for us), has made music for Hiveswap. Between the vague similarities of their release and his presence on the project, there is significant hope that Hiveswap will be enjoyed by enough people to be a commercial success, as well as a critical one. It would be disappointing beyond anything for it to fail after all this time.

An event that I would be hard pressed to describe as anything but “weird” also happened today, where an old regular from when NSFW was still a channel came back. HP is actually a key figure in the destruction of NSFW; I mentioned that WoC was ultimately responsible for the death of #NSFW when it was still around on HSD, and this is because he ended up DMing a .gif of a deer getting its head blown off to HP. HP was a pretty central figure to the community of #NSFW at the time, and she ended up leaving the server over this. WoC was almost demodded over the incident, and I would have been his replacement. As things go, he claimed it was done accidentally and he kept his position. HP was gone for ages though, and I hadn't seen hide nor hair of her for a while. Apparently she's been back for a few months and I just haven't seen her.

Since I've noticed her being back there has been a noticeable degree of underlying tension. There is no open hostility but there is a pervasive air of uneasiness between us and her. I'm not sure why, but it appears she has an immediate disdain for anyone who is underaged or a mod. She has explicitly claimed that “there are no good mods left”, although I'm not sure who she could be referring to, since the mods that were around when she was still here are basically the same now. These statements also tend to draw people to her, a tendency that we call “establishing a cult”. Whether done on purpose or not, this is usually a bad sign. Other people who manage to establish these followings usually turn into a problem for us in various ways, usually by causing an enormous stink once they find something to disagree with mods on and getting the people who support them involved over it.

Personally noteworthy, Makin came in to the mod chat earlier today and extended an offer to Wheals and I. He pinged us and said that “the first one who accepts will be made the new moderator of the subreddit”, or thereabouts. Wheals responded first, but declined the position. I was actually kind of ambivalent about accepting because I started graduate school recently and my time is at a bit of a premium. I enjoy helping out though—I enjoy the HSD very much, and I especially appreciate being able to make things better for people. I don't use the subreddit that often, but I did promise myself a while ago that once Hiveswap came out, I would participate there more often. If worse comes to worst, I can always just resign, so I accepted the position.

Toast and Makin made fun of me for it of course; I provided basically the same reasons that I did here, and Toast immediately joked about me being “power hungry”, the implication of which he knows bothers me. Makin also suggested that I was trying to word things in a way that suggested I didn't want the position even though I was accepting it. I know Makin well enough at this point to recognize when he's trying to play mind games so this didn't faze me too much.

I think that part of this behavior is an extenuation of me being an easy target in some ways; I'm anal retentive and don't take to accusations well because I try my best to be sincere in most things. The longer I know people the more relaxed I become and the less of a problem it is, but it's still an annoying pitfall to keep an eye out for. Admittedly once I've learned the patterns of it simply being a joke then in a strange way I start to enjoy it as well. I guess this is just how the process works, kind of like baiting. It's always a positive note when I begin to better understand how people work.

Nothing else for today.

---

2^nd of September 2017

Corresponding fairly closely with my being modded on the subreddit, Makin announced the creation of a Tumblr blog where top posts from the subreddit could be “saved” onto Tumblr for posterity; these posts also link back to the original post on /r/Homestuck and credit the person who posted it. I didn't pay much attention to this when it first became a thing but it's become more popular than I would have given it credit for. It also seems to be attracting an insane number of people to the HSD—as of this writing we now have 7,738 members, over 500 people more than when I began writing this journal. The increase in activity has been noticeable, and my previous concerns about the relative activity of the server has been alleviated; in its place, new worries about integrating new people into the server successfully and maintaining peace has taken root.

It is indisputably a very exciting time for us though. Hiveswap coming out would mean a serious balloon in content for us to discuss and latch onto. The lack of new content in the last several months was slowly having increasingly visible effects on us, with significant channel slow down causing things to stagnate. Due mostly to my experiences with previous communities, I'm fond of saying that a lack of new content will almost inevitably lead to some form of community death.

Oddly enough though, I think that the HSD has some inherent mechanisms that protect from that sort of decay. The source material is old enough that fans of the webcomic are well established and probably aren't going anywhere, unlike TPP Red where the community sprang up over night (while extremely energetic at the time, it had no staying power), and it's a specific enough branch of media that people are able to discuss it for a while even without new information to work with (whereas Sydlexia was generalized and thus depended on input from all angles). Contrary to this, the HSD went for almost an entire year without any news or substantial updates whatsoever and it only took up to the last couple of weeks for me to grow worried about the drop in activity. That's a positive sign as far as I'm concerned.

Worthy of note, Makin's creation of the Homestuck + Hiveswap Tumblr blog has led to some backlash from some rather unsavory characters in the fandom. One in particular that I recognize is a fellow called Swamp Wizard; from what I've seen he goes pretty relentlessly after Tensei, a fact that is more bemusing to me than anything else. His assertions are that the HSD is a repository for bigots and racists/homophobes/what have you, accusations that are basically pointless and unworthy of comment except that their very nature is frustrating to me. Another such post from a so-called “Big Warnings” blog popped up and was gaining a little bit of traction, but then ost dropped by and opened an incredible can of verbal whoop-ass on the person who posted it.

Ost pulled out some of the most well thought out and touching sentiments I've ever seen regarding the HSD, all the while retaining conversational validity. The main focus of people behind posts like this and especially Swamp Wizard is often Makin causing estrangement between the Homestuck fandom at large and WP officials or employees. Ost explained in no uncertain terms that Makin's behavior is not representative of everyone in the HSD even if he does own and administrate the place. Ost also remarked on how we, the mod team, do our best to make sure things are running smoothly and effectively. Honestly, many of us were moved by the contents of the post, and especially their sincerity. I've looked at it a couple of times since it was originally posted, and each time I find something new to appreciate about it.

Of some small note, the uptick in activity on the HSD also means that the voice chats have been getting used again. It seems most of the users are from altgen and end up doing altgen things, like mic spamming or planning things they shouldn't be. Anervaria is usually the brave soul who goes to watch voicechat when it becomes very active, although one of the other mods will often step in if she's been doing it for a while or if the room usage is absurdly high.

Anervaria is a curious member of the team. She's the pseudo-mod for the art-music and voicechat channels, and her demeanor is kind of static. In her channels she's pretty responsible and keeps an eye on things as expected, even begrudgingly sitting in the voice channels and listening for anyone mucking about, sometimes for hours. However, in almost any other context she is focused on memes, and especially memes about vore. I have no earthly idea why or how she got into such a thing, but I guess she really enjoys those sorts of jokes. She often changes her handle to some variation thereof, typically Anervoria or the like. Her avatar is typically of a black hole with a green outline, perfectly in keeping with the vore jokes. I don't envy Aner's job in the coming weeks, it's going to be miserable to physically keep track of what people are saying.

Nothing more for today.

---

3^rd of September 2017

I was woken up by a ping from Makin in modchat telling me or Wheals to prepare a statement. Apparently a tweet suggested that Hiveswap was going to officially go up on Steam today, and he wanted one of us to post a message about the HSD along with a link as soon as it went up, for maximum visibility. Techniques like this strike part of me as unsavory because they're essentially just shilling, but I also can't be bothered to care that much. As it is, I'm excited to see just how many people we can get to join the HSD, so I agreed to write something short.

Alas, Hiveswap did not go up on Steam at the appointed time. This led to some confusion from people since the tweet was fairly explicit, and now there is a small amount of concern as to the status of the project. I'm waiting to see how it develops further before making a judgment one way or the other. It's fairly likely that the game will go up on Steam tomorrow, although I'm not privy to how Steam releases work so I could be completely mistaken. Either way, not a terribly big ordeal.

Nothing more for today.

---

4^th of September 2017

Today has been pretty frustrating on a personal scale. There's one guy who's been around for a week or two now that does things that bother me intensely, and his name is ggrey.

Ggrey has been sticking around in #serious and often engages in discussion to their utmost extremes. We actually had a run in with this guy near the end of May. He claimed that he was being persecuted because of his political leanings, to the point that he was serious banned for the rest of the day. This was elevated to a month long ban because he then argued with Ceru in DMs that he should be allowed to insult others because of his views, which was of course utterly ridiculous to us.

Fast forward to now and he's been unbanned from #serious for about a week and then some. The effects of this have been almost purely negative. It's difficult to describe exactly why ggrey's attitude bothers myself and so many others this much, because almost everything he does is bothersome. He calls upon logical conventions to support his own arguments and refute others but then doesn't uphold the tenets of the logical appeals he makes, which is insanely aggravating to witness happen in real time. He asserts that evidence does not make his opinion wrong, which is also insanely aggravating. He has managed to cause many, many hours of discourse in just the week that he has been back, and I've had to Za Warudo #serious twice now because of it.

And yet for all of this, he technically hasn't broken any rules. My frustration with him came to a head earlier today and I officially motioned that he be banned. Shitler agreed with me, I assume because he's also spent a decent amount of time in verbal combat with this charlatan, but Ifnar, Cerulean and Toast did not agree. I did my best to explain why exactly I was so irritated with the guy, but the main point that prevented an agreement from forming was that the guy simply hasn't broken any rules. This is understandable, and I fully admit that my desire to have him removed was inappropriately founded. As such as I withdrew my motion to ban and have recused myself from interacting with or passing judgment on ggrey, a resolution which is probably for the best in many ways.

On the other hand, Toast then went into #serious to talk to this fellow and appraise him. It was amusing and, I am unashamed to admit, intensely satisfying; Toast quickly grew frustrated with him as well, or at least used some rather choice words to describe him that made me feel more than a little bit smug in my original stance.

Alas, there's nothing that can really be done about ggrey at this point. I've kept my eye on the ongoing discussions to ensure that they don't get too out of hand, but I haven't bothered to speak with him again. There are, thankfully, enough other people around to do that anyway. I think that this too is for the best; some of them appear to be able to handle ggrey's gross misuse of reasoning better than I can. As such, they're more well equipped to deal with the lapses in logic, and my earnest hope is that one of them will finally be able to reach this guy and help him see actual reason.

In a broader sense this issue made me reconsider some of the things I've grown to stop thinking about during the course of my time on the HSD. I used to be more concerned with issues like exactly how much should we intercede with things like this, as moderators. Was I trying to improve the quality of discussion by having him removed or was I actually just frustrated enough with his perceived chicanery to want him to be removed, even in an illicit manner?

Rather than repeatedly question myself like some kind of angsty schoolboy, I guess it's appropriate just to resolve to learn what I did wrong and how to prevent it in the future. It's not exactly the first time I've made such a mistake on the HSD, there have been scores of people who are just as odious to deal with as ggrey; these kinds of people just tend to break a rule or ten by this point, which gives us sufficient reason to actually remove them. Too many times now I've gotten emotionally invested in seeing a particularly vexatious troublemaker removed, and I still don't know why I allow such things to get to me as much as they do. Regardless, I forget my place—it's not mine to actively influence a discussion or who is allowed to participate in it.

Hopefully this sort of thing does not occur again in the future, at least any time soon. Nothing more for today.

---

5^th of September 2017

Last night I went through with a series of actions that were prompted by a discussion in mspa-lit regarding the extent to which rules are enforced. The overall point being argued upon was, predictably, that altgen does in fact have rules, but it appears as if they have no obligation to listen to them at any time. This perception is obviously incorrect in theory, but in practice it appears that moderation of altgen is a little bit lax in nature.

One of the primary complaints in this vein concerns the use of “slurs”, or offensive terms, apparently used with reckless abandon in altgen more than any other channel. Our policy about slurs is very specific: in order to maintain our position against censorship as much as possible, we do not ban the outright usage of slurs (even if it is heavily discouraged). What is a bannable offense is using a slur specifically against another person (thus, “you are a faggot” would be bannable, while simply invoking the word “faggot” in a discussion would probably not incur a ban). While we still receive complaints when these words are used anyway, there has been a significant uptick in complaints concerning the latter case, which obviously warrants attention. I looked around and also received information about people doing this, and a few people came up who were doing this repeatedly. They were all banned, although two of them are worthy of some note.

Scalene was a very notorious shitter that we weren't certain what to make of for the longest time. Their greatest period of activity was a few months ago, where it seemed their name cropped up almost daily in some new act of inanity or general shittiness. They fell in that category of people who were generally unappealing but didn't cross the line enough to warrant a full ban; many people avoid punishment in this fashion, which is a pain to keep track of for us. However, Scalene's recent comments finally crossed that line, and they have been removed.

The other notable character in this play is $trider, a more or less important figure in altgen and the person over which this set of actions became worthy of writing about. He exhibited the same behavior as the others I banned last night, so I followed through with him as well. Today, however, I was assailed with a number of messages and pleas to renege on $trider. This was bothersome, but I decided to speak with him about this matter anyway. In my haste to purge altgen of these people I had neglected to give those I was unfamiliar with their due process, and $trider gave a fair case for why he should be let back. I was reluctant at first, but I felt bad that I hadn't given him a proper warning before his ban. It was especially inappropriate because this was his first offense; between this and him expressing a sincere desire to come back and interact with the community, I decided to apologize to him and lift the ban.

It was actually a rather nice sight to see: true to his words, as soon as $trider had rejoined the server, he said hello to everyone in altgen, and he was received very warmly. It's gone a long way in reinforcing the idea to me that these guys actually are a cohesive community of their own, and not simply “a problem”. The option of total destruction of the channel is not really on the table, it would obviously be more than disruptive and actually generate an insane amount of bad will towards us. More idealistically I just can't support destroying a place where people more or less harmlessly congregate and enjoy being around each other. I'll work on asking if we can incorporate the altgen confinement role instead, I would hate to lose this facet of the community completely through some dumb, contrived nonsense.

Nothing more for today.

---

6^th of September 2017

Today was pretty turbulent. Hiveswap finally got put up on the Steam store, so we began advertising the HSD as directed by Makin. It was almost instantaneous; the page went up around 9 AM and I believe we had the topic for it up in about one or two minutes afterwards. Let it never be said that the HSD mod team is not a well oiled cog in a machine, assuming that machine is made out of utter nonsense and funny pictures.

The discussions page for Hiveswap is currently pretty inactive, but I don't know how common that is for Steam games. Could be totally normal, but from where I stand at this point in time it's kind of worrisome. I have heard a lot of discussion going on in the HSD proper, which is to be expected, but I wonder if any of that will carry over into the actual release.

A minor effect of the Steam page going up is, I think, a small revitalization of the rivalry between us and Hiveswap Discord. Icel, the owner of HVSD, actually came over to talk briefly after we started talking about HVSD a couple of nights ago, but it was primarily a cordial interaction aimed at clearing up what they deemed “misinformation” regarding an activity they're doing—a giveaway in which they'll be awarding nine copies of Hiveswap to different people once it comes out.

Today, shortly after the Steam page and our discussion of the HSD was posted, a followup post for Hiveswap Discord appeared as well. While neither of our groups have said anything about this development, I think it's evident to all involved that there is at least a small competitive spirit here. I'm interested to see if this will lead to a more serious rivalry again or not.

Nothing more for today.

---

7^th of September 2017

Not a lot to remark on today, just a couple interesting tidbits. We had a rare encounter with Elvish today: they came on the server for all of a single minute and posted one message, which was a screenshot of three hostile, anonymous Tumblr comments on their blog attacking them for gender-related issues. Elvish then warned us that if these hostile asks kept happening then they would be “forced to do something nasty”, and then they immediately left. This was an incredibly bewildering event, I think no one really knew how to respond at first. Then as the reality of the matter set in, discussion slowly resumed as people tried to figure out what the actual fuck just happened.

As we see it there are three possibilities to this: the most obvious is what Elvish themselves is stating, that someone or someones from HSD are harassing them through Tumblr. Another option, though, and more likely in my mind, is that this is just some random person perpetrating this nonsense. This scenario also carries the possibility that the person involved is systematically trying to make us look worse, given our history with Elvish. The third option and the most conspiracy-oriented by far is that Elvish themselves posted those asks in an attempt to pin the blame on us and make us seem terrible to lookers on.

This last option doesn't seem very likely to me, but Tensei remarked that Elvish's coming on to the HSD specifically to warn us against doing it more seemed fairly suspicious, an assessment I agree with personally. Unfortunately we have literally no more information to go off of in order to determine which scenario is most likely. Thus we've collectively decided to move on until something develops further and we can get to the bottom of the matter.

The other notable event, which was far more positive, was a user joining and informing us that the HSD had been linked to organically from another place. DannyStrider joined a few hours ago and mentioned that he was from a Discord server dedicated to Ryan Haywood, a Twitch streamer and member of Rooster Teeth. I don't know the exact context of which they were speaking about us, but the topic of Homestuck apparently cropped up and someone provided a link to the HSD as a result. This is fairly good news: it means that we're notable enough that some circles recognize us, or are at least aware of our existence. The ramifications of this are exciting—when Hiveswap comes out, if it becomes a widely played thing like Undertale was, then we may see a serious increase in membership, which would lead to a whole host of developments and probably the ushering in of a brand new culture if the number of people is large enough.

Of course, I'm getting ahead of myself with that. There is no telling exactly how popular Hiveswap will become until it actually comes out, and even then it may take some time to know for sure what'll become of it. From where I'm standing though, the future seems very exciting. This is in addition to some rather interesting developments internally; of note today, an old regular named hstanon came back.

Hstanon is an interesting figure; the main word I would think to describe him with is “unapologetic”. Both through the name (/hst/ is the current name for an old Homestuck-related 4chanboard, /hsg/, that no longer exists, and an anon is historically any given user on 4chan) and through their behavior, they have asserted themselves as a stereotypical 4chan user: loud and abrasive. I never spoke to them much personally, but the instance in which they left the server was pretty indicative of the typical experience of dealing with hst. Some months ago, he either snapped or lost all pretense of keeping things at least somewhat sane and began pinging Makin or mods repeatedly, calling them various epithets and practically demanding to be banned. Thus it was that they were removed from the server, and months passed without any word from them until today. Makin unbanned hst after he specifically requested to be let back in, for reasons that I'm not personally aware of. His behavior now, while still ruthless in some ways, is a far cry from the profuse insanity and self-destruction with which he left us. I can only wonder what went through his mind, and even what may go through it now. Either way, his presence is almost guaranteed to shake things up a little bit more in the server, so I look forward to seeing what may happen.

I've also established a more or less Official Policy with which to handle the journal being viewed by others. I've mentioned before that I worry what effect releasing copies will have on the behavior of people in the community, and that some of those fears have already been justified. Optimally I would not release any copies at all in order to preserve the behavior of the community as perfectly as possible, but I also don't want to sacrifice the accuracy of the information presented here, which means I must ask people to occasionally review this work. As such, I've decided that it would best to offer the opportunity to read it once in every fifty pages written—that is, once I reach 150 pages I will let people read it, then again at 200, and so on. This way the effect it has on people is minimal while also not jeopardizing the integrity of the recording. Hopefully this system works effectively.

Amusingly, Makin did hold this principle over my head right after I announced it to everyone. Not even five minutes after stating I would no longer let people read it, he demanded I give him the latest copy to peruse since he was bored. I was going to refuse, but then he said that he would revert the name of the mod chat to illuminati-not-hangout, since it bothers me that he changed it due to my actions in writing this journal. After confirming this was not a joke (“no bamboozle?”), I DMed him a copy and before I knew it the glorious #illuminati-not-hangout was back. I consider this a personal victory, if not exactly a particularly important one. I'll take what I can get though.

Nothing more for today.

---

8^th of September 2017

The appointed time is nigh: Flare has been unbanned from the server, and no time has been wasted in making this as controversial as possible. We've already received reports of him taking others' art and editing it against their wishes. This isn't grievous enough to warrant a ban, but not everyone sees it the same way. It's been described as no less than “art theft” by the leader of Hiveswap Discord, Icel.

Icel is a difficult character to assess; there has been a lot of tension between them and Makin, to the point that they do not come to talk on the server unless he's gone for the night or if they feel an explicit need to argue about something he's done or said. This tendency usually means that discourse follows their appearance, which automatically makes it harder to talk to them. Aside from these incidents they are also strongly compelled by a sense of justice and rightfulness, although their opinions and actions regarding what is right often clashes with our own (such as with with the banned words list of HVSD). I would like to avoid bad mouthing them too explicitly but my interactions with them haven't been that pleasant; they are often extremely accusatory and make snap judgments or inferences that are inaccurate or scathing, or both. The way they word things is also often fairly manipulative, a trait I dealt with myself in this conversation with them.

Right around when we were due to unban Flare, they contacted me personally through DMs and stated that it “looked bad” to be unbanning someone like him. Already I could tell that something was off about this assessment, and I ended up talking with them for a while about what exactly Flare's offenses were and how they should be handled. Unfortunately, neither of us made much progress on this point; they are adamant that Flare should be handled immediately, given his offenses against various members of the community by way of his art edits. On the other hand, while we think that the practice is distasteful and we don't condone the activity, we don't think that editing art deserves a ban.

We do have a policy for actual art thieves, which is of course to ban them—the rub lies in what constitutes art theft. If, for instance, Flare was taking the art, editing it slightly, and then reposting it with no credit to the author in any form (“This is my own work!”) then that would clearly be art theft. As it is, Flare has either provided credit to the original work of his edits (the best case scenario) or he has simply referred to them as “edits”, which removes the idea that they could be his own work. The second one is slightly more egregious but still does not constitute “theft”, so we can't ban him for art theft. Based on this and the fact that I was not speaking for the mod team as a whole in that capacity, I did not accede to Icel’s points.

As I said, neither of us made any progress in this discussion: they did not provide me with any convincing arguments and I did not provide any to them, apparently. After they realized I wouldn't be changing my mind they decided to call the conversation quits, which is of course fine. I have fervent hope that they will talk with us more and we can try to convince them of what we're saying, but I have a feeling that outcome is very unlikely. Sometimes I have to wonder which party is “more correct” in situations like this, but in the end I believe our arguments are more or less solid. Additionally, their point about “bad optics” struck me poorly.

Hopefully this does not turn into a bigger issue. Nothing more for today.

---

9^th of September 2017

LOFAM 4 is out! We had an intense community stream dedicated to its release, hosted by Lambda herself on her Twitch page. It was actually a pretty decent set up; the album is divided into three parts, or “discs”, and between each disc—which were all a couple hours and then some long—there was an intermission where we played shitty memes or what have you.

It was honestly a very nice time; LOFAM's title albums are all assortments of music made by other Homestuck fans and groups, and can be pointed to as a “best of” collection. It's a great honor to be put on the album so the stream is usually a pretty jovial event, and it's always nice to give credit to people who have made considerable contributions to the fandom.

It should be noted that all of these albums are available for free—none of the music that Homestuck fans make is for profit. I'm not sure of the exact reasoning for this but I'm sure that the legal problems of doing such a thing are a significant factor. For a lot though I'm also sure that there is element of decency to it: the music is made by fans for fans, and they want to keep it as accessible as possible. However the hosting site that carries all of this fan music, Bandcamp, requires you to assign a price to your work if you want it to be downloaded by others. In order to skirt this particular issue, fan albums are usually associated with ridiculously high prices, often in the hundreds of dollars, and then they provide a link to a free download of the album in its description. I've always thought this was a clever workaround to the hosting issue.

Nothing more for today.

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10^th of September 2017

Today had a couple of interesting things; Putnam and MrCheeze got into a discussion about “callout culture”, or the practice of seeking out “problematic elements” of someone, even historically, and using that to invalidate their stance or position (I could be mangling this definition, that's just my assessment thereof). The incident was spurred by a blunder from an enormously popular Twitch streamer using a racial epithet on air, which needless to say is a pretty serious deal. I'm not quite sure how this transformed into a discussion on callout culture, but the net effect is that MrCheeze left the server.

This in itself isn't that huge of an ordeal; MrCheeze leaving the server has occurred multiple times already, and is usually an infrequent enough event that it doesn't need to be punished. This particular time and others have been due to controversy, but sometimes they may leave simply because they don't want to be distracted, which is far more understandable. Either way, we expect them to come back eventually.

More excitingly, a giveaway was announced! A giveaway is when the leaders of a community have a contest for distributing free gifts to members of the community, either donated by themselves or by an official from the company that sells merchandise. The latter case can be an indication of a strong relationship between a community and the people who are more or less in charge of its content. I'm happy to say that ours is as such: the items being given away include two sets of a themed shirt and wallet, contributed by We Love Fine. The associate who is in contact with us is a pleasant figure named Kara. Obviously we don't know much about her, but our interactions with her have been nice and she's always helpful.

We've actually had one previous giveaway through WLF, which was conducted simultaneously as an art contest and a raffle. People submitted their own works to the community, who collectively voted on who should win the giveaway (Nights won that one). Unfortunately the art contest portion had a few problems, the most obvious of which was that not everyone had time to finish their submissions. After some thought, this time Makin has decided to stick with just a raffle instead; if you are a member of the Discord community and reblog the post on Tumblr, then you are entered and have a chance to randomly win the prize. Two people will be selected, who then give their shipping information to Makin, who relays it to Kara.

It's actually a pretty nice event, and I hope that it increases community activity for a while. It's always fun to see these things play out. Nothing more for today.

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11^th of September 2017

A bit of a headache situation today. The giveaway has sparked some problems between us and members of HVSD, partly due to Makin's interference. I mentioned a couple of callout posts the other day, namely Big Warnings, who were throwing serious but insubstantial accusations our way. Makin apparently went through and blocked whoever reblogged those posts from participating in the giveaway, which honestly makes complete sense. However, he took it one step forward and blocked Icel and another from reblogging as well, even though there is no substantiated link between them and the post itself.

This obviously led to some drama. Icel appeared and demanded to know why they were not allowed to reblog the post, and based on Makin's input I incorrectly stated that they had supported the Big Warnings post. They claimed that they hadn't, and after talking in mod chat briefly it was apparent that Makin had not known this for sure (stating in his defense that he was sleep deprived). These sorts of blunders, while not a huge deal, are still pretty embarrassing so I retracted my statement.

In addition, Makin blocked Alex on the supposition that they were the ones who wrote the Big Warnings post on Tumblr. Makin has stated he did so based on the manner of speaking between the two being very similar, which admittedly they are; however, using this as a direct link between the two is tenuous at best and we had to discourage him from this. I think the situation has been resolved but this is still a pretty damaging event in the face of building relations between HSD and HVSD. I think the rivalry has been reignited in a bad way, and with more energy being injected into the fandom as a whole through Hiveswap, this may turn out to have some fairly annoying consequences in the future.

I don't believe that the effects will be thoroughly damaging—HVSD is a tad too small for such interference—but it can prove to be a stubborn thorn in our side, and assuredly many small conflicts will rise from such things. I'm not looking forward to putting out the fires but we'll see how it plays out in the future.

I also want to describe an incident of some small note that actually occurred last night but didn't think to write down until now. $trider has been utilizing the voice channels to DJ for people listening. This has been a rather amicable process so far, as near as I can tell no one has complained about it. However, there was a miscommunication involving Anervaria, who thought this was not allowed; we were going to let the activity continue, but “playing music” in the voice channels is typically not allowed because it's disruptive. Based on this precedent Anervaria went to tell $trider to stop DJing in the voice channels, which led to a small stink. $trider insisted that no one had complained and then requested that, in order to avoid making music in channels where people might prefer to talk, that he be given a special “DJ” role that would allow him to play in the radio channel.

This request was immediately denied. We are strictly not into making custom roles for people for historical reasons; before I joined this server, the role list had an insane number of joke roles dedicated to specific people, which caused problems with role structuring and chain of command functioning. I'm not sure if this occurred at a different time or was concurrent with The Reckoning, but Makin deleted all of the roles and completely reorganized the system, shaping it into what we have today.

All of this is to say that we are not about to create a new role just for $trider, as useful as it may be. In fact, we had a corresponding talk about what to do as per people playing instruments in the voicechat, and we decided that it should not be allowed—thus it is a new rule for the voice channels, one that unfortunately has upset $trider. There might be an update to this rule later that leads to a more nuanced and effective system, but for now it is what it is.

Nothing more for today.

---

12^th of September 2017

A small event for today. After an extensive stakeout of altgen for the last however many days, I have come to a decision about who should be nominated as new altgen janitor. Since I haven't elaborated yet on what exactly a janitor is, I will now take the liberty of doing so. The hierarchy of the HSD is as follows: Makin ← ← ← Mods ← Pseudo-mods ← ← ← Janitors ← Regular users ← The common earthworm ← Altgen users. There's an enormous power gap of course between Makin and literally everyone else, but mods and pseudo-mods are still above the “common folk”. Janitors are basically just regular users with some duties attached to their channel, they can't see #illuminati-not-hangout so they do not have any say in the governance of the place. They do have the power to ban within their channel though, so they're at the top of the bottom of the totem pole in terms of power.

To date the only channel that's really needed a janitorial position is altgen, due to the sheer force of shittiness associated with it. Makin spontaneously janitored two people, definitely_not_him and Tsimona. Tsimona, or TS, has done a fine job so far, but definitely_not_him has not been active and outright stated they don't do their job. I'm not sure if they were referring to simple lack of activity or if there was a degree of rule breaking they played witness to that they did nothing about. In either case, we decided the role was better suited to someone else who would be more attentive. I took it upon myself to go and and keep an eye on altgen for a couple of weeks when I could to find a suitable replacement, and a few options did gradually appear. First though, it would be prudent to describe Tori herself.

The #altgen pseudo, there is a lot of talk, by herself and others, of how her time in #altgen has warped her own views on humor and irony, and occasionally she'll descend into rambling fits about the nature of jokes and internet humor. Sometimes I'm not sure if it's all an elaborate schtick or if it's sincere, which I'm sure is an additional layer she appreciates surrounding her persona. She will often launch into lengthy speeches about the specific nature of a single image, ascribing heavily obscure terminology to it both in an attempt to educate and to confuse people. No one is quite sure how genuine this act is, which is in keeping with her overall personality, which I think leads to some emotional isolation. A heavily conflicted person, she is simultaneously tortured by and relishes her time in #altgen, forced to deal with constant shitposting day in and day out. There are a number of habits she has developed to keep the people of the channel on their toes, because if they manage to figure out anything about her schedule regarding taking care of #altgen, the regulars of the channel will take advantage of it and wreak unmitigated havoc. In fact, recently we introduced the janitorial position so that the channel could continue to be handled even if Tori is asleep, a fact she is both pleased and dismayed to be confronted with.

The problem with altgen is that there's an inconvenient gap in user quality: the characteristics that are preferred for a janitor would be active use of the channel in question and seriousness or ability to handle responsibility. Unfortunately due to altgen's nature, users who fall into both categories are exceedingly rare. I've found two users (Linked Girafarig and Pigeon Jude) who fall into the former category and sort of fulfill the latter, and there's one user I've taken note of that would probably be able to fit both, Malice (or AKA Grandma Molly).

Malice at first glance does not appear to be extremely active but they respond to pings immediately, which suggests a tendency to lurk the channel even if they're not talking. Whenever they participate they are well received and somehow fit into both roles, both as an altgenner and a serious contributor. Based on all of these factors, I made my recommendation to the mod team, Tori seconded the idea, and Makin approved. So it was that definitely_not_him was removed as altgen janitor and Malice was instated in his stead.

I hope that these decisions help improve the channel's reputation somewhat; one of the more significant problems is that the rules aren't getting enforced as much as they should be, which leads to more people breaking rules in more ostentatious ways, which leads to them getting banned and pissed off because “no one else is banned for this”. If we can get to the point where people who categorically break the rules are banned when they're supposed to be, we might avoid significant problems in the future regarding this issue.

Nothing more for today.

---

13^th of September 2017

Grand news: we hit 8000 members as of 8:12 AM EST! The timing couldn't have been better (indeed, part of me suspects Makin specifically orchestrated it to turn out this way, somehow), what with Hiveswap coming out tomorrow. To commemorate the occasion, Makin has implemented a number of things: created a new channel for hype purposes called #8000-party, bought more adspace on MSPA, and initiated a survey for feedback and questions. These developments are a lot to take in, and the server has been in a positive flurry of activity since the morning started. The new channel is dedicated largely to celebrating the server and all its new members, which is accompanied by a large selection of fan art made by the community members, among other things. I'm unsure of whether the channel will be archived once the festivities are completed; Makin has stated that he intends to post the funny and/or good art to the associated Tumblr, which means those works will be archived regardless. I assume this means the channel itself will be deleted in the future.

My intuition in this manner was partially correct: it being now several hours later, Makin has since hidden #8000-party from the server. I've been notified that there are channels even moderators can't see, which means that Makin has an indeterminate number of channels around for archival purposes that only he can see. I wonder what information is stored away where no one else can see it.

While the channel being removed was a predictable outcome, it is always at least mildly disappointing to see such things be born, live, and die so swiftly. On the other hand, Makin has still not released the results of the survey; most, including myself, enjoy the peanut gallery that follows the closing of a survey, and past experience indicates he's usually done with them after less than 12 hours. For whatever reason it appears Makin is leaving this poll up for an extended period of time. While we'll have to wait longer for results, that just means there will probably be more to amuse ourselves with when the time comes.

The time has come to describe a significant subplot that's been in the works for a couple months now. WoC was demodded back on the 12th of July, although shortly before in a characteristic bout of competitive spirit WoC made a bet with Tensei that Hiveswap would not come out this year. Tensei didn't bother to take up the bet, but Anervaria did. The conditions were that if he lost, he would have to pour hot sauce up his nose on video and upload it for everyone to see. If Aner lost, she would have to buy him a hat of some kind.

WoC actually made a similar bet with me some time ago, although we both simply agreed to gift the other a hat in the case of victory, rather than include the hot sauce part. The content of the bet in question at that point was a bit more esoteric perhaps: the time was about a week before 4/13 earlier this year. Hussie was slated to write a newspost on the website since it was the anniversary of the webcomic, an event which is typical of him. WoC asserted that the newspost would have a specific term included in it (I forgot which one exactly, but it was suitably moronic), and I took him up on the chance that the newspost would not contain the phrase in question. I won this bet, and so WoC gave to me a hat in his color with the phrase “WoC is a Loser” embroidered on it. It is now one of my most prized possessions, occupying a place of honor in my house.

Returning to the present, WoC has of course lost his bet with Anervaria since the game will be coming out tomorrow. True to his word, WoC contacted me and a number of others with a video of him performing the deed. It is truly 42 of the most glorious seconds I've ever played witness to, and I imagine his nose must still be burning as I write this. Let it never be said that WoC is not true to his word.

Shortly after this incident, WoC came onto the server to answer any questions people may have had about the hot sauce video (of which there were naturally many). I expected him to leave shortly after doing this, but as soon as he joined back an impressive number of people received him warmly. I think this made him feel happy about being back, and for some hours now he has remained. Since Makin agreed that he should be given the gaming janitor role upon his return, I bestowed that title upon him. WoC then demanded it be changed to “gaming enforcer” because it sounds better than “janitor”. I figure now that I'm in for a penny I might as well be in for the pound, and so I acquiesced to the name change. Hopefully Makin is not upset by this development, but I don't necessarily see why he would be. WoC has stated that if this will lead to trouble for me, he'll renounce his position entirely and leave once more. While I certainly appreciate the gesture, I'm simply hoping it won't be necessary; his return has been more satisfying than many people would admit, I'm sure. It would be a shame to have someone of his caliber be turned away after all this. Time will tell of course.

Nothing more for today.

---

14^th of September 2017 – Hiveswap Zero Hour

The appointed day has arrived: Hiveswap is being released, and the community is appropriately in a frenzied buzz. Makin is running a community stream with a special edition of a movie that is culturally significant to the fandom, Con Air. He has timed it so that the end of the stream coincides with the release of the game, a level of planning that does not surprise me coming from him. People started to receive download keys about two hours before release, and although I will not receive a key (since I hadn't backed the game on Kickstarter) I have been poised with wallet in hand to pay for this game once it is officially released.

This is a very exciting time for the community, and the first time since I've joined that I will be around for new official content to work with while among other people. It is unprecedented territory for me. Ceru shares some of my nervousness, but mostly I'm excited for the possibilities. All day already we've had people joining regularly, at a rate that is completely unbelievable. I will update the figures later when I have a better idea of them.

Now, several hours later, I have completed the game and many other people are doing so as well. Considering it is only one part of a whole it is pretty straightforward and short, but the content itself is actually rather enjoyable. This sentiment has already been echoed by many others, with most giving it a fairly positive review. The channel dedicated to talking about it with spoilers included has been speeding by nonstop since the game was released, and already the off-the-cuff theories and speculation has begun, accompanied with the Homestuck fandom's characteristic attention to detail and legendary ability to grab onto things that would go otherwise unnoticed by literally anyone else. All of this is exciting to me; I had heard about this years ago when I started reading and never looked into it, but seeing it happen in real time makes me feel a particular giddiness that I was not expecting. It is gratifying in a way that is hard to express with words to be included in these actions this time around, like some sort of fulfillment I didn't fully know I was missing. I believe it's safe to say that Hiveswap has rejuvenated us.

Here near the end of the day, the rate of people joining the HSD has been mindboggling—I don't remember who, but the figure “approximately one new user every 3 minutes” was tossed out. We hit 8000 people only yesterday and now we're just shy of 8,300 as of this writing, a user gain that is almost unfathomable to me. The strain is being felt though; with general being an unutterable hive of activity; there is significant danger of the culture there being lost a la The Eternal September, and even most other channels are experiencing a heavier load than normal. Makin has made talk of recruiting some people temporarily to be pseudos and help with containing spoilers in the appropriate channel, or just regulating traffic; this hasn't been completely necessary up to this point, but during the day when a lot of mods are busy then it may be a different story.

This activity has carried over to the subreddit as well; we've had to keep an eye out on new posts or users that are promoting piracy. Notably, the ggrey person I mentioned was finally banned from the HSD for offering links to pirated material, and then he (as well as 6 or 7 alts) did it on the subreddit as well. I'm not sure if he is the sole source of these problems but either way it has compounded into something that could present a serious issue if not handled adequately.

WoC has remained on the server, with more details regarding his position on the server coming to light. I believe, at least on a tenuous level, that everyone aware of him is okay with his remaining the gaming “enforcer”. He is not to receive additional duties or abilities. The janitorial role's position on the role list ensures that he can no longer modify his own permissions anymore, which eliminates the risk of power abuse. All of these things give me a sliver of hope that things will remain positive.

Of course, WoC has made clear some of his thoughts on the matter as well: first and foremost, he wants to “Make #gaming Great Again”, lamenting especially over the state of the channel now that he's been gone for a while; unfortunately, there is a significant chance that he will not stick around to accomplish this, as he has begun college and expects his activity level to drop substantially. In his words, “no reason to hang around in a place that I don't participate in”. This last point is sensible, although would still be unfortunate on a certain level. As it is, we will have to see how things pan out.

I should take the time to describe one of our users, Niklink. Nik is actually one of the mods of the subreddit, and he’s a fairly laid back individual. He has a humorous streak in him, often delivering commentary that is unexpectedly funny. This has given him a reputation for being clever and witty, and as such his input is usually pretty valued. Now I think about it, however, most of his posts involve something meant to be funny. Some of these are outright memes; I guess he just really likes joking around on the internet. Can't blame him, he's good at it.

Niklink has brought up a salient point about Hiveswap's success, in that it seems like it isn't starting off very strongly. He has given a rough figure of “40,000 purchases in order for it to be successful”, and if it doesn't reach that threshold then the future of the project will be ill-fated. Hopefully the news in the morning is good.

Play Hiveswap – nothing more for today.

---

15^th of September 2017

Today has actually been exceedingly eventful. I'll try to recount everything as faithfully as I can, although I'm certain I've forgotten some things.

The survey has actually been more or less complete since the day it was created, but Makin had deemed the responses “not funny enough for a peanut gallery”. I was initially skeptical of this, but after looking through it myself I have to agree: the caliber of responses this time around was simply not good enough to work off of. That was pretty disappointing to hear; the associated roast is always the best part of a survey. Perhaps next time we'll see some higher quality answers.

Speaking of suggestions falling flat, Makin has ultimately reneged on the potential for taking on a new pseudo, even on a temporary basis. His reasoning is that he's “already beaten hiveswap”, so there's no need for another staff member since he can keep an eye on things himself. While the status quo doesn't exactly seem in imminent danger, I still wonder if this is entirely true. There's a threshold to where you're going to want more help, but of course I'm not qualified to say exactly where that threshold is. I trust Makin to know what he's doing here, but based on sheer numbers alone the time for recruitment may come sooner than any of us are expecting.

In an unprecedented move, Makin also mandated the creation of a #welcome channel at some point in the near future. He also tasked me with creating a channel list complete with descriptions of the activity of each, since I keep this journal (which he amusingly referred to as a diary). This came as a surprise to me; I may be mistaken and simply thinking of #rules again, but I'm fairly certain that Makin has stated we would not create a #welcome channel since it's a redundant feature of the site, seeing as most channels' purposes are self-explanitory. Regardless, I'm not one to turn down an opportunity to help so I set about drafting a channel list up. It's not finalized yet but the brunt of the work is done, and all that's left is to polish things once the time comes. I'm curious to see if this will have any actual effect on the relative quality of our server; it's standard practice for servers to have a #welcome channel, so the absence of one in ours has elicited comments in the past. Just another of the many things we've carried out in an unorthodox fashion.

I mentioned yesterday the element of Hiveswap's profitability, and how we all want it to be a success. Niklink kept us updated today as to the status of Hiveswap purchases and downloads. From what I understand, approximately 20,000 now own the game, which is around half of what we'd optimally like to see. The nail in the coffin, so to speak, is the fact that it can be expected most of those people did not actually pay for a copy at this time; they paid for it years ago with the Kickstarter, and they received a key to download it on Steam or receive it on Humble Bundle. Either way, the point is that Hiveswap is not turning a profit by any means. Thankfully most reviews have been very kind to it, and the game itself is enjoyable enough that it merits these positive reviews, it's just that these don't mean much if the project makes so little money they can't afford to continue.

The exact reason this is the case, with so few actual purchases, is difficult to assess with complete accuracy, but it has been the subject of debate all day and some obvious or reasonable explanations for this repeatedly crop up: first and foremost is the lack of proper advertising done for the game. Linked no doubt to the general lack of communication we experienced for long, and I personally suspect because there was no room in the budget for it, the game was advertised almost nowhere. We received the trailers on Youtube, but as far as I can see there were no ads put up in an attempt to garner people not already aware of the game.

This act is somewhat maddening because it feels like something that could easily be rectified and used to attract people who want to buy the game, but there are other routes besides advertising of course. Oft-discussed is how Hiveswap could parallel Undertale in terms of developing a fanbase, and the latter did so by being picked up by a multitude of people who stream themselves playing video games, or release videos thereof. Hiveswap being picked up by a massive streamer or Youtuber would almost guarantee that it becomes much more widely sold than what we're currently seeing, and would ensure its financial success⁹.

In fact, such a thing has already happened. Jacksepticeye is a Let's Player who was responsible for Undertale absolutely exploding in popularity back when it came out, and just a few minutes ago as of this writing he released a statement on Tumblr stating that he had already recorded the “first episode” of a series for a Hiveswap let's play. This is truly bittersweet news, as it will almost certainly lead to good things for Hiveswap's financial success, but jacksepticeye's involvement is arguably what led to the Undertale fandom having such a horrid reputation.

I'm personally excited for the possibilities but also experienced enough to know that this will be culturally destructive, even if it is a positive occurrence for the developers specifically. There is a non-zero chance that our community (or the Homestuck fandom at large) may be destroyed in its current form by the sheer influx of people with no regard for the existing structure. I don't expect this to actually happen in such a blunt way, but the possibility still worries me somewhat. Communities that experience growth too quickly are often altered in significant and irreparable ways.

Looking at the various channels and seeing the people talking and having a good time with each other is what makes me fear for this possibility. There is a distinct semblance of culture here, and especially leanings toward a strong community. For the most part, everyone likes everyone else. Even those who don't strictly like each other still display some camaraderie just by dint of being here and associating with each other. It reminds me of why I started this journal and why I like this place so much; it is easy and tremendously enjoyable just to be here. I am loathe to see this community disappear in any way, be it by force or time. I am going to redouble my efforts to preserve what I am witnessing, and also to assist in keeping the community happy and healthy.

Here's to hoping that the future holds only good things for us and Hiveswap. Nothing more for today.

---

16^th of September 2017

The jacksepticeye video is out, and it has almost immediately garnered hundreds of thousands of views. This is the kind of publicity that we were really hoping for; if enough people see videos of Hiveswap, then they'll start to pick it up and support the game in a serious financial way. This is the optimal outcome, following in Undertale's footsteps. There are some interesting comments, as Jack mentioned in the video that some people have told him not to play the game because it'll “ruin the community like it did with Undertale.”

Such comments strike me as distinctly mean-spirited and not really accurate. While jacksepticeye's Undertale videos did kickstart the fandom into what it is now—mostly unsavory and rabid—it was the actions of many who contributed to this process, not just one person's efforts. I admit that there are many of us who wonder what direction jack's involvement will take us, but I think we're all more concerned with Hiveswap succeeding at this point. We'll cross the other bridge after we've crossed this one.

As for exactly what the video may do for the game, that remains to be seen. Of course it will increase its visibility substantially, reaching out to people that would otherwise never have heard of this game, but the playstyle of Undertale is significantly different from Hiveswap; there is a significant chance that people won't pick up on it even though they know about it because the type of game isn't interesting to them. We won't even be able to tell what the effects of the video's presence will be until some time has passed—Undertale's search trend increased gradually over the course of about three and a half months after it was released, peaking near the end of 2015, but by then it was so widely known that people picked it up by osmosis alone. It's been only two days since Hiveswap has been released, so there's literally no way to tell if it will follow a similar trend or not. It's been pointed out to me that the purchasing trends for Hiveswap so far are outdoing what Undertale had before, which induces some optimism, but ultimately does not tell me what the future holds. Guess we'll just have to wait and see.

More strictly related to the server, the Swamp Wizard blog disappeared today. After some brief confusion, it was deduced that they've restricted access to their blog, and the exact manner in which they restricted their blog means it is unviewable by anyone. This could be due to a number of factors; Tipsy has elaborated on the occurrence with some detail, speculating that it may be because “so many people turned against them”. A number of people have begun talking about them, which tipsy takes to mean that they are “universally hated”. There was also a sighting on Twitter from James and an affiliated artist named Shelby Cragg, neither of which were explicit but almost clearly referring to Swamp Wizard's activities.

In the interest of documenting this as accurately as possible, I would like to point out that I don't know any of this conclusively. Swamp Wizard restricting their blog access could be due to something completely unrelated, all of the things I've mentioned so far are more or less speculation, and I don't exactly pride myself in utilizing internet gossip to fill out the entries of this journal. That having been said, the confluence of factors surrounding the incident are all pretty convenient in their placement. For the sake of not misrepresenting things as worse than they need to be, I will move on from this topic and revisit it only if conclusive information is presented.

Instead, I'm pleased to present a story that I've yet to detail here. About a month ago, there was an encounter between Toast and a user who wanted to ask them a question. This user wanted to know if they could “kin” Toast. For those who are unfamiliar, “kinning” is a concept that involves assuming the identity of another object or person. A classic example is someone enjoying the concept of dragons so much that they want to be one themselves, at which point they would call themselves “dragon-kin”. The vast majority of us find this sort of instantiation of the concept distasteful, but that's a topic for another day. The point here is that this fellow wanted to “kin” Toast, to literally become him in their mind.

Obviously, Toast denied this odd request, albeit as tactfully as possible. All this by itself wasn't that big of an issue; we talk to some pretty unusual people all the time, and a polite—if unusual—request like this is downright pleasant compared to some things we've been asked to do or say. If it had been left at this, I'm sure that we wouldn't have even known that the conversation took place. As things go, the person in question could not restrain themselves and asked one more question: “is it alright if i suck one of your toes? like in a rp or smth?”

Things have never been the same since. I don't think a week has gone by where the toe-sucking meme has not been called upon at length, and we routinely make fun of Toast for this. It's one of the more infamous things to occur here, as far as my memory serves, and I don't believe anyone is going to let it stop anytime soon. I wonder where that person is now; they immediately withdrew the request and stopped messaging Toast after the initial comment, which has been positively ensconced in the folds of our personal mythology. I'm not sure we will ever forget this occasion, nor should we forget it. Someone's gotta rake Toast over the coals for it, after all.

Nothing more for today.

---

17^th of September 2017

Since WoC returned, he has been so kind as to read over this journal and provide his own insight as to the events here, and some of my descriptions of him. He has talked at length about the state of channels both past and present, and wanted to clarify some things. The full document is included as a separate file, but when this journal is complete (should that day ever come), then it will be added in an index of miscellaneous materials alongside the documents provided by others, such as for CANMT and LOFAM. Edit as of 1/15/17: the item is now included in appendix B under “Addendum”.

Speaking of WoC's return, there has been a noticeable change in the quality of discussion at any given time. For instance, today we managed to talk about shitting for over 45 minutes. I'm not kidding—this is the kind of discussion that WoC's mere presence encourages. I don't know how the topic sustained itself for nearly an hour, but the overall point is that his involvement has already influenced the channel to an extreme degree. The conversation itself was oddly engaging so what I'm saying shouldn't be taken as a strict complaint, it's more just bewildering to me that he manages to make such things happen just by existing and being in close proximity.

Other topics discussed included the history of altgen, and how there is a noticeable change in the quality of conversation there from before WoC left to now. From the time it was created to just a couple weeks ago, altgen was a repository for shitposting. I've covered this topic at length, so suffice to say that for some reason its intended purpose has changed somewhat as of late. WoC has firmly decided that their attempt to form a legitimate community instead of being an exercise in meme masturbation is a change for the worse, an assessment that amuses me greatly. WoC is nothing if not principled; he may not agree or like what you do, but he will respect you if you stick by your guns and ideology when it matters most. To him, the reduction of shitposting in favor of community building is an inexcusable upset in the dynamics of the place; in his words, “it's different and all change should be met with open hostility and fear”. Timeless wisdom for the ages, surely.

I want to take this time to mention an old regular known as Sylandrophol, who was fairly infamous in the community. They fit into the mold of “lowkey shitposter”, where they often had a net negative effect on discussion, but were so infrequent or subtle about it that we couldn't outright ban them for it. By the time we ever noticed something was amiss, it was either already done with or it had been so long since a previous infraction that they were let off the hook. Sylandrophol had a strange habit of interjecting into conversations when certain romantic pairings were suggested; I don't remember which characters caused them to do so, but if one they disliked was mentioned, they would automatically leap to attack it ferociously, which would draw the ire of anyone participating in the conversation since it was extremely disruptive and rude.

One of the more interesting things Sylandrophol ever did was create a fanfiction of Makin and some members of HVSD. This creation had the rare and impressive effect of making literally everyone who read it uncomfortable—even Makin, who is fond of parody and teasing, was distinctly unnerved by some of the things suggested in this story. I never read it myself, but one event of the story described to me in some detail involved Icel killing Makin's parents. After this passage was released, Makin demanded that Sylandrophol stop writing or at least releasing the story to the public, as it could stir animosity between the HSD and HVSD for absolutely no reason.

This warning seemed to work, but in keeping with the general behavior of keeping it subtle Sylandrophol kept distributing the work and finally people got Too Upset about the crassly written literature. I am uncertain but I think this, in combination with advocating raids on HVSD, finally earned them a permaban somewhere a few months ago. A strange fate for an even stranger person.

This aside, in the current day the jacksepticeye video (and others I'm sure) have proven to be of some success. We ended yesterday with around 20,000 people owning Hiveswap, and today we're ending it with over 30,000. That's a significant increase in ownership, and as jack produces more videos I'm sure there will be more of a boon to Hiveswap sales. If this momentum keeps up then Hiveswap will have sold enough copies to ensure that What Pumpkin isn't gutted by the time they finish, which is an outcome that we all hope for obviously. I wonder what the effects on the community will be if we continue to grow in size as we have been, but I consider that development to be exciting. I have intermittently stated my excitement for obtaining a round number of 10,000 members in the HSD as a whole, and then to go even further beyond¹⁰. I'm very curious to see what the future holds for us, hopefully good things.

Nothing more for today.

---

18^th of September 2017

Nothing of importance really happened today. Instead, I asked the regulars hanging around at the time to provide some material that might help me bolster this journal a little bit more. I received a pleasantly large stack of information, which I will try to explain in full here. My knowledge of most, if not all, of these events is patchy at best, so I rely on the information given to me by those who were here for it.

First I think it would be good to describe a rather notable member of the community, Andrew. He is the person who has been on the server longest besides Makin, joining before anyone else. He is a rather interesting fellow, eager to share insight on a conversation when he has it. He is also a rather notorious flirt, even hitting on me once or twice to my recollection. Interested in all sorts of entertainment, especially gaming and even tabletop, he has regularly created Dungeons and Dragons groups, although to the best of my knowledge they don't typically pan out as time goes by. I consider him one of the main members of the #gaming crew, consisting of himself, WoC, LRS, and then regulars Somerandomguy, Mildly Adequate Snoiper, and then some others. They're all by far the most active people in that channel—I can peek in at any time and there's an almost certain chance that one of them are talking, no matter what's being discussed.

Andrew was gracious enough to describe the conditions of the place before it assumed its current form. Apparently the server was more specific in purpose, as it was meant for people playing The Overseer Project back when it was still in earlier development stages: “Well, it was originally an Overseer Discord as you probably know...”. The radically smaller size of the server and its specificity must have given it a much different feeling. Andrew's creation of tabletop gaming groups existed back even then as well: “... during the transfer from Overseer to Homestuck AnionCation, Rumull, myself, Medix, and someone else I can't quite remember played DND”, Medix in this case being our very own Medixum, and AnionCation a figure that still floats among us on the HSD.

His presence here from the beginning has ensured that Andrew is more or less aware of all of the servers' bumps and stories. I think his involvement was less pronounced compared to someone such as Toast though, who not only remembers these incidents but also caused a few of them himself or directly participated in them. There are a number of other users that used to make up a significant portion of “The Old Crew”, remnants of what Toast refers to as The Golden Age of the HSD, specifically February through June or so of 2016.

The first I'd choose to describe would be CynicallyCritical. I'm not sure of the exact word I would use to describe them; I've spoken with them a few times and their personality strikes me as a strange blend of many different aspects, which aggregates into this generally bewildering character. CynicallyCritical, or just CC, is self-centered in an almost aimless way. They seek out amusement from others and if you fail to provide it, they are very quick to tell you that they are not interested in speaking with you. It's far from personal; they are simply curt and honest in a way that borders on rude. Conversations can go from amicable and thought-provoking to the most outrageous horseshit to being cut off completely because CC got bored all of a sudden. It makes talking to them in a consistent manner kind of difficult, at least for me.

They also own a server that, if memory serves, is the progenitor to the splinter server nonsense. I don't have a thorough knowledge of this and no one has bothered to clarify so I'll avoid saying much more on its history, but the server is still around to this day. A number of people from the HSD are on it, and many of those people have since left the HSD. The activity of the server fluctuates in ways that are difficult to fully assess, so I will move on.

Another significant user from the past was a guy named Wade. He used to be a moderator on the MSPA subreddit and also this server, but eventually had a falling out with Makin. After this, they went to HVSD instead. They're also very active on the subreddit and a pretty recognized figure for our pocket of the fandom. He started or at least helped start a rather ambitious fan story called “Redditstuck”, which utilized the assistance and personalities of the subreddit members themselves to make a rather impressive story. As of this writing Redditstuck is still being made, although the update schedule is exceedingly slow.

One of the more amusing stories involving Wade (that I'm familiar with) occurred recently actually. I mentioned they joined HVSD and were content to hang out there some time ago, but then on April 11th of this year he joined HSD again very briefly to say: “its official hsd is the better server I cant call people cucks in [HVSD]” and then simply left again. This encounter had us positively reeling for days afterwards, and is forever pinned in #general for posterity.

A less savory person, in the same vein as people like Talons or Itoan, was a user named Lognes. Before their eventual ban, however, they left a mark on the server that is still present to this day. Lognes was more than a bit of a shitter who liked to repeat meme phrases ad nauseum. One of these phrases was simply the word “kek”, which anyone versed in 4chan lore will be more than aware of. Lognes spewing the word would have been more or less fine on its own even if stupid, but for some reason it was picked up by everyone else in the server, and it got repeated so often that it became a banned word. This event was eventually commemorated with an emote that is simply the word “BANNED” in big red letters, called with :kek:. I was actually pretty fond of that emote when I first joined, although I would say that its general use has fallen considerably in the last several months.

In the category of problem users, it is long overdue that I describe Daddy. I've mentioned them once before as someone who succeeded in making the vast majority of people insanely uncomfortable, but I have not gone to any lengths to describe what it was they did. They were unfortunately before my time, but Toast has explained that he, “spammed porn in gen every day... and claimed to be 7 years old”. I assume that the server was far less structured at this time, which is why he wasn't immediately banned permanently for being a shitter. Of note is that, during the server's one year anniversary, Daddy was unbanned for the duration of the day to celebrate. Remarkably, or perhaps not remarkably at all, he immediately round robin'd the mod team and asked for access to the NSFW channel (still in existence at the time), which everyone obviously refused him. The part that amuses me about this is how swiftly and easily he resorted to the tendency. There was no hesitation in it—only the practiced and unthinking actions of someone who has undoubtedly asked for access to porn hundreds of times prior. I almost wish I knew more about this person and how it is he is allowed to exist, but ironically he serves also as a lesson against asking such questions; some things are just not meant to be comprehended by us mere mortals.

There are two events that have been described to me that I wish to relay as well: the first is a meme phrase that pops up every once in a while, which simply involves someone shouting “THE PHYSICAL RETURN OF JESUS CHRIST.” I've always wondered what was meant by this, and hb was kind enough to provide context tonight. Earlier in the server's history, there was some random user who spammed a video of the character “Biggie Cheese” from the Nickelodeon movie “Barnyard”, accompanied simply with “The Physical Return of Jesus Christ”. Eventually they were banned from this, but like a curse they came back and spammed the image more. Then it happened again, and again, and again. It happened so many times that the phrase has effectively been embedded into our collective consciousness here. I sometimes don't even register it when I see the phrase; it's simply a part of the fabric of this place.

The second incident involved the original altgen pseudo-mod, named swifterjack. This user themself has an interesting and drama-filled history with this server, which I promised some time ago I would explain here. I am reasonably certain that there are actually a large number of things that caused problems, but the main thing is that several months ago, perhaps as early as last year, the swifterjack was part of a group message with a bunch of other people; all of the people involved were underaged, including the swifterjack, and they all began sending each other nude pictures. This activity went undetected and unknown for months, until finally in about May or so it came to light and we had to sort through the fallout in order to figure out what needed to be addressed (this is actually the incident that precipitated Twonks becoming angry and being banned from the HSD over). Between this and some other behavior that won’t be elaborated on for reasons of privacy, the swifterjack was banned from the HSD in full, and it is highly unlikely they will ever be allowed back.

At the time of this incident, however, the swifterjack was the pseudo-mod for altgen before The Reckoning. It might have been this next incident in particular that led to their demodding, or at least slated them for the axe; one fine day, the swifterjack decided to rename everyone in the server to Wah, and abused the bots to set the radio in the voice channels to play a single video: a ten hour loop of the Mario character Waluigi saying “Wah!” over and over again, in increasingly warped or layered fashions. This activity went unchecked for an entire day before someone finally realized what was happening and put a stop to it. This event has been suitably dubbed “The Wahhening”, and there are still accounts in the server named “wah”, although I couldn't tell if they're relics of this situation or if they obtained the name organically.

Shortly after I was modded, sometime in March if memory serves, we had a raid that can only be described as an intense microburst; with absolutely no warning, over 300 accounts joined within the same minute of each other and all posted exactly one message, which was a link to another Discord server. These bots all had the same name: Fuck. It took over half an hour for myself and other mods to comb through the messages and delete them. Discord has an option to delete the message history of a single user, but since all of these accounts posted independently we had to manually ban them in order to make the messages disappear. While tame in content and severity, the sheer amount of work involved with cleaning up afterwards makes the Fuck Raid probably one of the most infamous cases we've ever had to deal with. We've since had Ceru design a bot function that can only be called by moderators, which automatically bans all accounts that have joined in the last however many minutes, and deletes their messages. We haven't had to use this command yet thankfully, and there is hope that we won't ever have to. Admittedly though, the novelty and relative tameness of the Fuck Raid has solidified it in our memories forever.

The last thing I shall describe today was when Makin put up the first ad advertising the HSD, and arguably the beginning of the end for the Golden Age. It led to a severe restructuring of the server's channels, with many informing me that the current forms of #general, #altgen, and #mspa-lit all exist as a direct result of the advertisement. I can only imagine how many people were involved, but according to Toast, “the server population went up like 400%”. Since then advertisements have gone up periodically and we always see a noticeable increase in members on the server, but nothing quite so dramatic obviously. I wonder if the severe increase was similar to what we experience now and it was simply higher in proportions because there were less people on the server back then, or if the increase was significantly greater than we experience now. If the latter, then what's the difference between then and now? Questions for another time perhaps.

It's important to note that, while I've described these events as all running within the Golden Age of the server, it has been explained to me that some of these events such as THE PHYSICAL RETURN OF CHRIST and the first ad Makin put up actually occurred outside of the time frame of February to June 2016. They are lumped in with the Golden Age because the general feeling of these events are all similar to each other, and are indicative of a newly formed community.

I'll ask around for more past events at a later time, especially on a slow day. As it is, nothing more for today.

---

19^th of September 2017

A more or less slow day. Jacksepticeye released his second Hiveswap video, and the first one has (as of this writing probably) surpassed one million views. The figures for Hiveswap sales updated as well, and it looks like they finally broke 40,000 owners. This is a fairly positive trend, and we all hope that it continues of course. There have also been other notable figures streaming/playing it, such as Rev from Vinesauce. While I'm sure there's a degree of overlap between people who already own the game and watch each of these people, there will be people in each section of these communities who have never heard of or experienced these things, which is what we're banking on.

There was one review about Hiveswap today that I watched and thought was fairly cogent and well written, by a person named HippoCrit. However, in addition to Hiveswap as a stand alone game, the reviewer talked about its position in relation to Homestuck. Obviously due to their inextricable nature this is to be expected, but I find myself wanting Hiveswap to develop a reputation and success that is independent of Homestuck in as many facets as possible. Part of this is because Homestuck has its own very well established history and fanbase, and while it would be helpful if that base was shared with Hiveswap there is an extraordinary amount of baggage associated with Homestuck fans for a plethora of reasons. Prematurely connoting the two with each other will automatically alienate people from Hiveswap, precluding any chance that they will play it by mere association alone. This kind of occurrence bothers me significantly—I've never thought that solely judging a work by its fans is appropriate.

Funnily, in his playthrough today jacksepticeye wanted to make a correction of a statement he made in the first Hiveswap video, where he credited Toby Fox as the composer of the game and drew the link between his involvement and Undertale. While it's true of course that Toby Fox is composing music for Hiveswap, so is James Roach; jacksepticeye wanted to point this out today, but he flat out forgot James' name in the video when he went to give the shout out. The exact comment, transcribed by I assume Minish, was:

oh, and i also said, i wanna-i wanna correct it here and now as well because i feel bad, i said that toby fox made the music for the game. but toby fox only had a hand in it, somebody else as well - oh i forget their name, im so sorry, i talked to them on twitter, there was a lot of names - they, they also made, the music, as well, in fact i think they made most of the music, so i-i, i gave all the credit to toby fox and im sorry about that, i didn't mean to do that, i didn't know...

While obviously humorous, this is actually pretty unfortunate. I don't care for James personally, but it would be unfair leaning solidly towards unethical to deprive him of due credit; the soundtrack and general audio design for Hiveswap is excellent, and I feel like James deserves a chance to shine for it. However, Toby's presence on Hiveswap has kind of ruined that in a sense—the nature of Undertale's success and the type of fans it boasts are such that all people see in the music credit is “Toby Fox”, which means that Roach has fallen by the wayside. As this progresses further, I sincerely hope that we get to play witness to James becoming more successful and recognized as an artist for his contributions to this game. His skills are very impressive and I simply find it a shame that he's not being recognized appropriately for his part in all of this.

More specifically to the HSD, I would like to bring attention to a very strange tendency that's been occurring for some time. For reasons that I cannot even begin to understand, Sea Hitler has this uncanny ability to attract socially awkward members of the server to him. There has been a long string of these people, and more striking is the severity with which some of these people interface with Shitler—Pep was the last such individual, and their interactions with Shitler are almost legendary.

Pep was a regular in altgen who I never had the misfortune of being an object of attention from, but Shitler seemed to be solicited by them on a regular basis. Sea Hitler has provided screenshots of some messages he received from Pep, most of which are an overt attempt to gain his attention—Pep would often say nothing but “sea hitler” dozens of times, and then when he would finally respond then the conversation (or whatever it may be called) would begin in earnest. I think there was some exchange of art or general declarations of affection, the exact details are lost on me. The overall point here is that Pep managed to sew an incredible amount of discomfort into their interactions with Shitler, and even with other mods like Anervaria.

Pep was finally banned from the server a few weeks ago, I believe due to inciting raids. They had developed a small cult of personality in altgen, but thankfully this action did not prove to be too controversial. After they were banned, they began messaging other members of the mod team, once even myself; we advised everyone to avoid responding at all costs, a move which seemed to work. I have not since been contacted by them, and aside from Anervaria and Sea Hitler I think Pep has left us alone.

The larger idea here is that Pep is only one such instance of people seeking out Sea Hitler. The frequency with which this happens is truly bewildering—I earnestly wish I knew why it happens so often (I surmise it has something to do with the character that Sea Hitler utilizes in his profile, but that's not strictly important). The latest version of this is through a user that has proven difficult for us for some time, a fellow named Maxmikester.

Maxmikester has been around for a long time in the HSD, and is a particular nuisance for Tensei as they hang out in art-music frequently. They habitually request that people draw them with another character from Homestuck, an act that has drawn some attention from us in the past. With most people we would dismiss this, as it's honestly not that strange. However, the earnestness of these requests has proven unsettling; whereas we would typically chalk up this behavior to some obscure irony, it seems as if Max is being completely sincere about their desire to be portrayed alongside the character. To put it mildly, their affection for this character is strikingly deep and genuine. I've heard stranger things and am not terribly fazed by this personally, but others can find it off-putting or even disturbing.

All of this is to say that Max is only the latest person I'm aware of to engage in this song and dance of private messages with Sea Hitler. We've suggested that he turn these people down, but he cites the fact that he “doesn't want to be rude”. It speaks well to his character, but there will be no end to suitors like this if he does not learn to firmly (and tactfully) deny them.

Part of Max's involvement in art-music was a subset of a larger collection of behavior that had to be handled a few months ago. The graphical nature of Homestuck is such that it is extremely easy to make a template or take existing art from the comic and edit it to suit the artists' whims and design. Unfortunately, this leads to an unwieldy amount of frankly shitty contributions to the channel. These so called sprite-edits were eventually unallowed from the channel because it clogged the place up and made it harder for people to discuss other forms of art. It was mandated that sprite-edits belong in altgen, a declaration that thoroughly pissed off a variety of users. The backlash, while short-lived, was actually pretty fierce. Tensei had his hands full with trying to keep the channel from rioting under the new rule, but things have since then calmed down and people accept the rule (albeit with some grumbling on occasion). There is still protests against their relegation to altgen, but we're not sure where else they can go that would be appropriate. Maybe something to be revisited in the future.

On occasion, people will try to exploit the sprite edits for their own gain. Just today this happened, where someone—no doubt working from a template—crafted sprite edits for Maxmikester based on the Hiveswap character design. They then posted an “example set” of edits and listed prices for making them for people! Not only was it being advertised in art-music, which is actually bannable, but the price this person was asking for the quality of work was insanely exorbitant. We had a good laugh about it in modchat after Tensei posted screenshots—it was almost offensive on principle alone. I think that, for this person, it may have actually just been a simple misunderstanding, as when they were confronted they acquiesced and went elsewhere immediately. I wonder about people like that, but at least it's a smooth process when they bother to listen.

Less HSD-centric but still notable, it seems as if Discord had a severe array of server outtages earlier today. I received DMs from no less than 6 people total asking me if the server had been deleted suddenly because they could not see it. If it's as I suspect and the outtages were due to the load on the system caused by the number of people, then I have to worry. Discord has already progressed heavily into monetizing themselves in order to adequately pay for server costs, actions which have earned them condemnations from some. Many feel as if the extra features you can pay for are unfair and shouldn't exist, but I personally don't see the issue—Discord must pay for its servers somehow, and if you enjoy the service and use it enough it makes intuitive sense to me that you would financially support them (especially considering all of the little benefits you get from doing so). Indeed I would prefer that most people do this, because if they cannot afford hosting for their servers then we could start running into a variety of problems—I'm no expert in this area but the ramifications could be disastrous for us. That's a topic for when it becomes an actual problem though.

Aside from all this, there's a curious effect that I've repeatedly noticed or played victim to myself, which is that time seems to flow differently here. Things that happen in real life pass with regularity and an easily trackable flow, but on the HSD things that happened only a few days or a week ago feel like they occurred in some other year. Events that happened months ago feel like they occurred in an entirely different lifetime; it's quite unnerving to be speaking about something in the distant past-tense, on a scale of months, to be reminded that it happened four days ago. I guess that's also a motivating factor for myself in writing this journal; it makes it much easier to recall events with certainty when I need to. I don't enjoy forgetting the facts and details associated with any of these events, and having a definite record on hand alleviates that problem substantially.

The sensation of time slipping away from us is not entirely unpleasant to me though—it gives this place an air of relaxation and comfort, where I can feel loose and distant from things that make the days drag on. There's a significant degree of satisfaction for me in coming onto the HSD every day and talking with people, where even the negative experiences are arguably enjoyable in their own perverse way. As time goes by the collective experience leaves this indelible effect on me; every day I feel like the impressions I get of this place and its people are cemented further into my mind, and I'm comforted in the fact that I may never forget what I have experienced here, be it good or bad.

I wonder where I'll be in relation to this place in the future; a year, five years, ten years, and so on. Will we still be around? If so, what will the community be like? Will the same people use it? What will have happened to us all as life goes by? While I greatly fear its eventual loss, I am also eager to see what the future holds for us. I'm sure that many others are like myself, and have been left with these permanent etchings of a community that can never be forgotten. As time goes by, perhaps those of us who are dedicated to its perseverance will grow closer together, and we will never actually leave?

I'm sure I could be happy with that.

---

20^th of September 2017

Today hasn't been terribly eventful; we did reach 8,500 members as of 9:16 AM, which is astonishing. However, it's felt a bit slow around here lately. I attribute this to school starting back up for a lot of people around this time, and I'm sure other reasons exist as well. The slowness in the face of the increased membership is kind of worrying to me personally, but as far as I can tell it's just a natural dip in activity. I'm sure it'll become more active as people adapt to being in school again, a trend that would fit with previous communities I've witnessed or participated in.

Instead I'd like to append some statements to previous stories I've recounted, namely that of the Music Team AMA and the nature of hstanon's ban some time ago. Wheals helpfully provided me with information regarding both, and I'm always happy to more faithfully mark down this information.

I mentioned before that an AMA was formed with members of the Homestuck Music Team, which led to Tensei staying here. As it turns out, the order is a tad different: Tensei joined the HSD first in October last year, following the release of a Hiveswap trailer: “everyone freaked out when they saw it was him, which made a busy chat even busier”. He conducted his own informal AMA, and “then a few days later there was a more formal thing where a bunch of the music team people joined”. This then led to the chat going way too quickly for anyone to talk properly, and the subsequent departure of the Music Team from the HSD. According to Wheals, “he said he did it 'cause i like a bit of chaos'”, a fact that amuses me more than just a little.

As far as the incident with hstanon is concerned, it was a fair bit of a fiasco. Hstanon appeared to lose his mind somewhere in the beginning of January this year, to the point that his behavior was becoming a real problem. He made a bet with Tensei, saying that if the latter “called Makin a nigger”, then hstanon would give him $50. This proposition alone was enough to warrant a ban since the intended goal was to get Tensei in trouble for using the slur. Additionally, I was under the impression that hstanon ping spammed the moderators and called Makin the racial epithet repeatedly as well, but upon further review I actually can't find any instance of this on the HSD. In this case there are two possibilities: either this did actually happen and the messages were just deleted afterwards, or I imagined the entire scenario up, which is not inconceivable. Even disregarding this, hst's ban was long overdue anyway, and he was removed on about the 13th of January.

More concurrently, when I distributed the latest copy of the journal, Olki brought up a rather interesting point about the historicity of the server. I took Toast's word on what constitutes the Golden Age of this place for granted, since he's been around for a while. However, his assessment is not universally agreed upon; there are others who would extend the period of the Golden Age until the end of October, or move it entirely. It is generally agreed upon that this period lasted for about four months to half a year, beginning shortly after the server began. More interesting than the past even is the consideration of where we might be now; I've mentioned that server activity appears to be down, but we have way more members than ever before. Additionally, the channels that do experience activity, mostly mspa-lit, altgen, and possibly general and social, have been experiencing a sort of cultural Renaissance. Old members coming back, new members joining in spades, and new content is bringing us back to our roots as a community; with all of these factors in mind, it is has been generally agreed upon that we are perhaps entering a Silver Age. The glory is not as pronounced as it was before, but this is still a prosperous time for our community. I sincerely hope that the positive trends continue and that the community flourishes in the future.

Seeing as it's Wednesday, there was also another interview from WP set to come out, which it did; James Roach and Toby Fox did a joint interview about what they thought of the music they've made. It was actually quite humorous and enjoyable, but then only a few minutes after the interview went up, it was taken back down. The URL now leads to a blank page, and people are greatly confused as to why this has happened. Serendipitously, Toast had loaded the interview in the brief amount of time that it was up, so he had a copy of the text available. After making a textbin for it, he distributed links so people could read it anyway.

By all means, we could find nothing in the interview that would have necessitated the recall, at least according to our inexperienced eyes. There might have been some kind of comment they wished not to distribute or something along those lines, maybe even something of a legal nature, but the truth eludes us. I'm extremely curious as to why this occurred, although it could simply be a mistake. No way to tell unless an official statement is given on the matter in the near future.

Nothing more for today.

---

22^nd of September 2017

Discord updated and finally released channel categories, which allows us to organize the channels of a server so that it's more refined. In order to capitalize on this, Makin rejuvenated the survey channel and requested suggestions on how exactly to organize the server.

After some discussion, it was decided that there would be five public categories: one dedicated to announcement channels; one to general chats, including general itself, social, serious, altgen, and bot-spam radio; one to Homestuck related content, including homestuck, hiveswap, and hiveswap-spoilers; one to special interests, including gaming, art-music, tv-cartoon, anime, mspa-lit, and coding-tech; and one dedicated to the voice channels, which includes the actual text channel and then all of the voice channels. Not visible to the public are the mod related channels and then all of the archived channels.

All in all, the new organization is actually pretty aesthetically appealing. I recall that being able to organize the server channel list in this manner has been something Makin or the mod team in general has looked forward to for a while. In order to usher in this new era of organization, Makin also officially instated the #welcome channel, which has been localized in the same category as #news and #announcements. This is probably the closest to a #rules channel as we will ever get; any closer and I'll start to suspect that Makin has been compromised somehow.

The archive list has also had previously unseen channels to it, such as the #8000-party channel. Being previously unseen by moderators, it is a relief to know that we have access to it as well now. However, it begs the question of whether there are more hidden archived channels that only Makin can see. I either can't recall or have never known about these channels in the first place, so in all honesty there's not much point for me to dwell on the possibility.

At any rate, I hope that the current organization of the channels remains in place for some time, I find it quite appealing. Nothing more for today.

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23^rd of September 2017

The slowness continues. Today in #mspa-lit we talked about a number of things, but the first of note for me personally was a conversation between myself, Tensei, and occasionally a few others, about RPGs.

Classically I'm not very well versed in pop culture, so sometimes I feel left out in these discussions. Usually I'll refrain from saying anything unless I have a specific thing I can actually add, in which this conversation I did. I made a comment detailing my very limited exposure to RPGs, and Tensei and Makin managed to pick up on the fact that I haven't actually played that many. Instead of making fun of me for this, like some of my previous communities would have, Tensei was pretty understanding of this and talked it out with me. When I pressed for more information, he was actually very helpful and provided answers that made the experience a rather positive one.

All of this is to say that I really appreciate Tensei's presence here. His status as a member of the Music Team for Homestuck, and the exact nature of his contributions to key elements of the story, elevate him above the rest of us in a way that is indisputable. Despite this, he associates more or less freely with people and to date I don't think I've ever seen him bring up the Music Team thing in any context, even jokingly. Additionally, whenever he contributes to a topic it's almost always well-founded or at least amusing. I guess I'm just consistently pleased with talking to him.

To top it off, he's a fairly enigmatic guy. He's not paranoid like Makin, but retains a degree of mystery surrounding his actual self. I think it's been established that you can figure out information about him easily if you bother to put any effort in, but he doesn't volunteer it either. I think it's a fair balance between people who wear their heart on their sleeves and ultra-secretive people like Makin.

Speaking of, what we strongly believe is a reference to Tensei was found in Hiveswap; there's a poster with contributing musicians to Homestuck, four in total, but one of them is ripped so that you can't see their face. The other details that are still visible are strikingly similar to the one picture we've seen of him floating around. If this is indeed a reference to Tensei, the exact reason he's been ripped out is not clear to us, although we're certain it wasn't meant as a snub. Just a neat detail for us.

Mspa-lit has a new name, a detail that I've failed to touch on for a number of days, or even weeks now. Its current iteration of read-x is “read-modern-cannibals”, Modern Cannibals being a rather interesting meta-fiction for the Homestuck fandom. Without going into too much detail, it seems to be an overt call back to the hey-day of the fandom; while it takes place in the time it was written, about 2015, the strength of the fandom as its portrayed in the story is reminiscent of 2011 or 2012 levels. I didn't personally enjoy the story that much; while it was written interestingly and is almost certainly an engaging read for anyone who can directly sympathize, I was either too late or simply didn't bother to engage with the fandom at the proper point for me to imbibe any of the feeling that this story is attempting to channel.

At any rate, Makin has stated that the channel will only be changed back to read-worm once everyone has read Modern Cannibals, a mandate that has led to plenty of grumbling from some of us. I would personally prefer a return to simple “mspa-lit”, but apparently that's not acceptable at this point. I wonder where the exact turning point was where it was established that that name would no longer be valid, but it hasn't been used in some time. The tradition now is to rename the channel in whatever work that Makin has decided to espouse most recently, with a return to read-worm when no work is currently being shilled.

Speaking of things being shilled, we were alerted to the presence of a game that came out just yesterday called Doki Doki Literature Club, which is a visual novel. I'm not really a fan of these types of games; they're overtly marketed towards the type of person that I don't like to imagine myself as being, and they usually end up being kind of trite or cliché anyway. After we were told about it, though, other users wouldn't stop remarking on it, citing some rather interesting developments. Because of the buzz it was generating I decided to pick it up myself and see what was going on.

This turned out to be a bad idea. Far from being cliché, the game was simply horrifying. I don't have any tolerance for horror genre material, so I quickly abandoned the game. I was curious about the story, though, I decided to look up some more information. This brought me to the world of 4chan, which at the risk of discussing for too long made me think about the HSD.

The 4chan communities I went to see more about this were /v/ and /vg/. I used to use 4chan more often but never found it that enticing, and quickly abandoned it in favor of other platforms. However, my encounter with it tonight was strange and vaguely illuminating. I didn't spend very much time sifting through the available threads on the topic, but there were some interesting things that were indicative of a very real and thriving subculture concerning the topic at hand. It's a level of dedication and specialization that reminds me distinctly of the HSD itself, with layers that are no doubt only obvious or even visible to people who actively engage in these discussions regularly. Despite being completely unfamiliar and concerning a topic that I'm not terribly fond of personally, it kind of reinvigorated my passion for this documentative effort. The sheer level of complexity and mystery associated with various internet subcultures is fascinating; I hope that this document will serve as an adequate preservation of the HSD's subculture in the future, should such a thing be necessary.

Nothing more for today.

---

24^th of September 2017

The conversation with $trider about instrumentation in the voicechannels took on new form today. Last time this was brought up, I mentioned that $trider was seeking a custom role that would allow him to DJ in the radio voice channel, which we were explicitly not going to do. However, it's not just him that's perpetrating this now; others have come forward expressing a desire to play instruments in voicechannel, which is not suitable for any of the discussion related channels we have. The only other available option is the radio channel, which no one is allowed to speak in by default.

In order to build on this in a more constructive fashion I suggested an alternative, where a new and privileged voicechannel is created for people specifically to put on their “concerts”; it would be reserved in such a way that only users with good behavior and a clear talent or willingness to perform for others would be allowed to voice themselves.

We have all manner of people who wish to do things like this; Squarewave has played the piano on occasion and numerous others do so; $trider of course with his DJing; Rune has infrequently provided an ocarina concert for people to listen to them play. The precedent for such a channel is very clearly present, it's just not been capitalized on. With $trider's recent discussion about being allowed to DJ, we hastily implemented a rule that blanket banned all instrumentation in the channels, but it doesn't feel like a good end point. I don't personally see the harm in making a new channel, but it's not my place to do so; I've presented the idea in mod chat, and we'll have to see what Makin says about it.

Another idea being brought forth concerning the voicechannels is that we need a new pseudo-mod to watch over them specifically. Anervaria has been doing this almost completely by herself for ages, and when the channels get full it is no doubt an extremely agonizing task to deal with. She has apparently already spoken to TS, who has proven themselves a reliable and responsible person for the task. I talked with Aner about it for a little and we brought up the possibility in mod chat, to which Makin has agreed as long as TS “doesn't belong to any splinter servers”, which is a reasonable expectation. Going to confront TS about this the next time I get a chance and ask how they feel about becoming a member of the team.

As far as pseudo-status is concerned, WoC expressed some frustration to me today about his position on the HSD. He has total and complete dominion over #gaming but is explicitly not allowed to moderate anywhere else. This is all well and good, but part of his attempt to “make gaming great again” is to advertise it in other channels, like #general. When this happens, occasionally he notices someone acting out of line and impulsively goes to mete out punishment, but then remembers that it's outside of his jurisdiction. This frustrates him, and he has described it as “having a bucket of water and watching a fire you're not allowed to put out”. While Makin was fairly clear about WoC's position on the HSD from here on out, part of me has to wonder if the decision truly is final. As I said to WoC, Makin's tendency towards being capricious works in both directions, so there's no telling what the future may hold. I obviously wouldn't or couldn't say that WoC will definitely be allowed back onto the team in full, but the possibility exists in my mind if nothing else.

Finally, I've been considering my treatment in describing the HSD and related places' cultures. I'm not sure if I'm doing fair justice in my portrayal of these matters, and am actively seeking ways to improve how I do so. One thing in particular that I've personally noticed is that I have not gone into as great of detail as I would have liked on some occasions. I feel as if this is at least partially due to my now releasing the material of this journal on a regular basis, which prompts me to censor myself in various ways. I do this to avoid causing problems in whatever fashion they may arise, but it also compromises the integrity of what I'm writing, and especially the accuracy. If possible, I think I will try to return to that original ideal of faithful and complete representation here. I don't want to skip out on any details simply because they seem unsavory; there are limits, especially those dictated by privacy, but otherwise what would the point be if I decided to omit details for convenience?

I'll reflect more on this later. No more for today.

---

25^th of September 2017

Today was quite eventful. First and foremost is one of the most miraculous things I've witnessed on here since joining, a rather lengthy ordeal that started completely by accident when we were talking about the MSPaint Fan Adventures, or MSPFA.

MSPFA is a repository for stories and fan fiction about Homestuck or other Hussie stories. The term was actually coined during Hussie's previous tale, Problem Sleuth; the history behind the forums of the website is actually its own complete story, which I will cover another time. MSPFA is another important website, short for MS Paint Fan Adventures, and eventually became a centralized location for people to post their fan stories, a topic I will cover more in depth eventually as well. More to the point, MSPFA went through a massive overhaul lately, thanks to the efforts of a user named Miroware, and sometime in the last few months attained its current form. Of more immediate importance is that the owners of the website accept donations in order to keep it running; to this end they a website called Patreon, which allows users to pledge a certain amount to donate each month; this website is popular with artists or content developers who rely on direct support from their consumers to make a living, because it makes it easy to promise certain content to people who pledge so much money to you in the form of reward tiers and the like.

To bring this back to the current day, all of this is relevant because MSPFA's usage of Patreon was brought up in casual discussion, and suddenly Makin was struck with an idea to end all ideas. With a characteristic “OH SHIT”, he rushed off and created a Patreon for the HSD itself. As the reality of this idea set in, the implications became all too clear to me and others watching at the time. There are an insane amount of things that the HSD has or does that would be applicable to a reward tier system of some kind. The most understandable and accessible one is simply custom roles, which were actually done previously; for $1, you gain access to the lowest tier: a custom color role and access to an exclusive channel for donors only. The reward tiers only increase in nonsensicality: for $5 a month you get to officially shill your work once a day; for $8 Makin will personally review your work or projects that you send to him and offer criticism or praise as he deems fit; for $10 you can rename the server or change its icon for a day; for $30 you get your own personal channel that you moderate and can make about whatever you want; my personal favorite, the “Holy Shit” tier, is a one time deal where if you pay $1,000 you become a full mod of the entire server with an added benefit of, I quote, “You can delete altgen if you want.”

The idea is that the money would go towards purchasing adspace for the server, which would attract more people to us and thus increase the chances of people donating, which would lead to a self sustaining cycle. There are various backer goals, such as reaching $100 or $250 per month, each with their own motivational items. At $250 per month, we would be able to have ads up on MSPA 24/7. At $500, Makin claims he would look into making merchandise for the server, a possibility that actually excites me greatly. There are additional goals that only increase in wacky zany potential, which I will explain in more detail if they become relevant. Suffice to say that the entire notion is hilarity personified.

This idea has of course been insanely controversial, and therefore fun. I have personally gotten more entertainment out of the proceedings from today than I thought humanly possible; people alternatively think this is the best idea ever and that it is the worst idea ever. Makin has been called a sellout by none too few people for this move, the ethics and even legality of it has been called into question; for myself and others, it has only been a fun development so far. I shamelessly signed up to donate one dollar a month for sweet access to that custom color role (I appreciate my old one, but it's not quite the flavor I want). Medixum already coughed up $30 for his own custom channel, which he has christened #iceland and has essentially become a second #altgen. A second backer also signed up for the $30 reward tier, but Makin went to bed before being able to create their channel.

It sounds rather mundane when written here, but the flurry of these activities is not to be understated; it has been a complete romp of a time since Makin put up the Patreon. Others are not so pleased with it, such as Ifnar: “I mean, I'm not worried you desperately need money and if you convince some weirdos to give you money for virtual baubles that's morally grey at worst. I just think it's tacky and unnecessary.” and S, who has condemned the idea in its entirety. There was even talk that this violated Discord ToS, but Patreon already has ties with Discord, so we're not sure what the ramifications of this are yet. By all indications I think it should be fine, but we'll see what the future holds.

As it stands near midnight here, the Patreon is sitting at 9 backers with a total of $71 per month. It's a far cry from the top goal of $5,000, but the fact that it's even made it this far is enough to fill me with mirth; for some reason I can't help but laugh at these proceedings, they're utterly bizarre to me and I hope that they can be played out to their fullest extent. A lot of speculation has gone on about what would happen if the $1,000 tier is satisfied. Aside from “delete altgen probably”, we're not totally sure. To be honest, the idea of anyone actually coughing up the money for that kind of privilege is just unfathomable to me; I can think of literally no one on the server who would bother to do that, or would even be able to. The possibility looms ever present though, which is the important part in my mind.

Aside from all of this incredible nonsense, there were some imminently less pleasant things to deal with. Before I go into all of that, I wanted to follow up on TS's status here as a pseudo. It was discussed at length in #illuminati-not-hangout, where Makin agreed to take on TS as a pseudo-mod provided she was not part of any splinter servers. After relaying this information, TS did specify she was part of some smaller splinter servers unworthy of note, HVSD (a place that other people on the team also visit so it's not a big deal), and then unfortunately Sylandrophol’s splinter server. This last one stuck in Makin's craw and influenced him to say no to her appointment as a new pseudo.

The rest of us vouched for her trustworthiness, although it didn't change his mind; we did manage to reach a decent compromise, wherein TS is now expected to be a janitor for both altgen and voicechat, and if in the future a new pseudo becomes clearly necessary they will probably be promoted. It's a less than elegant solution and I feel as if it's heavily one sided, but I've seen Makin react in worse ways to developments like this. At least this way TS gets a custom color for their trouble.

Along with Sylandrophol, Elvish is also a member of the server, and for reasons that are still murky at best to me they began to conceive of ways to revoke the HSD's partnership with Discord. I mentioned some time ago that Elvish briefly ventured onto the HSD to tell us to stop “sending death threats”, an accusation that was incredibly confusing for almost everyone present at the time. We weren't, to our collective knowledge, responsible for these threats to her, and we still maintain that now. It seems as if the threats have continued since that fateful evening, and now Elvish has decided to contact Discord devs in an attempt to have us ousted.

This sequence of events is confusing to me at best, although the implications of it are certainly vexatious. Elvish claims to have evidence of these threats coming from us or from people on our server, but has failed to procure any of this evidence for us to see at any given time; furthermore it would seem as if most of these threats come in the form of anonymous Tumblr asks, which by nature precludes any chance that she could identify one of us as sending them. The overall point here is that Elvish has literally no case against us, but still wishes to try and frame us for it anyway. The audacity of this move strikes me in a big way; it would be insulting if it wasn't so hare-brained. Over this, TS expressed regret associating with these people and wanting to be their friend: “they just obsess over all the ways they've been wronged it seems”. I don't personally know what to make of it, as I was never intimately involved with anything that Sylandrophol or Elvish had to do with. However, the dubious nature of these claims has put a sour taste in my mouth. I wonder what exactly drives these people to feel the way they do, but I hope they're able to find peace before they end up doing anything egregiously stupid.

Also on the splinter server menu for today, there was a run in with Talons. We've been long overdue for one—it's been several months since the last overt situation involving him. Unfortunately, this occasion was far more insidious than his normal antics, as it involved an alt that he successfully passed off as a new person for months. This gave him ample opportunity to get closer to people with a new persona, and now there is at least one person who has been specifically affected by the events.

I was first alerted to this in the morning, where Olki helpfully asked me for advice about what to do. There was no clear indication that it was a Talons alt at this point in time, only that this person had outed themselves as an alt. While grounds for a ban right away, I didn't press too hard for more details about who this person might be. The possibility that it was a Talons alt was in the back of my mind the entire time, but they had managed to lodge themselves into a few communities and some had grown fond of them. I let Olki look into the situation more, and then after being provided some screenshots of messages they've sent, it was almost disturbingly evident that it was Talons' handiwork. To make matters worse they had used this alt profile to get very close to Twonks, which Olki and I agreed would lead to an incredible amount of discomfort for her.

Unfortunately, at some point the other shoe dropped and their identity was outed to people in general. Bans occurred swiftly thereafter in all places we could find the alt account; while this happened I was personally messaged by Talons begging not to be banned, with some rather disturbing and in depth reasoning as to why. By the time I was able to respond all of these messages had been deleted, but the thing that stuck out in my mind was that he had claimed to turn a new leaf and was actively seeking to improve himself. This is a classic Talons strategy that he employs in every single instance where this has occurred; it is almost certainly not true, but manages to draw people in if they do not have previous experience with him. Perhaps more depressingly, even if were true that he has changed, we cannot reasonably trust him. The damage he has visited upon people is too great for us to ever let him back, and I detailed this to him explicitly before I permanently dismissed him:

talons, i implore you to stop doing this
stop coming back
we will not let you back
go find something else to do with your life
if you have changed, then that's wonderful
but we cannot trust you ever again
you have done too much damage
I sincerely hope that you have changed
but if you truly have, then you must go somewhere else and start anew
there is nothing left for you here
do not come back

These situations always leave me in a foul mood; there's not much else that feels quite as dark. I don't know what compels people like Talons to act the way that they do, but they need help and we cannot reasonably provide it. I hope that he listens to what I've said, but the cynic in me says that he will be back before long. Knowing him, I'm sure he's already transitioned directly into another alt account and is lurking in the HSD as I write this. I wonder if this situation can ever be rectified.

In a similar vein, the problems associated with Pep reached a head today. In the mod chat, Sea Hitler and Anervaria were detailing their various dealings with her, and then during the Patreon discussions $trider lobbied once more for her to be unbanned. For reference's sake, she was banned for threatening to raid another server; $trider said that the server was purportedly for alt-right politics, and implied that us banning a user planning to raid that place was tantamount to supporting neo-nazis. I'm not sensationalizing this, it's almost exactly what he described (in a comment that he since deleted): “its lowkey supporting the neo nazis imo”. This incensed me greatly; such accusations have been levied against us before and they always succeed in irritating me through their sheer awfulness.

These two occurrences in tandem convinced me that the situation with Pep needed to be handled more tightly than it has been thus far. I talked with Anervaria and Sea Hitler to ascertain what it is exactly that Pep is doing to irritate them, and it mostly consists of her messaging them on a regular basis for inane or otherwise disturbing purposes. When I asked why they simply haven't blocked her, they both said they had; Pep just has other people relay the messages for her at that point.

This sort of behavior suggests darker leanings than I really feel like bothering with, perhaps bordering on the obsessive even. In order to address it I decided to Za Warudo altgen and speak with them directly; after an initial warning I froze the place, described to them what was going on, and why it must stop; this talk seemed to go well, with no one outwardly complaining at the time, but it didn't take long for word to reach us of people relaying the information directly to Pep herself.

She has managed to gather a rather significant cult of personality around herself—I don't know how many people it is but it's enough that it's a significant buffer between herself and the rest of the community. I don't know exactly why but they have practically pledged themselves to her at this point, and needless to say their obsequiousness towards her is off-putting and ultimately harmful. When this information reached them, some of the screenshots we received showed this almost tribal reaction; threatened to report me for making “false accusations” against Pep, insulted me for it even. I have to admit a morbid curiosity as to why people like this allow themselves to reach this point, where they must resort to extreme measures to protect their sense of mutual identity.

At any rate, I hope that the speech I made earlier will cut down on the rate of related incidents; I've made it clear that we will ban people who act as her courier since it can be interpreted as a form of ban evasion, which should be enough to keep most people from doing it right off the bat. Additionally, this gives us room to say we provided fair warning and actually ban anyone caught doing this. It is my firm hope that within a couple of weeks, Anervaria and Sea Hitler will no longer be harassed in this way.

Nothing more for today.

---

26^th of September 2017

Today was exhausting. The Patreon has garnered even more people than before, and as of this writing sits at 19 patrons donating a collective of $151. There are more user-created channels including the aforementioned #iceland, a new channel dedicated to original characters called #steel-donut-run (commissioned by LinkedGirafarig), and either one or two that haven't been created yet because Makin went to bed before people asked for them.

I continue to find this situation hilarious. I recognize that the more money garnered through this process the more prone to abuse it potentially is, but I also feel as if there is a definite ceiling we will hit or have already hit in regards to donation amounts; there is almost no chance in my mind that we will approach Makin's second community goal of $250 per month, at which point he has suggested we will be able to keep daily ads up on MSPA 24/7. I just don't think the community support is there; the fact that we made it to $50 was incredible to me, let alone three times that. Of course, this does carry the weight of the fact that I've been wrong about this a couple of times already. Who knows how far we'll be able to go with this?

On the other hand, the farther this goes the more controversial it seems. It's either evident to people that this is more of a lighthearted joke than anything, or it's not evident at all. With people for whom the latter is true, there is a significant degree of tension because of concerns that Makin will misappropriate the funds or commit to otherwise unethical behavior. There are some well founded arguments in this vein, such as: “how do we know that the money will all be dedicated to community relevant/supportive tasks?” “how do we know that running ads on MSPA will actually benefit this community in any way, instead of just feeding into Makin's numbers game frenzy?”¹¹ and so on.

Myself, Toast and Ngame were fielding these questions for over an hour and a half earlier, and at the end of it I think very little progress was made to assuage people's doubts about this. If anything, my own doubts were deepened, even if only by a little bit. I still think that the overall reach of this Patreon business is as a joke, and that it can't be considered anything but a joke until we reach a more significant amount of money. However, there are some legitimate ethical concerns regarding the use of the money; Toast brought this up in the modchat and effectively voiced the concerns of almost all of us in this matter: how do we keep the gathering and allocation of funds above-table and accountable as much as possible?”

We presented some ideas that would be helpful, but at the end of the day the only person with any direct control over the Patreon and all funds that go through it is Makin himself. For people who are mistrustful of him, such as Putnam, this arrangement is suspect at best. MrCheeze in particular was livid about this situation and has been since the start.

I say they were livid about it because tension with them reached a head where I felt it was necessary to intervene. At the start they were simply stating things that we disagreed on; other people were parroting this information and it was hardly a problem. However, even after the discussion shifted, MrCheeze kept repeating their points and became only more unruly as time went by. While I recognize that there are some inherent concerns about this situation, repeating things ad nauseum will earn you no favors. In addition to this, they started resorting to insults; finally I decided to mspa-ban them (an admittedly hasty move), at which MrCheeze immediately left the server again.

This is an extremely disappointing turn of events, but it was not unexpected; before this MrCheeze had even removed themselves as a moderator of the subreddit over the Patreon; I feel as if the depths of their personal distaste for Makin has led to them being unable to accept anything Makin does as anything but bad. I don't wish to completely invalidate their criticisms over this, and naturally Makin has done things that warrant such criticism, but this is not necessarily one of those times. The bias is astounding, and I can't say that I'm fond of the idea of having MrCheeze around if they allow themselves to get so worked up like this. I even asked them explicitly (and as tactfully as I could given the circumstances) why they’re still here, as it seems as if they genuinely dislike almost everything that occurs on the HSD or the subreddit, a question which I think not even they can answer at this point.

Many others criticized these developments, including cait, trip, Mines, wheals a little bit, putnam, and assorted others. I have to admit that I became exhausted trying to defend actions that weren't even my own; I had to withdraw after some time, as I reasoned that Makin can fight his own battles in this way. I don't want this Patreon to be shot down before it has a chance to become something great (and potentially terrible), but it's already causing such a dispute that I fear for the effects it may have on us culturally if allowed to become much more significant than it already is.

The level of discourse we've been going through has been unseen since when sprite edits were banned in art-music. I guess for historicity's sake it's important to point out that rule is still in effect now, so it's difficult to say that these protestations will have any significant effect on the Patreon's existence. Whatever may happen, I only hope that it will not cause too much disharmony or even create rifts among us. As entertaining as the Patreon itself may be, it's not worth it if the net result is destruction of culture here.

Speaking of culture, I'm looking deeper into the matters of the MSPA forums and MSPFA. I thought it would be a relatively straightforward effort to go and find more information about these places, but they're either so old or so esoteric in nature that not many people know about them. Thankfully, serendipity appeared in the form of a user named 3tych, who used to go by “memento vivere” on the MSPA forums and was a moderator there. There are some events that occurred there that were before their time, but they and wheals have very helpfully pointed me in the directions of other sub communities that popped up; once I have a more complete picture of these places and their histories I will be writing about it in full here¹².

Nothing more for today.

---

27^th of September 2017

I’m actually writing from the next day, but the 27th was an immensely disappointing experience in almost every conceivable fashion. It started off relatively tame, but then swiftly became more distressing as time went by. I have taken a larger amount of time than usual to assess the situation and determine what must be said.

I’m not exactly why I was put into the position, but I have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to assuage the doubts of people opposed to the Patreon, namely MrCheeze and another user named Duke of Hazard. These concerns are related explicitly to Makin’s organization and handling of the Patreon. Criticism is aimed not just at the Patreon’s existence itself, but the fact that Makin has constructed it in such a way that it “promotes his image”. For people who dislike him this is unacceptable, and it has led to a significant degree of backlash from them. The overall number of people who explicitly dislike this development isn’t even that high, but the fact that it was organized by Makin and serves to aggrandize him has drawn out fierce opposition from these people. To them, the Patreon’s very existence is an aberration and threatens the integrity of the server.

Talking with them has been an exhausting experience. I have stated numerous times now that I’m not the one in charge of the Patreon, but they continued to argue with me about it for what seemed like hours. I was actually thoroughly upset by the time I cut off the conversation; this event has generated so much discourse that it’s swiftly turning it into one of the very few things I genuinely regret involving myself in since joining this server.

It’s a particularly frustrating problem because some of the complaints that are being levied against the project actually carry some validity, as near as I can tell. Letting my preference get in the way of objective analysis and appraisal goes against what I stand for in these situations; if there is a problem then it must be identified and handled appropriately, regardless of my own feelings on the matter. I find the Patreon to be harmless and even fun, but is it actually prone to abuse? Is there a serious ethical quandary in the making here?

Disregarding the Patreon itself, things came to a head after Makin came back online at some point in the morning. MrCheeze and Duke are the main vocal opponents to the Patreon, and I had thoroughly tired myself out debating with them the various factors involved (particularly aggravating since they wouldn’t actually listen to anything I said about the topic). Eventually I resolved to stop talking to them at all, and with no fuel for a few hours the situation calmed down substantially. As soon as Makin came back though, all hell broke loose.

Duke in particular kept up this infuriating string of questions that were barely coherent, let alone logically sound. Even worse was that the nature of these questions was incredibly hostile, or at least demanding. It was admittedly cathartic to watch the aim of these questions shift to someone other than myself; Makin seemed admirably unflustered dealing with it, and for a time I thought the resolution to this scenario might be an acceptable one. However, just when it seemed things were settling down for good, those hopes were dashed violently: Duke made an errant comment about Makin “bending over backwards”, which is a clear phrase in English that refers to “expending an extreme amount of effort.” However, the language barrier interfered and Makin focused on the section of the phrase “bend over”, which is a shorthand rape joke.

Tensions escalated rapidly from here. After mistakenly admonishing Duke for making a rape joke, Duke claimed that they were in fact a rape victim and that the accusation was extremely insulting. After some time spent discussing the nature of the phrase “bend over backwards,” Makin, to his credit, did apologize for this mistake; normally this would have been the end of the conversation, and yet it only seemed to accelerate into further madness. Duke and others, such as Putnam, were demanding clarifications from Makin that at this point I struggle to remember. The requests they were making, far from being unreasonable or confusing, were actually quite simple in nature and fair to ask about. Instead of answering any of these requests, however, Makin skirted the issue repeatedly; this led to the nature of the conversation becoming much more frenetic and crazed than it should ever have gotten.

The crux of the matter last night was that the situation could have been handled swiftly and without issue, or without nearly as much issue as we suffered through. Instead, for whatever reason he may have done it, Makin decided that the preferred course of action was to dismiss these questions outright, or if he recognized them he did so in such a way that made it clear he was not treating the issue seriously whatsoever! In doing so he stirred the anger of the people involved, and eventually it culminated into some sort of surreal nightmare scenario.

After the initial apology, Makin engaged in this obtuse verbal dance with Duke, to all appearances egging them on. Confusion steadily increased to the point of a fever pitch; the conversation was moving so quickly and had reached a point of such intense rage on the part of Duke that it felt bizarre to watch in real time. Part of the reason I’m writing this a day late is because I felt the need to review the events and get a clearer idea of what happened. Even after doing so I still don’t feel completely certain in my assessment of the situation; Tori, Toast and many others have explicitly agreed with me that the progression of the conversation was too absurd to follow properly.

Again, the overall point of this is that a situation that could and should have taken mere seconds to resolve ended up being protracted over the course of half an hour, and only increased in intensity as time went by. After reflecting on it for a while and asking who should be blamed for it I’ve personally come to the conclusion that both Makin and Duke are responsible for the escalation in their own ways, but the situation in its entirety is an illustration of behavior from Makin that a lot of people find incredibly distasteful.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the event and talking about it with others, and as with similar occurrences in the past, a number of people (who shall remain unnamed) harbor real concerns about Makin’s behavior. The way he went about it suggests a very real problem, one that is disturbing in its implications for people: there is doubt that he is able to respect others if he does not immediately sympathize with them, and some few have gone so far as to call it “sociopathic”. I won’t pretend to know exactly how to describe it, but whatever others may think I was and still am concerned about the incident that took place last night, and especially what it says about Makin’s attitude toward dealing with others.

The first entry I created in this journal described an incident at length where Makin recognized his behavior was causing problems, and he made the unprecedented move of reaching out to us for help. At the time I thought this was an incredible improvement from before, when it seemed he would engage in whatever he cared to with reckless abandon. However, now that sufficient time has passed, it is dismaying to remember other key factors involved with that event. Notably, there were many criticisms and much advice given to Makin from us, but almost all of it was completely dismissed. He would generate some abstract reasoning involving rationalism for his behavior or even completely ignore it. In the interest of fairness, I recognize that it’s valid to dismiss criticism if its basis is inappropriate or misguided, but I am also reasonably certain that the advice we offered and still do offer on occasion is well founded.

The exact reasons he does this elude me completely, and sometimes it is incredibly frustrating to try and comprehend why Makin behaves the way he does. Most of the time it is not such a problem, but in the case of last night, it turns what could be a relatively simple issue into a fiasco of terrible and unneeded proportions! It’s not even to suggest that the long lasting effects of this will be so single-handedly horrible that we are unable to recover, but the events themselves are exhausting for most of us and use up an enormous amount of his already thinly-spread social capital.

Every time something like the Patreon discourse occurs, I fear that it pushes people further away. There are already those who have sworn this server off due to Makin’s behavior; while there are certainly some who leave for strange and unnecessary reasons, I fear for when more reasonable people will feel compelled to leave as well. Putnam, who I consider one of the more well-intentioned and ethically-inclined people here, has already left the server multiple times; he explicitly says each time that the reason he does so is to protest against the kind of behavior I have described in this entry. Of course he rejoins afterwards, which I fear Makin then takes as free-license to continue acting the way he has been. In this way, I worry that he has begun to think he is untouchable. What will happen when such departures become permanent, or when entire schisms begin to occur? Instead of just Putnam, what if people who have never felt the need to do this before suddenly join him? I dread the day that people like Tipsy or Cait feel compelled to leave, because it will be a clear sign that our community has been destroyed.

Just thinking about it is honestly depressing. The situation last night felt like an aberration to witness in real time: Duke expressing actual, explicit discomfort and Makin (while initially apologetic) refusing to back down and keep the conversation from escalating further. I have no idea what could possess him to believe doing such a thing is fine, and yet here we are.

In an attempt to clear my mind I went and talked to Phantos about this for a while. Phantos is a rarity of the HSD. Probably the oldest active member, he is one of the more celebrated people for his unwavering kindness and support of others. I'm personally grateful to him; on two separate occasions, phantos gave me gift cards to Domino's pizza, which actually kept me from going hungry. He has done all manner of things like this for various people, commissioning people for art when he knows they need the money or even just because he wants to see what they can do. His incredible capacity for being nice to others has not gone unnoticed, and he has been branded as the sweetheart of the server by many people.

Phantos’ being who he is, his insight on the matter was honestly very helpful to me. Based on his age and general demeanor I figured he would have valuable input, which he gave me license to write down here:

I'm generally tolerant of Makin because the alternative is pretty pointless, as his behavior is entirely up to him. BUT I'm starting to believe that Makin cares so much about being correct, or being seen as correct, he can't just look at a conversation and go, "Oh holy shit I am under my head here, time to give a half hearted sorry and bail." But he doesn't usually bail, and he even rarely less attempts an apology. Time and time again he could have just feigned some revelation about the topic and gone, "You're right, I'm wrong, ttyl." because that's what I figure any person would do after digging themselves into a hole. Whether or not you believe Makin was right or wrong didn't even matter at the time because he was just blatantly being silly, irreverant and/or cruel depending on who you ask. But it's so, so, so easy to just shut up and say sorry and not mean it, but he doesn't do that. So I figure he is either obsessed with his image in that regard or there's some other outlandish-er reason like the guy just wants people to have a "full" conversation even if it means he runs himself into the ground hosting one.

At this point I am not even talking about that single incident, which is really just one example of Makin being pretty much totes wrong but hey what can you do...

I do believe I excuse him as part of that cult of makin concept, but tending on the side of for fun. It's not always the most helpful response or stance of me to take.

There are just some times when it's so bewildering how much people are willing to forgive because they either really like makin, the community, or both… At several points people just ask makin for basic concessions like, "admit this was a typo" (putnam) or "answer this basic yes or no question about your comment"(duke) and makin just sort of dances around those.”

Conversations like these make me glad that I consult others, because it provides new angles for explaining Makin’s behavior that I would never have considered. “Hosting” a conversation to the point that it may be run into the ground and damage his reputation is indeed something I could see Makin doing, as he has expressed his desire to foster communication people before. If such is the case, then how are we to reconcile this with the fact that the methods he employs are distressing and unpalatable to people? Is it possible for him to do this in any other way, or is he compelled to do these things because he thinks they are the most efficient path to his desired outcome? Is the server able to survive such tendencies in the long run or will they eventually lead to some sort of rift? I don’t think any of these questions are immediately answerable; we will have to wait and see if such things come to pass.

As it is I decided to call it a night once the argument had concluded, and here I am the next day. From my current perspective I really don’t want these sorts of issues to crop up again, because they feel largely unnecessary and are not actually fun to deal with at all for the vast majority of people involved. Most things on this server, even if negative in their own way, are typically still enjoyable in retrospect, or at least things that I don’t mind remembering and discussing. As I said earlier, this occasion is one of the very few I’ve ever been in that has made me feel a distinct sense of regret for being in the position I am.

While I am glad that the effects are relatively minimal at this time, I don’t know if the community could handle many more of these problems. I’ve spent a lot of my time trying to talk with people and assuage their doubts concerning Makin as a leader, but then he goes and fosters situations like this; it is insanely harmful to the image of this place as a whole, and especially to his image specifically.

I wish I could illustrate the danger and destructive potential that these acts possess, but sometimes I doubt that he will ever be willing to listen—not just to hear, but to actually listen to what we are telling him. Indeed, sometimes I wonder if it even matters to him; with as little as I know about the true nature of his intentions and desires, I simply cannot say if this is something he is willing to budge on, or if he’s only engaging in this sort of thing as some sort of joke. I would like to put my faith in him, but these situations only serve to make me wary.

I sincerely hope the server does not fall prey to such events as I have detailed here. As it is, I’ve harped on the topic for far too long. Nothing more for today.

---

28^th of September 2017 - Explanation of MSPA Forums

Moving to more positive thoughts, I am delighted to report that my investigations into the past of places like MSPFA or the MSPA forums have been much more successful than I could have hoped for. I’ve been able to question not only 3tych, but a few others as well. I have assembled the raw, unedited information these people supplied me—about ten pages worth—in Appendix C under sections “MS Paint Adventure Forums” and “MS Paint Fan Adventures”, but I will also be writing about them here in a more streamlined fashion.

Chronologically the forums came before MSPFA, so I will write about them first. Historically the MSPA forums have changed around a lot, and their exact beginnings aren’t centric to Homestuck because it’s substantially older than that work actually is, or older than MSPA itself. The original instance of the forums were a personal venture between Hussie and friends before MSPA was even conceived. At this point, Hussie was drawing a collection of webcomics called “Team Special Olympics”, and he spoke regularly with his friends on the Penny Arcade forums, their cadre being referred to at this point as the “Gangbunch forums”. One of the people involved in the Gangbunch forums is a man named Michael Firman, who used to draw his own webcomics on a website called “Firman Productions”. The website is still around, but no updates to his comic have been posted since 2014. He has a Twitter profile where he posts art that is semi-active even in the modern day, so I decided to send him an email. There’s been no response yet, but if I get the opportunity then I will come back and fill this section in with more explicit details regarding the Team Special Olympics days, and how they served as a precursor to the forums.

After some investigation prompted by wheals, I found this description on tvtropes.org: “[MSPA] originated in 2006 as a series of games run on the Gangbunch forums, a small gathering of artists and miscellaneous people from the Penny Arcade forums which later became the current MSPA Forums, and were played by a group of Hussie's online friends; it graduated to its own site and effectively became a webcomic in 2007.” A member of the HSD, 1011686 (who inspired me to ask about these matters in detail) and wheals described a couple of transitions that unfortunately I do not have further knowledge about at this point in time. As quoted above on tvtropes.org, the forums themselves started off as the Gangbunch forums, which were simply a subset of the old Penny Arcade forums. Sometime after this, what I assume is a prototype of the forums’ final structure appeared through the link format phpBB3, which wheals describes thusly: “phpbb3 was the intermediate step when it was the mspa forums but not on mspaforums.com”. It’s hard to confirm the veracity of these claims, as no other information has been provided to me at this point.

The most familiar form of the forums has been a difficult topic to tackle. The very nature of the beast is that the closer you get to its point of origin, the less people were around or know about it. There is no one around, as far as I’m aware, who joined the MSPA forums near the beginning; this makes sense in light of the fact that MSPA itself used to be far more esoteric than it can be considered now. However, the history of the official MSPA forums can be deduced from a basic timeline of MSPA itself.

There are four stories currently up on MSPA, in chronological order: Jailbreak, Bard Quest, Problem Sleuth, and of course Homestuck. I cannot say with certainty when MSPA originally went up, but it had to have occurred at the latest when Jailbreak was started on June 3rd, 2007 (2007 also being the date specified in the tvtropes article). I speculate that the forums were around at this time as well; the reason I say this is because of the very nature in which Andrew Hussie wrote his stories, which utilized input from the readers to determine what the characters would do next (a technique that would be used in all of the other stories as well). To this end, there were dedicated threads on the forums where users would submit “commands” for the characters; usually the first or most entertaining of these suggestions was taken, and Hussie would incorporate it into the story. Jailbreak itself was explicitly an experiment dedicated to figuring out if that was a feasible method of writing stories—barring any other methods of obtaining commands from readers that I may be unaware of, this all suggests that the forums must have been around at least as long as Jailbreak.

Unfortunately, I did not encounter anyone who has been around that long. The earliest information I could glean was from a fellow named Schazer, who used to be a moderator on the forums starting in 2010 and frequented it for some time before then. The forums as they were before Problem Sleuth (3/10/08-4/9/09) are largely unknown at this point in time, but Schazer said “there were various waves of people signing up to the forum but most of them must've happened in like 2008 or so? I remember a link from vgcats was credited by a lot of people as the reason they ended up on the forums”. Subsequently, Homestuck started on 4/13/09: “I'm looking and quite a few people joined the forums april-june 2009, so right after the end of PS/start of homestuck. the forum adventures subforum (sometimes called the fan adventures subforum) must've really got going around that time.”

Some time after Homestuck started, Schazer and 3tych both describe a series of incidents on the part of forum administrators (who were largely Hussie’s personal friends) that led to increased upset:

the Forapocalypse was a big restructuring/reboot of the forums that I wasn't around for but which I think involved some degree of community activities for fun before it happened; the forum games/roleplay subforum(s?) got removed at one point which caused a whole bunch of controversy and upset among the users who valued them; and there also used to be an "Advice Column" subforum that was for serious topics and life advice and stuff, but that was eventually removed because it led to a lot of heavy/problematic/troubling/etc discussions that I guess the administration didn't feel like being responsible/liable for entertaining. (3tych)

… the upgrade happened and most people were unimpressed with how it looked and didn't like how all old links to forum threads broke and this, and that, and the other thing
and what happened was that the admins' attempts to talk directly with the forum adventures subforum kind of blew up in their faces, and I've got two reasons for this
firstly, the admins of the forum… were all Andrew's friends. They had been ok with being administrators while the community was primarily people they knew but all of a sudden their job shifted to managing this big community of Mostly Teens while they were adults, at the time, and I don't think any of htem really got sat down and asked if they were going to sign on to something like that. (Schazer)

As time went by it seems as if the increasing dissonance between administrators and the rest of the community was too much to handle, and eventually huge swaths of people decided to leave, often forming their own subcommunities. Schazer in particular is a prominent member of Eagle Time, its own forum that was created by his friend Pinary soon after relations with the MSPA forum administrators began to deteriorate:

Eagle Time was created primarily as a place for the Grand Battle community to be able to do their stuff without sharing a subforum with innumerable troll sgrub roleplays, and also somewhat as a safeguard for the "original stories" forum adventures community if we were no longer welcome on MSPAF at any point
right now it's kind of the unofficial hub for anyone who was associated with MSPAFA to reconnect with folks. We also host a bunch of forum adventures and like to shitpost. The Eagle Time discord channel is also a pretty central gathering point for the community so it's almost more like, the forum's there as a platform for projects which were first aired on the discord channel? (Schazer)

There are a plethora of other communities like Eagle Time that have sprung up, such as Hiddenlevel and Chocolatepi, which Schazer provided some brief details on and are included in the independent text document.

Eventually, the forums were hacked sometime in April 2016, after which they were shut down. Makin (after explicitly confirming that he was being serious and truthful on the matter) said: “allegedly hacked by syrians who proceeded to delete pages manually instead of putting up anything, and we got this info from an admin that was no longer into homestuck”. There have been a series of statements regarding their status, namely that it is under maintenance. If you visit the forums through MSPA itself, you are directed to a page that only says they are “temporarily offline for maintenance work.” Sometime after this there was a statement by a member of a subforum called “Omegaupdate”—set up by a forum mod shortly after they went down—known simply as “Phillip”, who said: “I've pinged WP a couple times since my internship ended, and each time the response is basically that they're not ready yet but will be soon. I'm almost certain it's only going to be a priority after Hiveswap part 1 launches. I'm not really affiliated with the company anymore, but I'll finish the job here once they're ready.”¹³

At any rate, the future of the forums is not clear. They may remain down forever, which would be an utter shame. However, the quote from Phillip and other factors involved indicate that, hopefully, the forums will return some day. At this point, I wonder if the fandom will be able to collect itself enough to make them worthwhile again. And even if that were to be the case, would it be a positive development? These subcommunities are dedicated in their own way, and are undoubtedly a significant portion of the rich tapestry of culture that constitutes our corner of the internet.

Before their untimely and perhaps temporary end, the forums were also host to a wide variety of activities that people enjoyed massively. Schazer describes a phenomenon that, slow at first, heralded a shift in the dynamics of the place: “I remember a bunch of non-admins (myself included) had fun leading up to this by roleplaying the rush of getting into ‘sessions’ as well”, sessions being another word for “fan adventures”. After a particular section of Homestuck came out introducing a whole swath of new characters, the comic positively exploded in popularity, as did the forums. The aforementioned “Forapocalypse” that 3tych spoke of was a direct result of so many people joining the forums, which forced them to transition the software in order to accommodate all of the new members. As time went by, fan sessions or adventures swiftly rose to the fore as one of the most popular aspects of roleplaying or storytelling on the forums.

People enjoyed fanventures immensely (and still do—creating a fanventure is arguably one of the most popular things for people to do after reading Homestuck), but the way the forums were structured made it exceedingly inelegant to read them there. To this end, MSPFA was created as a place for people to host their fanventures in a more accessible fashion, and also offered storytellers a great degree of structural control.

I was exceedingly fortunate to be pointed in the direction of nixshadow, who was responsible for creating and organizing MSPFA, turning it into the website that is still so commonly utilized to this day:

MSPFA started off when an adventure called Roomland (ID 1 on mspfa) was posted on
front page of MSPA new sections
A bunch of people offered to host roomland on its own site so it was easier to read
Because back then they were called forum adventure, you'd have to wade through tons of pages of suggestions before actual panels
I was one of the people making it a site when a user called Lolzorine was like HA SUPRISE, mspfanventures
a place where anyone can editor their own adventure (nixshadow)

The structure for Lolzorine’s website was apparently badly mishandled, and people clamored for a more well organized website. To this end, nixshadow took over and gradually transformed it (over a series of server changes and restructurings) into the website that we have today. I think it’s safe to say that, without their efforts, the fandom would be in a completely different place from what it is now; MSPFA is the place for people to post their adventures, with literally every story I can think of related to the fandom being hosted there. As things go, the site has gone through an intense change recently, around the end of 2016:

A young fellow known as Miroware messages me letting me know the site is basically insecure as all hell
I ask for his help recreating the site and he does, which is the current version of the site, at this point we finally buy the shorter http://mspfa.com/ domain
He convinces me to open up the discord channel, and some point later I decide I'm not doing enough with MSPFA and decide to give him ownership. (nixshadow) nixshadow expressed dislike for Miroware, and intense regret over giving him MSPFA, although nix didn’t go into great detail about why¹⁴ (edit as of 2/16/18: nix has stated that they don’t actually dislike Miro, and that all indications otherwise were jokes. Please disregard this particular detail).

As it is, that is the state of things for the forums and MSPFA. If the status for either of these places changes, I will be sure to record it here. Both of them have been responsible for the vast majority of the fandom’s formative years, and much of its current cultural structure can be traced directly back to them. Hopefully the information I’ve provided has been sufficient to give understanding to people who are not intimately familiar with these places already.

---

30^th of September 2017

It has been a couple of days since the larger Patreon discourse, and things seem more or less the same as they were even before that. This is kind of striking to me, but in holding with a pattern of behavior that has been in place here for as long as I can remember: even when incredibly disruptive events happen, things typically go back to normal within a few days. This is not to suggest that those events may happen without consequence: even if no one is actively discussing it, the memory of the event lingers in peoples’ minds for some time. Additionally, if such a disruption is great enough then it leads to people leaving permanently, as has happened with Revlar and Thellere, among others¹⁵.

My concern is that, with each subsequent ordeal that we go through, the chances of more people leaving becomes greater. I can only imagine that there is some sort of threshold in place that defines the limit where people will finally say “this isn’t worth the trouble”. There is no telling exactly where this threshold may be, but naturally I am not eager to discover that.

At any rate, while there is still a decent amount of rabblerousing over the Patreon, especially from S, it has provided some ample entertainment for those of us not imminently concerned with its destruction. Makin promised us a treat at some point soon, and this morning he delivered: he commissioned some internet persona to create a video advertising the HSD. It was honestly very amusing: this fellow portrays himself as Jesus Christ, and for $11 or some such money you can write a script for him to follow and he will record himself saying it. Makin did just that, and the video went up some hours ago. The script was written in such a way that Jesus speaks from Makin’s perspective, espousing the Patreon and shilling Griever’s Jojostuck, as well as injecting a number of other assorted memes.

The video, entitled “Patreon Theory: Why I Gave the Messiah HIVESWAP!”, is an excellent example of the ability Makin has to stir things in just the right way to achieve this absurd yet enjoyable mix. The video by all means isn’t that funny, but for some reason the exact scenario and our perspective here turns it into this incredibly entertaining nonsense. Community streams are all like this as well, and I find myself consistently impressed at the kind of subtle talent that goes into making such events as enjoyable as they are.

Aside from this, the Patreon itself has experienced an extreme jump in funding. When I went to bed last night, it was standing at $238, but as of 8:00 PM EST it’s at $481. I have no earthly idea how it jumped so dramatically since then, and I’m especially confused because it looks like the number of donors is the same. Regardless, we’re just $19 shy of the $500 stretch goal, which states that merchandise that is HSD centric may be organized. I’m personally very interested in this, although I’m not sure the exact extent to which it would go (it only says that the merchandise would be considered, and that actual creation is simply a possibility).

I’m extremely skeptical that this amount of funding will actually be pulled in; as I said, it seems as if the number of donors has remained unchanged from last night. I could be misremembering but this would indicate one or more people are simply saying they will contribute large quantities of money, but then will pull out at the last moment. This sort of thing happens in fundraisers all the time, and the precedent bothers me. However, if the donations are legitimate in nature, then adspace will be able to be rented on MSPA indefinitely. I’m actually quite excited for the possibilities this holds for us.

I also wanted to provide a significant update on the Pep situation. After I issued that warning in altgen, I kept receiving minor reports from people that certain users from Pep's server were relaying information to her about what we were saying. This served to increase tension, as the people who tended to relay information were also manipulating it in such a way that made it seem we were explicitly bad mouthing Pep at all times. To make matters worse, Pep's behavior was increasing in intensity; at one point she was threatening suicide.

Needless to say, these developments were extremely agitating. I took it upon myself to go and talk with the people involved and see what exactly could be done. This culminated in me eventually joining a group DM with Pep herself and her close friend by the name of megaboy, who arranged the meeting. I took an hour and spoke with them about the situation at hand, and I'm pleased to say it went well. Pep and company are to inform us when people from there are spreading information, and we will cooperate to handle these incidents. They were initially mistrustful of me, I feel, but by the end of the conversation they expressed a deep appreciation for what I was doing, which made it feel very worthwhile. I'm genuinely happy that the discussion went as well as it did.

Of course, I am skeptical of the end result of these talks; there is no telling if Pep can be held accountable, and will actually implement any of the things we discussed. To this end I devised a small test of sorts: shortly before I felt it was necessary to engage in this discussion, Pep joined the Altgenstuck server that Tori manages, and began engaging in serially creepy behavior as she was wont to do. Tori made short work of banning her at the time, but after the discussion tonight I convinced Tori to unban Pep, with the provision that Pep must abandon her previously creepy behavior. The caveat in place, Tori agreed and we can use this as an effective test to see if Pep is actually bent on improving her behavior. If not, Tori may ban her again and things will go back to normal. It is my sincerest hope that things will keep improving, and that Pep will be able to find some inner balance for herself.

Nothing more for today.

---

1^st of October 2017

A fairly relaxed day, but not without its own details worthy of note. First and foremost, by the time I had woken up this morning the Patreon had reached its stretch goal of $500, reaching yet another tier of success that I would never have considered possible. Makin has stated a few times that he has never failed in a marketing project, and I have to admit that I’m beginning to believe him. It’s not quite $5,000 but even this much money is an unparalleled success as far as I’m concerned.

With the achievement of this goal, Makin declared—perhaps jokingly—that he would begin considering server-related merchandise, and for some time today there was discussion about what we could make. Most of the suggestions were jokes, such as a shirt with a collection of out of context screenshots suitably coined a “screenshirt”. More serious suggestions included a themed calendar, with important server dates listed as holidays. I suggested that we commission someone for HSD-centric art and turn it into a poster, where the artist would receive a cut. However, I was at a loss for what the subject of the art would be—I would say the mod team, but that would appear ruthlessly self-aggrandizing. Instead I mentioned anthropomorphizing the channels themselves, but that’s also a fairly treacherous path I’m sure.

At any rate, this success is quite exciting. Makin has declared that he will start buying adspace in one week, for reasons that I’m sure include gathering of the funds in the first place. MrCheeze continues to lament this state of affairs, and unless I specify otherwise it’s to be assumed that this happens every single day. I would continue describing these occurrences but I don’t want to appear too mean about it. As it is, I will now take the time to describe the direct results of the Patreon, foremost among them the channels.

At the beginning I mentioned a couple, namely #iceland and #steel-donut-run (as of now humorously entitled #jojos-and-dogs-no-jojostuck-though), managed by medixum and LinkedGirafarig respectively. The other channels include: #oc-hell, managed by linkedsylveon and dedicated to sharing original characters, an activity originally localized in altgen (a fact that garnered the ire of many); #fanventure-fiesta-and-evangelion-memes, managed by Dickle, and whose content I’m sure is more or less self-explanitory; #mechanical, managed by deusAscendant and dedicated to discussing automotive or otherwise mechanically oriented material; #mspalit, managed by hb and used as his own personal playground where he initiates a contest called “Thunderdome” between users on a regular basis; and finally #food, which I purchased myself and have allowed Cait to run as her own channel (her jokes being the inspiration for my purchase).

Rather than simply clutter the channel list (which they admittedly do as well), these have all proven to be an interesting addition to the server, where each have experienced a significantly greater degree of activity than I would have expected. Unfortunately, this carries the additional repercussion of a draw of activity from the other, original channels. In some cases this drop in the level of activity is so minor as to not be felt, as with #oc-hell drawing some people from #altgen away. In others though, there is a distinct change in activity across channels: for instance, when #food is more active, I can physically feel mspa-lit (the real one, not hb’s channel) experiencing a drop in activity. Carlarc and I believe someone else have echoed these concerns, and they’re worried about what effect this may have on us later. For now though, I’m more or less content in the way things are running.

This description of the Patreon channels, while brief, has reminded me of something I wanted to try and resolve myself towards lately. I mentioned recently that I want to cover the events transpiring on the HSD more explicitly in order to increase fidelity with the actual history of this place, and I am still determined to do this; however, it has dawned on me that some channels I have not covered in great detail.

In accordance with my actual habits, I have covered mspa-lit by far the most out of any channel, and I am intimately aware of its politics and various cultural leanings. To a lesser degree I am familiar with altgen and have managed to describe at some length their dealings and politics, but I could stand to gather a little more experience in the channel. For others though, barring some minor experience, I am largely clueless—I could tell you about #social broadly speaking, but I’m not strictly aware of the “regulars” of the place, the people who use it the most and who are inextricably linked to its culture. I do know that Nikki is extremely active there, but not much else. In other channels this knowledge gap is even more pronounced: I know absolutely nothing about coding-tech whatsoever. I don’t enjoy not knowing the details about these places, so over the course of the next few weeks I’m going to spend a few days in each channel and perhaps write up some notes as the situation demands. It may come to pass that some channels don’t require any such notes: I mentioned coding-tech as a place where I know nothing, but on the few occasions where I’ve popped my head in I don’t see anything happening at all, with the most recent message sometimes being days old. Whatever the case, hopefully these descriptions will serve to eliminate any ambiguity surrounding the places in question.

As a follow-up to the Pep situation from yesterday, there was some minor nonsense to be dealt with: one of the regulars here and there, Jhon, mentioned that part of the discussion I had with Pep yesterday had negatively impacted one of their friends. After some discussion, they failed to convince me that I was strictly involved, although they did not relinquish the conversation. I tried my best to earnestly engage with them, but admittedly real life responsibilities have been catching up with me and I fear my responses were a bit too haranguing in nature. I’m going to reflect on this situation and see if it can be helped tomorrow.

On a vaguely similar note, Flare was permanently banned from the server today. While others like ost saw this coming, I was personally extremely disappointed to learn that Flare has simply been hiding their tendencies from us; I was given screenshots that showed Flare explicitly giving extremely vivid and disturbing death threats to Elvish. For this I yelled at him and immediately banned him, and since then there’s been a systematic effort to remove him from the community as much as possible.

I talked with Putnam about it since he was by far the most vocally outspoken person against Flare’s return to the server. While expressing ambivalence towards the situation, he did admit that my coming to him with that information offered him closure; while I was happy to provide that, I also expressed my frustration with the system, insofar as details being kept from each other for the sake of confidentiality. Obviously while I recognize that confidentiality is of paramount importance, honesty and proper communication would have put the Flare situation to rest months ago, rather than have it be dragged out as much as it was.

There is a significant difference between situations like these and the ones involving Marsy, or Daddy. While those people may have been memorable in their awfulness, there is no levity or ridiculousness that can be associated with something like actual death threats. It is not in any way fun or laughable, especially not to the degree that Flare was perpetrating it. As such, he has been relegated to the same cultural wasteland that people like Talons or Itoan now reside. Toast described it succinctly:

flare wasnt even the memorable kind of bad
he will suffer the worst fate of all
being forgotten.¹⁶

At some point today, Gnawms provided a helpful hint suggesting that a band of raiders were making rounds on various servers and spamming gore; it’s been a while since a proper raid has occurred, so I’ve felt we were approaching overdue for one. He gave us the ID associated with the ringleader, the raider providing invite links to various servers. They didn’t show up tonight, but the warning coincides with an odd phenomenon that Makin pointed out just as I was preparing for bed.

He mentioned that, in the userlog, there were an abnormal quantity of people joining the server and then leaving almost immediately. I think this worried him, as he questioned whether they may be put off by the #shilling channel. While I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a non-zero number of people who found the #shilling channel distasteful, many of these accounts joined and left in the span of less than one minute. I don’t think that’s enough time to get any sort of impression of the #shilling channel, let alone of the server in its entirety. Additionally, large quantities of people joining and then leaving immediately is a tactic similarly employed by raiders. The timing of these accounts’ behavior and Gnawms warning is far too close for me to dismiss it; it may be coincidence but I’m not exactly betting on that idea.

On a more personal note, I spent the last moments of my night on the server conferring with Makin about the nature of these accounts and what they could be. I felt as if I may have been a little terse, because at the end of the conversation he bade me good night. I’m sure this may strike whoever’s reading this as an unusual thing to point out, but in my experience Makin doesn’t typically extend farewells. Indeed, in the past he’s explicitly discouraged people from announcing arrivals/departures, as it may seem attention-grabby. As such while I was content to simply leave the conversation without much comment, his farewell caught me off guard. I’m the sort of person to overthink this kind of minor and trivial detail into pointlessness, so I will now discuss what this could mean for the next approximately 4,000 pages of this document.¹⁷

Now that some time has passed since the larger Patreon discourse, I wonder about some of the things I detailed in that particular entry. I will not go back and edit it, because whatever it is I said very accurately reflects the frustration or other emotions I was feeling at the time; it would be a disservice to try and pretend that I did not feel such things while the situation was unfolding. Likewise, I am simply trying to record how I feel now as well. These things may be at odds with each other at times. For instance, I mentioned briefly that I have to wonder if he actually cares about criticism, but the behavior that he displays on occasion makes it apparent that he does care; he mentioned PMing the people that joined and swiftly left the server to see if there was anything he could do to make it more appealing to them, which is a level of effort that I would find hard to attribute to anyone who does not earnestly care about the place they inhabit.

A significant portion of me is wary about discussing this too much, as there is a real possibility that I will overthink it more than I already am. Suffice to say, I would like to reexamine what it is Makin does and says, and why. It feels weird to admit this here when I know he’ll be reading it in the not so distant future, and it definitely feels strange in light of how much I talk about him already. However, he owns the server outright and he is our unequivocal boss, so to speak; I can only say that it’s difficult to avoid describing him in relation to things about the HSD when he is intrinsically linked to it.

I would like to believe that he means the best for the server and the people on it, and I’m sure I speak for many of the other people when I say that. I think Phantos’ comment about Makin not wanting to appear incorrect or some such may have been a more accurate assessment than I gave it credit for initially. As it is, I don’t know exactly what to think about him, and I doubt I will ever have anything resembling a full picture of Makin’s behaviors, or especially his desires and motivations. The thing that speaks to me in cases like these is that he does appear to earnestly care, and in the end I think that’s arguably the most important factor in play here.

Of course such observations don’t exonerate him by any means, but those are things to consider more fully another time. As it is, nothing more for today.

---

3^rd of October 2017

An unfortunate development today. Makin put out an announcement stating that he has been blacklisted from advertising the HSD on MSPA. The exact reason why is not known; it’s speculated that someone emailed What Pumpkin staff or someone else in charge of the ad spots and complained that they were “endorsing the HSD” or some such nonsense. As it is, the net effect is that we can no longer put ads up on MSPA, which was originally the entire point of the Patreon.

With this unfortunate development, what to do with the $500+ is unclear. We urged that Makin put out a survey asking the server what to do with it, and he did just that. There are a number of options available to us, such as commissioning an artist, donating it to charity, putting up ads on a different site like MSPFA, or paying the mods. I’m interested to see what the community will choose.

Unfortunately, my life has become busy and will be so for the next couple of weeks. Thankfully the server appears to be experiencing a slow period, so there aren’t really that many events to report that are happening concurrently. Instead, when I get a chance, I’ll mostly be using the days to describe my observations about each channel as I see fit.

Nothing more for now.

---

5^th of October 2017

It seems as if the survey is leaning towards the “donate to charity” option, a fact that I’m sure will please MrCheeze greatly. Of course, if this happens I won’t complain; I feel like it would be a great thing for the money raised to go towards some kind of benefit. It would actually be in keeping with activities conducted by members of the Homestuck fandom in the past; even though I never participated, I distinctly remember numerous occasions where fans would get together for a canned food drive or other charitable events across the United States, and even in other countries. In a way I think it would be nice to continue this idea.

Speaking more concurrently, I’ve been conducting my observations of altgen when I get a chance but I just wanted to recall an event of the past here that came to fruition tonight. Some time ago we were looking through the role permissions attached to each channel, and discovered that many of them were organized poorly. I believe Ngame, wheals, and myself all went through to fix these mistakes; of particular note was that the text-to-speech (TTS) option was enabled in a few places; ideally it’s supposed to be off, because it would take approximately one tenth of a second for people to begin abusing it as thoroughly as possible once they figure out it’s an option. Naturally we changed these settings as well, with one exception: I asked if we could leave the altgen TTS option enabled, for “shenanigans”, to which Makin agreed.

In the current day, after sharing a series of jokes that would have been immensely funnier or outright relied on TTS, I asked the fellow mods present, Ngame and Toast, why we weren’t just using altgen to actually render these jokes faithfully. It started off appropriately funny at first, with the typical phrases being employed; however, things became more sinister as time went by. The TTS jokes became longer and more esoteric, distant from its typical material. Finally, Ngame leaped off into the deep-end, and has been transcribing a 25 minute video¹⁸ by someone name Pannenkoek, discussing the mechanics of A presses for the game Super Mario 64. He’s currently on minute 10 of the video and started TTSing it 15 minutes ago.

I’m personally impressed with his dedication, but the sheer amount of this text has turned the joke into a nightmare. My brain actually feels numb from trying to take in all the information through the dull, flat speech of TTS. Altgen is complaining en masse and the fun is over. I now regret my decision to initiate the TTS jokes in full; who could have known that this monster dwelt within Ngame all along?

To be fair, this is largely the caliber of interaction I tend to see in altgen. However, I need a few more days to properly watch and see what comes out of it. Nothing more for now.

---

6^th of October 2017

Today was exceedingly enjoyable. In the middle of the afternoon, I was talking with Makin and others about a fear I’ve mentioned here recently, namely that activity has been witnessing a decline. This fear has almost certainly been exacerbated by real life circumstances I’m being faced with, which have been causing an enormous amount of strain.

The stress has been feeding this idea to the point that I was growing legitimately paranoid about impending server death, although I dared not speak the idea. Thankfully, as soon as I brought up this idea Makin rebutted that the server has not been inactive, but rather just devoid of drama lately. To drive home his point, he brought up the Patreon and what we should do with the money that was gathered.

I’m sure it might strike some as off-color, but I’ve never been so happy to witness such utter drama. My intense fears for the past week or so were completely wiped away in the ensuing discussion, where people seemingly came out of the woodwork to discuss the various options available to us, often enough becoming irate in the process. One of these options is the idea that we could provide a small gift to people who work on fan album art, $5 each or so.

While this struck me as a decent idea, general reception to it was overwhelmingly negative. Despite this, Makin saw fit to argue for it for some time; his argument consisted of many points, the most memorable one to me being that “giving these artists $5 is better than giving them $0.” The opposition maintained that people who work on these fan albums do it because they want to, and that instituting such an idea would be antithetical to the very idea of a fan album, if not outright disrespectful and awkward. These both strike me as cogent points; while I think it would valuable to somehow reward people for even a volunteer effort, the vast majority did not agree with the idea in practice, so it was dropped (albeit with some extended grumbling from Makin about how irrational a viewpoint it was).

The idea of donating it to charity was subsequently nixed, with Makin stating: “if I wanted to give my money to random people who can misuse it without me knowing, I'd donate to my patreon”. This is when the tone shifted from seriousness to levity for me; at this point the conversation became something else, one of those magical moments that sparks sometimes hours-long discourse without any cause for real alarm.

It was thus that we discussed the nature of this Patreon and what to do with it for the next few hours. Other suggestions were brought up and subsequently iced; in this way the conversation was blended into a veritable whirlwind. Makin consistently brought up points that were hilariously controversial, such as art being inherently meaningless except for what “the market sets its value as”¹⁹. With many self-respecting artists in the chat, this comment alone generated an enormous amount of discourse, and many other comments like it transpired as the evening went by. Putnam eventually joined in and turned the already frenetic conversation into a full out fracas at points. The entire night was well rounded: MrCheeze combatting others over various topics, Minish bemoaning S’s conversational tactics, Cait clearly and concisely voicing her opposition, Putnam obstinately against Makin, and other conventions I can’t even recall at this point. We covered so many conversational gambits that I wasn’t sure if it could ever end.

As things go it eventually did end of course, but I had already been given a lot to consider. With as close to a textual wink as possible Makin said “I did it for you drew” and then disappeared for the rest of the night, leaving me with my thoughts. To be sure, there are a lot of thoughts: most imminently, it was reassuring to know that people are still around and watching, even if not strictly participating. There was an immense degree of satisfaction in seeing people come out of the woodwork for some old-fashioned discourse, although this fact in and of itself gives me some pause. I don’t know if it’s strictly appropriate that I should revel in this kind of verbal carnage, but with the alternative being silence I’m not sure which I would prefer.

Unlike the feeling of trepidation I usually associate with such arguments, all I registered was this thorough sense of appreciation that all of these people were here and talking. I think this has been an extension of my real life difficulties, where it feels like all of the people I know are drawing away in some fashion or another. After reflecting for some time it felt that some key participants from last night had been missing for a while, such as Cait. However, afterwards I felt as if my perceptions had been warped, in no small part by the stress I’ve been under. While it may be true in some way that a few peoples’ participation has lessened, it would be more fair to attribute that to their own real life problems than to a cessation of interest in this place (at least until we know more about specific circumstances).

This entry and some even before it have been a more personal inflection into what I originally intended to be an objective analysis, but I feel as if it would be misrepresentative to not record my own thoughts as well. This night explicitly reaffirmed how much the HSD means to me; there has been an immeasurable amount of culture and expression that I’ve been exposed to here, and I feel as if my life has genuinely been bettered by my decision to come here and talk to all of these wonderful, colorful, outrageous people.

The flip side of this is that my fear this place will eventually fall apart has been magnified in its own right; the attachment I feel to the HSD is intermingled with the eventuality that it will cease to exist at some point. To this end, I’m glad I’m keeping this journal and yet again I want to redouble my efforts to document the happenings of this place, so that it might not be permanently lost someday. The inevitability of the HSD’s eventual loss is what bothers me most, in many ways.

For all my time on the internet I wasn’t part of that many communities; I participated heavily in just a few, which means that my experience in dealing with the rise and fall of such communities is fairly limited. I’m absolutely certain that there are numerous ways a community may end that I’m not privy to; the reason I bring this up is because the reasons my previous communities died don’t even seem possible here: Sydlexia died because its creator lost interest and left us to fend for ourselves, whereas Makin has explicitly shown no signs of abandoning the place no matter what may happen; Twitch Plays Pokemon fell apart because of oversaturation and the lack of a solid base, whereas Homestuck has been well established for years now, and has many thousands of people who actively appreciate and engage in the community. Further, the longevity of the HSD itself at this point suggests it may be able to continue for quite some time, with a community approaching 9000 strong and still growing after a year and a half of activity.

In short, my more immediate fears have been assuaged. There are of course still the more existential concerns, but I don’t know if anyone could help that. The only thing left to do is continue as we have, and see where the future may take us. I fear that I may say this to point of utter redundancy, but I earnestly hope that the community will last as long as it possibly can; the day that the HSD ceases to exist is a day I will be devastated beyond measure.

Nothing more for today.

---

7^th of October 2017

I have more or less completed my observations of altgen: while it’s by no means an exhaustive effort, I’ve made an attempt to acknowledge the history of the place and its current progression, as well as people who were and are important there.

As I’m sure anyone who’s reading this has determined at this point, the presence of altgen is controversial at best. According to tori, after The Reckoning Makin deleted the original botspam channel and turned altgen into the new one: “altgen became botspam, and people attempted to have conversation while others had full 100 percent right to just fucking do whatever… i think those times where it was just bot hell and my job was to ban anybody who thought sonic toilet was a funny meme, and nothing else, are what make people think altgen is Bad today if they dont go there much”.

If altgen was brought up externally then there was a decent chance the connotation was negative. Many people avoided the place based on legend alone, and some would say its reputation at the time was fairly deserved. Old regulars, including Dickle, Viceroyofmontecristo, definitely_not_him, Zoey (formerly VDNW), Dingus, a couple others and tori herself, banded together to make their own fanventure, appropriately entitled Altgenstuck (which tori also requested that I shill here: “Go read Altgenstuck, it’s good.” You’re welcome tori). While this occurred altgen’s reputation steadily worsened; it was known purely as a hive of decidedly inhospitable memes. The impression I get of the time was that it was, in fact, a containment channel for all of the unsavory elements that inhabited the server; politically incorrect was the rule, and whosoever went there drowned in it.

Cut to today and the opposite is true: I literally just got done handling a situation wherein the altgen regulars of now were complaining about a new user who was, admittedly, hellbent on causing as much discord as possible and being an all-around prick. As it is, the fierce dichotomy between then and now is striking to me; one user left from that fateful time, called Zoey, who was helpful in answering some of my questions.

The regulars of altgen today are of course tori herself, the janitors TS and Molly, and Zoey, but then a smattering of new people. These include $trider, tgs, Squid, Sparky, Jude, and of course many others. The community of altgen has changed substantially from its point of origin; it is now, in Zoey’s words, a “more chilled out general with shitposting allowed, its like altgens the jack of all trades, a little bit of everything”. This perception is interesting to me because others outside of the channel still hold that it is an inhospitable place, but upon closer inspection Zoey’s description is fairly accurate. The shift has been slow but inexorable, becoming more obvious the more people join the server. Its current cabal has consciously and purposefully drawn itself together, and made itself more presentable towards others. Its literal generalization has drawn interest from a number of people and it continues to grow.

This does not mean, however, that it is devoid of its bouts of energy. Altgen is also differentiated from general in the sense that it is still a powderkeg—the shitposting spirit is still very present and shrouds the place. It doesn’t take much effort for one person to set it off, and for a few minutes at least there will be an utter storm of shitposting. As time goes by, however, it feels as if these bursts grow shorter, and maybe one day they will cease happening altogether. It’ll be interesting to see how altgen progresses in that sense.

Nothing more for today.

---

9^th of October 2017

Today was pretty pedestrian, but I feel like what constitutes “pedestrian” for us needs to be reiterated. It’s been a while since I’ve covered a day that was more or less “normal” for us, and I think it’s worthwhile to restate exactly what that means.

For example, most of today involved us discussing a number of topics that are revisited so often that they usually don’t elicit any kind of remark. These conversations are typically about one of various things: Harry Potter, Dragon Ball, or Pokemon, among a few others.

Of the three listed, Harry Potter is by far one of the most understandable topics that ends up getting rehashed here. Its literary ubiquity is not to be underestimated; when I asked Makin about the nature of fanfics associated with Harry Potter, he mentioned that they have managed to become increasingly nested as the years have gone by—there are fanfics of fanfics of fanfics, and I’m not sure exactly how deep this hole may go. Whatever the case, it has been a topic that is revisited frequently enough to merit some note. The fanfic aspect of Harry Potter definitely promotes this, although such elements are also present in the other topics we discuss.

Indeed it feels as if the concept of fan fiction is thoroughly ensconced in our culture, which originally confused me. After some thought, however, the reason for this became blindingly obvious: fan fiction is part and parcel of the Homestuck fandom already, in the form of an incredible number of fan adventures or fan sessions that we boast. In light of this it’s not exactly surprising that one of the most-oft discussed things in our group is this aspect of writing.

Other topics we talk about frequently, including Pokemon and Dragon Ball especially, are less noteworthy in that they tend to give rise to the same patterns of discussion every time they get brought up. Harry Potter discussion is typically deeper than it is wide, but the opposite is true for these topics and others like them: there isn’t that much complexity to them comparatively, but their passing can take hours. I’ve mentioned before that Tipsy is especially egregious in her treatment of these topics, being the de facto expert in all things Pokemon related and not far behind in terms of Dragon Ball. It feels as if these topics can be poked along by her indefinitely, although not strictly in a bad way.

While I make it sound negative, it’s worth mentioning that people do enjoy these topics and there is value in the fact that they can consistently make people engage. Conversely, this can draw the ire of people who have witnessed the ensuing discussions too many times; Makin in particular is fond of redirecting these conversations to their “appropriate channels”, which invariably causes them to die; managing discussion is a delicate balance to be struck, all too often resulting in premature discussion death. Whenever this happens, it is common to witness people complaining more about the sudden redirection than the original conversation. Exceptions to this pattern are exceedingly rare, but nevertheless amusing when they happen to occur (unless your conversation is the one that has been forced to move and die, in which case it is simply frustrating).

Occasionally mspa-lit will live up to its original name and we will begin discussing literature in earnest, rather than its derivatives. Today was one such occasion, with a rather engaging conversation about stories written by Stephen King. A fairly controversial writer, King’s strength is more in the storycrafting and less in the writing itself, but his works nonetheless have attracted a great number of readers. While his general works were discussed to some length, from what I could see the main topic of attraction today was The Dark Tower series. Anyone well versed in King’s works would be hard pressed not to talk about them in terms of The Dark Tower to be honest; its power of attraction proved great, and quite a number of us spent some time talking about it.

I think the discussion was aided in part by the fact that The Dark Tower and Homestuck both feature a similar kind of story progression; the details of the universe in each are revealed gradually in a way that suggests a widening of scope, especially at specific points in the story. While fans of this series are difficult for me to encounter in real life, I suppose it’s no great surprise that I have found a number of them here. It was a refreshing change of pace from the more common conversational topics we cycle through, and I think all involved would agree that it was a fairly pleasant exchange.

Speaking of cycling through topics, a more sophomoric trend we’ve noticed is that, when Makin shuffles off to bed and disappears for the evening, there is a not-insignificant chance that the topic will turn to shit. To be clear, I’m not referring to the quality of the discussion itself—rather, the topic will literally be about shit. It’s difficult to say exactly how this happens, and the results are predictably juvenile or even disturbing, but for some reason it happens occasionally and it seems as if no one can stop it. Last time this happened I think it was due primarily to WoC’s influence, which is somehow not altogether surprising to me. Thankfully these conversations tend to end fairly quickly—a blessing from what would usually be a curse.

In the order of the simultaneously more-and-less mundane, general and social observations are being conducted now. More details may follow on this in a day or two: I feel as if the amount and type of culture in both is conducive to describing them simultaneously, although it depends on if anything happens during the day. As it is, nothing more for today.

---

11^th of October 2017

Today was fairly tumultuous despite otherwise slow beginnings. The event of importance today came in the form of altgen being hidden once again, although under more intense circumstances than my typical jokes.

To begin, I described Zoey previously as a regular of altgen, there almost since the channel’s inception. They have expressed a deep attachment to altgen, bordering on the level of pathological according to some; as far as I could witness Zoey simply really enjoys being there, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some choice language that I’ve missed in the past. At any rate, they messaged me earlier today asking if they could be considered for altgen janitor.

These sorts of requests are not typically viewed favorably. Makin explicitly dislikes it when anyone asks to be modded or otherwise promoted, which he sees as a request for power. While the other mods may not couch it in such terms, it is still considered unflattering. It’s customary for a position to be offered to someone first, and only in the case where moderator applications are being accepted will an individual’s request to help be given due consideration.

This all having been said, I shared Zoey’s request with the rest of the mod team for reasons of transparency, although—with the exception of Makin pointing out the fatal faux pas of asking first—nothing conclusive was determined one way or another. Even if asking has effectively eliminated Zoey from consideration, altgen doesn’t need any more janitors right now; TS and Malice are both taking good care of it.

If it had been left here then I probably wouldn’t have bothered to include these proceedings at all, but then later in the day precipitated such events that served to stir the pot significantly. I don’t know if my noncommittal response to Zoey simply catalyzed latent feelings or not, but they apparently had an incredibly bad day. Shortly after I responded to them, Zoey started venting in altgen; while under ordinary circumstances an unremarkable event, this somehow escalated into suicide discussion, which is expressly forbidden in most forms on the HSD. After this happened, it was officially Time to Step In. Makin did so, and through a series of circumstances that I have no clue about eventually it was deemed necessary to hide altgen from public view.

I’ve stated a few times already that I do this as a joke on occasion, in which case I usually unhide the channel after a few minutes. Whether people are in on the joke or not, it doesn’t take more than three seconds for all of the altgenners to spill over into other channels, most commonly #general. Often enough this serves to galvanize conversation there, which is actually a desirable effect; once I reveal altgen all of the regulars go back, but general also has something to talk about for the rest of the day. This has been a pretty reliable, safe, and effective occurrence historically speaking.

By contrast, Makin decided to hide altgen for 40 minutes. I was too busy to play witness to this myself for more than a few minutes, but the results were pretty much what one would expect. Everyone directly responsible for keeping an eye on general ended up requesting more help with altgenners growing more frenzied as time went by, ultimately upsetting the ecosystem of the area to an unprecedented degree. From what I can recall Makin seemed to be cavorting around the place, reveling in his induced chaos not unlike a modern Nero. Men, women, and children alike screamed as the fire consumed them; none survived.

Then Makin decided that the fun was over and unhid the channel, and things went back to normal. Mostly, anyway—rather than galvanizing any real conversation in #general, it feels as if the channel has temporarily burnt out. I’ll provide a few more details in a bit; as for this, Zoey contacted me shortly after the ordeal had begun, expressing regret and apologizing for contributing to the state of affairs.

I honestly wasn’t sure what to say about it. I was so far removed from this particular scenario that any kind of reassurance I could have given would have felt hollow, I’m sure. On the other hand, I could tell that Zoey was bothered immensely by the idea that they were directly responsible for the proceedings of the evening. In situations like this I do my best to convey only the truth; reassurance based on falsehoods is more of a disservice than anything else. Rather than comment on the part that they played in altgen being hidden, I requested that they take a break from the HSD for an hour or two to try and relax, which I believe they did. I didn’t get a chance to follow up on this, but I genuinely hope that Zoey feels better at this point. I should go check on them and see how they’re doing.

Returning to the overall importance of this event for the HSD, I suppose it’s just another observation of the kind of nonsense that transpires here. If we were keeping score, then I believe it would be another tick against Makin, since he was technically the factor that fostered the chaos into becoming what it did. Then again, no lasting damage occurred and no one was really harmed by this incident, so who cares? I’m sure that the resultant nonsense was actually quite enjoyable for some, as a reprieve from the more typical patterns of conversation or behavior we see now. I would have to talk to some more people and see what they think about the proceedings of today, but the general impression I get was that it was karmically neutral and a net positive for enjoyment.

With that all squared away, it’s time for my comments on the culture associated with general and social, of which I will be tackling the former first. Not dedicated to any conversational topic in particular, #general has a unique position on the server as being the very first channel people see when they join. As such, it’s difficult to say that they have any sort of established culture at all; what little culture I can claim to have seen is transient in nature and tends to disappear as its perpetrators become more familiar with the other channels in the server. There are exceptions to this trend, with a notable few actually serving to anchor the place at least somewhat.

Sea Hitler, ost, and anervaria all keep watch on the channel more regularly than others, although ost is the only one to be officially designated as the general pseudo. There are also of course its regulars, the most notable in my mind being Tainted Angel. I’ve mentioned TA before as someone who has taken it upon themselves to welcome new users to the server, which led to some tension between her and the mod team. After a brief spat this behavior was no more, although TA does still talk frequently there and act as a guiding force for newcomers if given the opportunity.

Other regulars are difficult to ascertain—as I mentioned, the inherent culture of #general is fairly short-lived and will inexorably mutate as time goes by. At the time of writing the milieu consists of YanSpook, Pasta, fash, Mayyro, Erieolae, and a couple others I fail to recognize. However, when I first joined almost a year ago now the climate and demographics of the place were wholly different. It feels as if #general is fated to slowly cycle through various groups of newcomers until they all either leave the server or become regulars in other channels instead. I may be wrong in this assumption, but only time will tell.

Aside from the people, #general’s position as the first channel seen when joining the server has made it prone to some rather interesting phenomena: first and foremost of these is the raid factor. While in recent months it seems as if we hardly ever experience any serious raids, they used to be genuinely tiresome, disruptive events.

As a small aside, Homestuck tends to attract younger people around the age of 13-16, perhaps a bit older, who are generally unused to shock images—I feel as if this partially due to a shift in the topography of the internet itself, as myself and others can recall being used to seeing this sort of disturbing imagery around the same age as these people are now. As it is now though, it feels as if this kind of culture has been phased out; the chances of randomly running into a screamer or other assorted shock imagery like Goatse are unlikely at best and bordering on impossible in a lot of scenarios. In my inexpert opinion this can probably be attributed to the “urbanization” of the internet, so to speak: places like Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit have become monolithic, and more importantly in an attempt to monetize themselves more effectively have phased out processes that are conducive to viewing this kind of material. As a result, people born after the 1990s are going to be far less conditioned in regards to viewing shock imagery.

The point of this aside is to indicate that, while a raid is mildly annoying for people like myself, it can engender legitimate panic in people who are unused to their occurrence. Without fail, every single raid we’ve experienced has been accompanied by what can only be interpreted as a distinct breakdown in social order: people begin to freak out and post rapidly, not only expressing their own distaste and disbelief but also asking that others confirm if they feel the same way. It’s honestly a pretty annoying behavior, but I’m not sure if it’s something that can be avoided. With the number of people who join the server, there is close to no chance that such responses can be avoided as there will always be someone who has never been in a raid before.

With this in mind, #general is typically the worst instigator of these conversational abortions due to the fact that it experiences the most raids and also has the most people who have never experienced a raid before—truly the worst of both worlds. As such, once a raid occurs there it can be a bit of an ordeal trying to get people to calm down once the threat has been taken care of. The exact extent of the panic will of course depend on the nature of the material being raided with; at its worst, we have actually had to freeze the channel momentarily to get people to stop posting. Whatever the case, it’s an interesting feature of the place even if it hasn’t been seen in some time.

With these main points being covered, we now turn our attention to #social. A far more modern channel, social was originally created when the levels of flirtiness and selfie-posting had gotten too high in other places on the server—especially mspa-lit—and Makin wanted a containment channel for it. Originally only a test, #social proved successful enough that it eventually became instituted permanently, and we recruited Ifnar as its pseudo-mod (a position he later switched with Medixum, who used to moderate #serious).

Ifnar has been a member of the community for a while and has always spoken in a very proper manner, with no shorthand in his writing and proper grammar always. Unexpectedly his commentary is usually far from appropriate or proper, usually consisting of an innuendo or otherwise suggestive phrasing. This influence of his usually brings about some interesting conversations in #social, which has come to be regarded as both a casual place for personal discussion and a containment channel for more sexually explicit conversation. If it becomes egregious it's moved to #serious for Medixum to handle, or if it becomes REALLY egregious it's moved to Homesmut entirely. Under his careful watch, no shortage of flirting and lighthearted conversation ensues.

As it is, #social is reserved for more personal discussions, such as details about your life that you simply wish to share with others, light venting, or even more mundane things such as how your day went. More positively speaking the channel is well-liked as a casual version of mspa-lit, developing its own distinct group while simultaneously being more welcoming towards new people, or amenable to all varieties of discussion.

Social is kind of a more nuanced version of #general, with which it even shares much of its native population. The number of definite regulars is substantially increased with #social, including such people currently as Ci, furrylatula, virtuNat, Dioxazine, IAMTARA, and more. Social is far enough removed from #general that it doesn’t tend to experience the same kind of user turnover, or if it does it’s at a much slower rate. As such its culture is more robust, and it generally consists of the same conversational material that it was originally created for.

Users share images of themselves, either in a casual context or more Homestuck-oriented, such as cosplay. They are also comfortable talking about a wide range of topics, which gives it a distinct overlap in conversational range with both general and mspa-lit. In this way I think it’s helpful to visualize these channels as a progression, with each one representing a more refined degree of integration in the server: general being the entry point is the least refined, social is moreso but still fairly accessible, and then mspa-lit is the most intense of the “generally oriented” channels. Many people go through general and social, and from there may specialize into mspa-lit or more often redirect towards other channels more tailored to their interests.

There is one occurrence worth mentioning: social became a lot less active over the summer once Twonks was banned from the HSD, especially after she went and formed a splinter server. She and a couple others were notoriously flirty towards others, too much so even for #social. When told to go to #social by Makin, she replied “I’m already in social”, so he responded with “go to #socialer”. Thus the splinter server “socialer” was born.

I’m not personally aware of any other major events for social in particular, but I’m not certain if this is due to a lack of participation in the area or if it’s simply less prone to more tumultuous events. To this end I’m going to take some time in the next few days to message regulars and see if there’s any distinct events I’ve missed, but for now I think these are the brunt of my observations on both channels.

At this point I think it’s worth pointing out the culture of botspam-radio, or lack thereof. This is one of the channels that has nothing of importance going on at any time—as the name implies, it is reserved specifically for bot commands and especially spam, which is considered the most egregious form of shitposting. The bot has a few commands that are conducive to games, but it would be farcical to imply that any kind of subcommunity has popped up around these functions. Its most notable feature is being used by newcomers to give themselves a color role, or as the place where you submit radio requests with Aradiabot for when you’re in the appropriate voice channel. Aside from these features, it is devoid of anything worthy of real note, so I will not cover it any further.

Nothing more for today.

---

13^th of October 2017

It’s been a slow couple of days. Of note, today Phantos got his own Patreon channel that he decided to entitle #spooky. This channel is dedicated to a concept that I actually personally enjoy, which is taking the inherent association of October with Halloween and amplifying it greatly with sarcasm.

It’s a relatively simple celebration of the holiday—and arguably one of the more juvenile—but it is nonetheless greatly amusing. Common ways of expressing this kind of behavior include: the use of images depicting skeletons, typically dancing or doing otherwise silly things; ironic overuse of the phrase “too spooky”, and especially application of this adjective to various concepts, including the entire month of October (a la “Spooky Month”); and assorted other activities that are mockingly child-like in nature.

I can only imagine that this sort of behavior is grating on people, and especially towards the end of the month I’m sure that it will be said to have overstayed its welcome. In the meantime though, Spooky Month is in full swing, and the videos of dancing skeletons reign supreme. Phantos’ channel is up and running, and the liberal use of shitty memes has been nothing short of successful in glorifying Halloween. I look forward to lurking the channel and seeing what comes out of it.

More broadly oriented, Discord had a major server outage today. The occurrence of this in the past has been rare enough to elicit little comment, but today it was fairly egregious; the program was completely unusable for a span of almost thirty minutes, which is unprecedented as far as I’m aware. I also don’t know how widespread this outage was; I’ve seen it where Europeans have been shut out from Discord for some reason or another while everyone else was unaffected, so I don’t know if this event was localized to the Americas or not.

Whatever the case, it’s a disconcerting reminder of how easily the stability of this place could be disrupted. As time has gone by I’ve come to regard this place as a solid habitat, but the reality of the matter is that it wouldn’t take much for everything that’s been built here to be completely destroyed. I’m not sure exactly what could remedy this fact, and indeed sometimes I think there is no effective way to help it at all. If Discord were to suddenly shut down one day, how would we all keep in contact?

Thankfully, the internet is nothing if not redundant in many aspects. While the Discord is currently the absolute go to for real time discussion, there exist alternates such as IRC. It is highly likely that a majority of people from the HSD would return to the subreddit in the case of the HSD being annihilated; most people came from there anyway. Additionally, I feel as if there would be an inevitable pull towards IRC; the subreddit is great for organizing loosely, but a real time chatform is needed for effective and engaging conversation, and thus the #homestuck IRC channel waits.

The IRC channel has been around since before the HSD was created. It has no real extant connection to the HSD, and most of the people who used it never associated with us or even professed some level of dislike for the Discord server in general. It’s kind of dismaying that this would be the case, but nonetheless my paranoid mind is grateful for the presence of a backup in case this place is ever closed. If for some reason this should occur, there is an almost 100% certainty that the community as it is now would effectively disappear. I assume more dedicated people would probably seek out the IRC channel, but we’ll have to wait and see if that’s actually what would happen. With luck, we’ll never have to actually test that hypothesis.

On a more derivative note, I’m starting to harbor some concerns about the movie night server. We’ve been trying to do it on a regular basis, once a week, but it seems as if user participation has been declining steadily each time. This could be attributable to many things unfortunately, and I’m not sure exactly where to point the finger. It might be due to a lack of organization lately, where I’ve been unable to personally oversee all aspects of the process like I used to. It might also be a matter of user fatigue, where trying to watch it once a week has been too often. Could also be a lack of movies people want to watch. Not really sure to be honest; I’ve suggested that we change up the way we decide what movies we watch; for instance, perhaps instead of doing one movie a week for sure, we wait until people decide collectively what to do, so that we have guaranteed interest. There are a number of ways we could go about helping this process, we’ll just have to see what works best as time goes by.

Nothing more for today.

---

14^th of October 2017

Today was a little interesting. The journal reached 200 pages a few days ago, and there has been a few ripples here and there of discussion surrounding it. This usually peters out after a few words, but tonight it eventually led to the more unconventional topic of the nature of the journal itself. MrCheeze and Tipsy in particular were involved in this conversation, and I felt as if there were some misunderstandings as to what the journal was actually for.

After probing them for a little more info, MrCheeze asserted that “the intent of the journal” made them a little uncomfortable, which was puzzling to me. I pressed them for more information but never did get a clear answer. I suppose this is in keeping with my other interactions with S—they have this tendency to assume you know what they mean, and if you don’t then they refuse or are otherwise unable to clarify. Getting a straight answer out of them is frustrating at best, although I couldn’t say why they act this way. I don’t believe it’s a matter of smugness; rather it seems as if they have a very strong notion of what is right and wrong, and it is difficult for them to understand why others may think differently. Of course this makes discussions with them rather intense when a disagreement occurs, but otherwise they’re fine to talk with.

More immediately important was that the nature of the journal seemed to bother them, although not terribly. I try to be as accommodating as possible so I tried my best to see what exactly was bugging them, but to no avail. The phrase “you can’t please everybody” rings true, but I really do want to avoid causing friction with this work. It also makes me wonder if there are many other people who feel this way towards the journal, or even more strongly about it than simple discomfort. Is there anyone who legitimately hates this document for some reason?²⁰

While I would be lying if I said such thoughts aren’t at least vaguely upsetting to me, I’m more just curious as to what facet of the journal could be so disconcerting. Thankfully I don’t think anyone does feel that way about the journal, and if they do then I have no idea who they are or why they think that way. It doesn’t do to dwell on such things until I know for sure that they’re real and what their nature even is, so I generally don’t let these ideas bother me.

It seems MrCheeze has a generally pessimistic disposition to be honest; outside of the scope of my journal alone, they laments things far too often for me to write it off as specific distaste of particular circumstances. During our discussion today they asked where I was even three years ago in the Homestuck fandom, which was a rather strange statement to me. Their statement relied on the fact that they believes the fandom has deteriorated significantly in the last so many years, which admittedly many people and myself will agree on. As for the question of why they thought I should have been involved back then I didn’t receive a real answer, which I guess is customary at this point. Suffice to say that their outlook on the future of the community is overwhelmingly negative.

Tipsy, both in her outlook on the fandom and the journal itself, is a different story. Hers was, as far as I can ascertain, just a misunderstanding; she didn’t even know strictly why I was making the journal, saying at first that it was “just for fun” (although after some consideration I would have to agree with this idea too). Rather I explained about how I care greatly for the HSD and the people in it, which she found to be sweet. She thinks that the method of collecting information—observing things in real time even—was a bit “stalkerish”, although I’m not sure if she means legitimately stalking or if she was joking. The implication of this bothers me somewhat but I can only assume she was being more or less flippant.

In addition she is, while not radiantly positive, at least warmly neutral or indifferent as to the direction the community is heading. I can appreciate this outlook, perhaps even more than I would one that is positive (assuming it becomes saccharine). Tipsy’s been around in the community for a long time and is actually a pretty well recognized figure, so I feel inclined to trust her perception of such things. I also think of her as a sort of litmus test for this place; if something is wrong then she’s usually the first one to say so, although as time has gone by I’ve developed a more nuanced view of her reactions. It’s kind of nice to develop that sort of intuition; hopefully it serves me well in the future.

Also a positive note in this regard, Tipsy said that I was one of the few people she (and conceivably others) would trust to write a journal without issue. Other figures, like Makin or especially Flare, would generate intense controversy with such a thing. However, in her words I’m “too inoffensive/impartial” for such problems. I have to confess great pride in the fact that people view me as trustworthy. It makes me feel like I do my job well, and I hope I can help that perception continue as time goes by.

Nothing more for today.

---

15^th of October 2017

Not a lot for today. Some gentle discussion has occurred, of which I’m pleased to say that Sora has started participating more often again (among a few others who had seemed to leave) and appears to be feeling better than they did before. It’s heartening to see them striving for self-improvement. Additionally, the server is just a few members short of 9000 users; Makin has demanded utter silence from the mod team when this 9000th member joins, for mysterious purposes as yet to be unveiled. The secrecy is amusing, and I eagerly await to see what he has planned. As it is, nothing more for today.

---

16th of October 2017

The server reached 9000 people as of 3:33 PM EST, a moment that many of us in the mod chat were waiting for. As soon as it happened Sea Hitler declared it in the mod chat, and as per Makin’s orders none of us said anything about it publicly. We asked what he had in mind for the surprise, and all we got in response was this:

This is the “itisamystery” emote, and it has a somewhat infamous usage here. It can be employed regularly by anyone without any issue, but when Makin uses it that usually means there are japes afoot. It can be his way of signaling he’s baited you successfully, or as a way to deflect questions. The latter is the case here, a rather insidious tease; when Makin gets secretive about upcoming events it’s a sure sign that pandemonium will follow. We’re not sure what he has in store yet, and we probably won’t find out until it’s already begun. Should be interesting.

Nothing more for today.

---

17^th of October 2017

At some point today Makin enacted his plan, which involved creating a new channel, entitled #aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. It’s probably a different number of “a”s but by the time I started writing this the channel had already been archived, with a different name. The channel name is a reference to an extremely widespread meme, now several years old, taken from an episode of Dragon Ball Z.

I’m sure anyone reading this who has any grasp of the history of humor on the internet will be familiar with it, but in order to contextualize the name a little better I’ll explain as briefly as I can for those who may not be aware. In the Ocean dub of Dragon Ball Z, episode 21 (“The Return of Goku”) has a scene where the villain Vegeta comments on the strength of protagonist Goku, referring to his “power level”. When asked he says, “It’s over 9000!”. The episode originally aired in 1997, but the phrase itself was popularized on the internet in 2006, for some reason exploding in usage over the next few years. Now that it’s 11 years later the meme doesn’t get used hardly at all, but it is permanently burned into the memory of anyone who happened to be around back then.

The popularity of this particular meme in our community—as well as others like it—was enhanced by a particular work of CANMT entitled “Savior of the Screaming Dead”, which Griever created. He takes a clip of the protagonist screaming for about four minutes straight and overlays it on top of normal Homestuck music, among other things. This caused nothing short of a small renaissance of the subject material for us.²¹

Indeed, such was its usage that we can still see its residual effects, today in the form of Makin’s new channel. 9000 users was the meme number he’s been waiting for, and I am both delighted and horrified to say that the opportunity was not wasted. The channel was dedicated to screaming—a closely related joke associated with the source material—and scream people did. For almost the entire day the channel consisted of nothing but people posting “AAAAAAAAAAAAA” in varying lengths and forms, spamming it to the point of absolute absurdity. The pace people were posting at was so intense that stepping into the channel for even one second caused my Discord client to crash, repeatedly.

While greatly amusing even by itself, the entertainment was only amplified for us when it was discovered that the disturbance caused around 30 people to leave, and thus we fell below 9000 members at some point. We’ve been catching up again slowly, but for now it is a shining example of hubris at work. As I mentioned though, the channel has since been archived, so now things have returned to normal. In addition to all of this, Makin announced a community stream for the 25th of this month; 10/25 is one of the important calendar dates for us, so this move was expected. As it is, I believe this will be a good opportunity for the server to break free of the conversational doldrums it’s been experiencing lately. #general could stand to use a bit more conversation as is, we’ll see how it works out.

Nothing more for today.

---

18^th of October 2017

It’s been a couple weeks since Makin gave us the news of being blacklisted on MSPA advertisements. While this originally led to some pretty fierce debate on what should be done with the money raised, Makin has continued to be secretive. We did know that he was going to run ads on MSPFA instead, which seemed a more or less tenable solution. In addition, however, today he bought server space for two games that many people are familiar with: Team Fortress 2 and Space Station 13 (or SS13).

Team Fortress 2 is popular enough that I don’t feel the need to explain it; Space Station 13, however, is a far more niche item. SS13 for short, it is the product of this free software called BYOND, which is used to create games or other net-related applications. SS13 in particular is a sandbox simulator, wherein any number of people may join and move about on a space ship²², with various assigned roles.

The objective of this game will change depending on what everyone has agreed to play, and indeed people may ignore the objective entirely and do whatever they wish (albeit with some penalty, depending on the nature of their actions). The space station has all manner of objects on board, with which people may interact in a plethora of ways. Rather than go into any lengthy detail about the mechanics of this game, I’ve elected to offer an example of my first time loading the game and actually playing it with people from HSD.

Makin had just created the server and was unfamiliar with the controls, as were most of us. I distinctly remember him, myself, and Tensei all trying to figure out what to do with ourselves. We started the game together on a shuttle that had brought us to the station itself. We were all buckled into seats; the first goal thus became to free ourselves, and after some messing about we were able to move around without issue.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that Makin had a second, administrative account on at the same time, which he had designated as a literal clown. Being inactive, the clown did not unbuckle itself from the chair. The rest of us continued trying to sort out the controls and figure out how to interact with other objects appropriately; in the process, we started using the clown as a training dummy for figuring out the user interface. In this fashion we started to punch the clown by accident.

This was amusing to us; we continued to punch the clown seemingly without issue, although for some reason I was only hugging it instead. This continued for some time as we tried to figure out how to change the appropriate settings. Once we had completed this task, we decided to unbuckle the clown from the chair. At this point I noticed that when I clicked on the clown I was giving it CPR. “That’s an oddly specific action, I wonder what I’ve done to enable it,” I thought to myself. As it turns out, when we finally managed to unbuckle the clown from its chair it immediately slumped over and fell to the ground with a wet “honk”. In our careless experiments, we had accidentally murdered this poor clown.

Thus set the tone for the rest of our escapades on this station. While there are defined objectives available for us to complete, what usually happens (at least so far) is that we’ll become hopelessly distracted by some random factor of our various roles—the assorted flavors of scientist or engineers being able to accomplish highly specific things—or even by nothing in particular as we simply explore the station itself and the broader possibilities of the game itself.

SS13 is highly reminiscent of some early internet programs I used to enjoy, and is actually extremely suitable for our particular brand of culture: easy to pick up (if difficult to master), conducive to casual hangouts, assigned goals available at our whim, among other things. For me it feels like a return to some of the early massively multiplayer online games I used to play in the early 2000s, although with far more complexity than any of the programs I personally encountered. I’m interested to see where this program will be with us in a month or two; experience tells me it’ll be a flavor of the month sort of deal, where we enjoy it greatly for a bit and then it fades away (as has happened with Minecraft and other things). On the other hand, perhaps it will have a lasting effect? Time will tell as always.

More directly related to the server, there’s been a bit of a ruffle concerning the practice of liveblogging. Liveblogging is basically the process of announcing your progress in a given piece of entertainment, often accompanied with a personal reaction; it may foster discussion but is also just a way to alert people as to where you are in the work. This latter use has become something of a problem lately; there are a number of works that Makin or others in general are attempting to spread as much as possible, and naturally it’s nice to have affirmation from people engaging in those works as to their progress. It’s not uncommon for someone to read HPMOR and then speak briefly when they reach a given segment—when Hiveswap Act 1 came out, this happened extremely frequently until everyone was caught up.

Unfortunately the practice has been occurring with a more alarming frequency as of late. Danganronpa v3²³ came out recently, which is a fairly popular franchise with people here. As such, Makin himself liveblogged it when it came out, among a few others. When the liveblogging is conducted appropriately it’s not too intrusive, but sometimes it can be excessive. Minish ended up playing Danganronpa v3 for the last day or two, and every time he does there has been a rather egregious stream of pictures that signal where he’s at, or his reaction to certain parts.

Usually when the reports concern sections that are famously known, then it can reasonably be said that most people are interested in and thus fine with the liveblogging. However, Minish has been posting pictures of almost every conversation or event, regardless of importance; this has landed him firmly in “inappropriate usage” territory, and it has drawn attention to the overall problem, which is that this system is prone to abuse.

After the topic was initially breached in the wake of Minish’s spree, a number of people were asking to ban the process, not least of which included Toast. In his words, liveblogging has “nothing constructive or interesting, it’s just spam”. Alongside this and others complaints I brought this up in the modchat, although based on the fact that Makin does it himself I don’t really expect much to be done about this.

More details on this situation as it unfolds. Nothing more for today.

---

20^th of October 2017

The SS13 server seems to have temporarily become the default method of interaction for us. I got online and it appeared that people had already been playing for hours, and this lasted throughout the day. This kind of intense usage is in line with my past experiences, suggesting that it will be heavily used for about two weeks to one month and then subsequently see an incredible drop off in activity. Within two months it will have been dropped almost completely. I could be wrong, but as I’m so fond of saying: time will tell.

My humorous SS13 note of choice from the last day or two: at some point, Tensei was a botanist or a geneticist, perhaps some other brand of scientist, and was experimenting with cannabis leaves. Before long he took some “unstable mutagen” and somehow transformed the cannabis into “omegaweed”, a glowing and much more potent (as well as lethal) form of marijuana. I’m not sure on the next step exactly, but apparently he consumed this himself and then force fed it to Makin, upon which they both nearly died from how insanely high it made them. Or it may have simply poisoned them, but I digress.

There is a definite decrease in activity from mspa-lit when this game is active, a fact that perturbs me slightly. I imagine that as time goes by, participation in SS13 will slowly decline and we will inexorably start to filter back into the HSD, so I’m not terribly concerned. Instead it’s just another thing that’s made me aware of how attached I am to this place; I’m slowly becoming cognizant of my overwhelming fear of this place being significantly disrupted. I’m going to have to work to dispel that feeling, or else it’s going to bite me in the ass later on down the road.

As a follow up to the liveblogging discussion, I don’t think Makin ever did respond to my request for a discussion on the matter, although I may have just missed it. More importantly, I’ve come to a conclusion that I probably should have reached immediately, which is that we can dispel Bad Liveblogging without chartering a rule for it. Sometimes liveblogging is good, or can even promote discussion—this is desirable, so instituting a server wide ban for it is nonsensical. Rather, we would be better off tacitly allowing it, and then forcibly stopping people who are abusing the practice. This may offend some but it’s a better approach than wielding our influence like a cudgel and completely getting rid of something that may have positive effects for us. Hopefully this does not lead to any further issues.

Nothing more for today.

---

22^nd of October 2017

SS13 discussions have only continued to grow in intensity. It has officially reached the level where others have started to decry its presence; indeed, many people have requested that SS13 conversation be sequestered in a more appropriate location. This tension reached its height sometime after Makin renamed the channel “play-ss13”. This was amusing for many of us, bfut those who were opposed found the topic disruptive, and seemed to crowd out discussion of anything else.

There was a dedicated cabal trying to mollify those who were upset, with such arguments as “this has always been a channel for Makin to shill what he wants” (which is not altogether untrue, at least in practice). However, this sort of explanation has been progressively less effective as time goes by. Such was the case today, and people were not satisfied with this response. Ordinarily I would expect Makin to simply dismiss these concerns and allow things to continue as they are, but tonight he acquiesced to these concerns (albeit with heavily applied skepticism).

When people continued clamoring for SS13 to be moved, he finally decided to create a new channel for it, much to the relief of those present. Simply entitled “play-ss13”, and with mspa-lit subsequently changed to “read-glow-worm”, this new channel was not without its controversy as well. WoC left the server again, citing indignance at the fact that Makin created an entire channel for discussion of a video game, stepping directly on #gaming’s toes and undermining its purpose. This offense is hardly the first of its kind, and I suppose WoC finally decided it was too much to bear. Personally I assume he’ll be back at some point in the future, but I would not be surprised if he stayed away on principle (or perhaps through apathy). Time will tell.

The new channel was created with one stipulation: Makin required that the channel being split in two would not jeopardize activity levels. He looked at the number of messages sent the day previously and required that each channel should match that in order to keep them both. An amusing side note, Makin mistakenly took the sum of ALL channel activity instead of just mspa-lit, which led to him saying 20,000 messages were required. After investigating, I determined that the average number of messages sent per day was just under 5,000 instead. In either case, I’m interested to see how this holds up.

Aside from the SS13 nonsense, a particularly enjoyable conversation occurred in the evening concerning the nature of humor that this community—both the Homestuck fandom in general and the HSD itself—has dabbled in over the years. A great number of people participated in this conversation, of note Toast, hb, Gnawms, Dingus, Niklink, Trip, cookiefonster, eclair, wheals, Skyplayer, and an assortment of others. A wide swath of history was considered, and the diversity of our backgrounds assisted greatly in the sharing of tales.

Of particular note was the background of these comics produced by the 4chan board /co/ (an abbreviation of “comics”), which are all in the same vein as Not On My Watch. Often they are dedicated to offense and baiting, and are expertly crafted in this way. More amusing to myself and others than the comic itself is the audacity with which these people made these comics; real people, thinking and breathing like the rest of us, conceived of and subsequently created these comics, and their content is so strikingly offensive that I simply have to laugh to consider what must have been going through the minds of these people. Obviously, anyone with a sense of decency would condemn the “message” (if it can be called such) of these comics as unethical at best and evil at worst, but their mere existence is a sort of joke in itself.

Nonetheless, these comics do still manage to accomplish their purpose as bait; even when publicly recognized as such, people fall prey to the offense and deem it unacceptable. This is a particularly difficult subject to approach because, from an idealistic standpoint, those who are repulsed by them are more than entitled to be—by all means, these comics are repugnant in nature. As such, I’m fascinated as to why some of us are able to simply be amused by them, instead of so thoroughly off-put like others who are unable to reconcile the potential humor with its inappropriate nature. I’m sure this is a question better suited to a brand of science I’m not familiar with, but I find myself wondering about it all the same.

Outside of these comics were a host of other historical memes, including many from the HSD itself. It would be madness to go over them all in such detail, but suffice to say that it was helpful in reminding me of how colorful the history of this place can be. In fact, the timing of this conversation may never have been more serendipitous, as hb announced earlier in the day that he was crafting his own document, related specifically to cataloging the various memes of the HSD. His list is ever expanding, but I was delighted to hear that someone else is interested in preserving the culture of this place in some way. The document can be found in appendix B, and I look forward to seeing how it may evolve in the future. Toast mocked me for my warm reception of this document, calling me a “data junkie”, but I know he means it in a friendly manner. Besides, he is completely correct—I’m hopelessly excited about the idea that our culture may be preserved in the future, against all possible odds. Every scrap of evidence goes at least some length in achieving this preservation, and I will do all I can to ensure it. Efforts on the part of people like hb really assist in this matter, and I hope others are inspired to keep their own records if necessary or even possible.

Nothing more for today.

---

23^rd of October 2017

The SS13 channel is not quite living up to the level of activity that Makin specified, but he has not taken it down yet. I and others are of some hope that he’ll leave it running anyway, as its presence has successfully ameliorated most people’s feelings on the matter, WoC excluded. The activity level of mspa-lit itself has not been jeopardized at the very least, and may actually have been promoted by this new channel, since SS13 discussion no longer dominates. There’s been at least a small flourishing of activity, which is always heartening to see.

In light of the conversation we had yesterday about the history of humor we’ve all been through, we also began reminiscing about the older days of the Homestuck fandom in its entirety. The fandom grew from the comic’s inception and then positively exploded in 2010, going through a consistent crescendo until finally reaching its greatest height somewhere in 2012. At that point, the comic started to diminish in quality, although only slightly at first; October 2013 began a period known as the Gigapause, a full year where Hussie took time to create panels in relative peace, in which no updates occurred. The Gigapause was the first instance of these pauses, which would become more frequent later in the comic’s run. It was at this time that the fandom began experiencing some significant signs of strain.

The gradual increase in fans throughout 2010 to 2012 was accompanied by its own slew of weirdness to be sure, but I think this period of time was culturally amenable to it. Both within the fandom itself and outside of it, people were less immediately put off by the sighting of people wearing strange costumes or doing strange things in the name of Homestuck. Then as things go, people became less okay with it and the weird only got weirder. Homestuck became recognized more widely, and people in general began to preemptively castigate those fans who made themselves known.

This behavior only continued to worsen. In the absence of any regular updates, people made up for the lack of new content by acting out in more spurious ways. The fandom began to witness its first decline since the initial pick up, but the hate against it grew ever stronger. This process of indiscriminate hatefulness in the face of declining numbers of fans led to a rather weird position on the internet in general, where Homestuck fans became fairly self-aware, perhaps even contained in a sense. They became more or less withdrawn, and their general presence on the internet was substantially lessened. The only really extravagant or flamboyant expression left to them were conventions, where people dressed up as characters from the comic. Some of the cosplays that popped up during the Gigapause were apparently utterly insane, although I didn’t get to play witness to any such thing during that time.

I could ramble about this topic for a while, and in the future I may do just that. As for now though, more immediately relevant to the server was part of the discussion involving the old #nsfw channels that we used to have on the server. I mentioned at the beginning of this journal that we got rid of such channels and instituted an entire dedicated server to NSFW material, and now I believe is the time to describe the factors that led to this development.

Sometime after the server started, a NSFW channel was created to house such discussion as was meant for adults. At first, if memory serves, the channel was basically open access—this proved to be somewhat problematic, and so rules were instated. It was required that people should give their date of birth to indicate that they were over 18 years of age. This system worked for quite some time, and was in place when I joined and then for a few months afterwards.

In this form the NSFW channel developed its own comprehensive culture, and I had some rather incredible experiences talking with the people there. People like Dickle made it rather unique, although decidedly hectic and strange. We reveled in that weirdness though; it was liberating to be one of the older people present, and to have access to this place that not everyone could see. We were free to talk with each other openly, and revealed details of ourselves to each other that, realistically speaking, we probably shouldn’t have. Yet we did, and the sense of community deepened for a while.

At one point, there was an intense encounter between WoC and one of the NSFW regulars that I’ve mentioned previously, HP. I’ve already described this incident in some detail, wherein WoC accidentally sent a .gif file of a deer getting its head blown off to HP in private messages. This led to WoC nearly being demodded from #gaming, and I almost ended up getting his position. This situation ultimately resolved itself, but it was the beginning in a long series of incidents that eventually culminated in #nsfw being removed from the server completely.

Some of the incidents are lost to me, but more important among them was the incident of nude images being collected by Itoan, which I have already described at length in a previous entry. At one point the original channel was accidentally deleted entirely, and a replacement was created. This replacement was ALSO trashed for some reason, and archived as #nsfw-older. An additional issue from after I was modded involved the former pseudo-mod of #nsfw, a fellow named Master Emp. Part of the rules concerned the exact level of “furries”, or people identifying as anthropomorphic animals, that would be allowed in #nsfw.

Furries are a contentious topic at the best of times, with anyone who openly participates as one being subject to social ridicule at least part of the time. There are a number of people on the server who are openly furries so that discrimination is not quite as prevalent here, but they do not go without some push back from various people. Master Emp was, at best, tolerant of this subgroup and had a rule that succinctly described his position on their presence in #nsfw. Basically, it graded “levels” of furries based on how human-like they are in the image in question, and if they became too animal-like then they wouldn’t be allowed (a not unreasonable rule, I would say). However, as time went by he began to punish people who shared such images more readily. This drew the ire of many, and debate shortly began about the nature of the rule.

Makin himself was only barely tolerant of #nsfw’s position in the server, and this incident was the final straw. In one fell swoop, #nsfw was destroyed. It now remains on the server archived as #nsfw-old, alongside its sister channel. This was also done in the wake of the Discord search function being implemented, which would have made it far easier for people to creep on others’ posts and find sensitive material. In its stead, we collaborated to craft a new option—eventually, Homesmut was born.

Homesmut has been developed as a more complex replacement to #nsfw. The system for getting in is the same, and there are now a number of channels instead of one to contain everything. Its existence as an entirely separate server also mitigates some potential issues for us; as a partnered Discord server, hosting NSFW content is against the Discord TOS, which puts us at risk of losing partnered status (this risk being a substantial reason for Makin’s distaste for the channel). Thus, having the NSFW material completely outside of the HSD removed that problem. Further, it prevented the effect of any drama from being felt in HSD proper. For these reasons it seemed to be a great idea.

In practice, of course, it hasn’t been as I had hoped. #nsfw had its own complex dynamics and regulars, and it felt like a real community of people together. Homesmut has way more people than #nsfw did, but is utterly devoid of that feeling of culture or mutual understanding. It is a mindless place, filled with people who are only interested in the porn. While more or less understandable, it is simply disappointing for anyone who was around for #nsfw. I take no pleasure in the place, and generally avoid it except to keep it running as needed.

It’s also worth mentioning that the Discord TOS has been changed since then, so now one of the main reasons for its existence is no longer valid. Despite this, the new server remains our tool²⁴. Thus is the history of the NSFW portion of our community. If anything more happens to the place, I’ll be sure to record them here as well. It is worth mentioning that #serious on the HSD can be used for discussion of NSFW topics, but only discussion; images are strictly relegated to Homesmut. However, I feel the barrier of access to #serious for casual NSFW discussion is discouraging. Often there are people already there, discussing things at length or at the very least venting about something. This does not foster NSFW discussion. However, as has been pointed out to me by others, that may be for the best.

Nothing more for today.

---

25^th of October 2017

Today is an important day for myself and the community. October 25th is the day that I joined the community last year. It’s weird to think that I’ve spent an entire year of my life in this place, and yet I hope that many more are to follow. As for the community, it’s a date of importance within the comic itself. Like the 13th of April and the 12th of June, the 25th of October is a meme date. Every year something important typically happens on these days, and in this way we celebrate them.

For the HSD and the subreddit, this usually consists of a community stream. We enjoyed such a stream today, although the timing was less than advantageous for people in America: we started at 10 AM EST and ended just as the people on the east coast were getting out of school for the day. The west coasters never even had a chance. Unfortunately, this sort of scheduling deficiency is always inherent in the system; we’re simply too spread out globally for any sort of cohesive, all-encompassing plan to be developed. To make up for this, there is usually someone who records the streams in their entirety. I believe Ngame takes care of this task most of the time, if not every time.

One of the things we streamed today was an exceedingly strange show from Adult Swim back in 2007, called Xavier: Renegade Angel. There is little information available about the show or its reception, but suffice to say that it employs an extremely surreal, dark brand of comedy as it follows its titular character around in these strange, metaphysical journeys, often with no real conclusion or goal.

WoC stumbled upon this show some months ago, and has taken great pains to advertise it to us. He deduced correctly that Makin in particular would appreciate the absurd wordplay and setting of the show, and thus it was streamed today. The reaction was as you would expect, with people continuously left agape or in disbelief at what they were seeing. The show touched on a broad variety of taboo topics—enough that it’s not really worth listing them here—to the point that it was mildly uncomfortable at best and indiscriminately offensive at worst.

Naturally, it was a huge success. I don’t know what kind of staying power the show will have, as only about 75 people were watching at any given time, but I’m sure that we’ll see references trickle through here and there for weeks, if not months. Altgen in particular should be pretty taken with the nature of this show, although I haven’t strictly checked to see what the effect has been.

Speaking of WoC, I mentioned before that he left the server after Makin instated SS13 as its own channel. This is due to the fact that it’s video game discussion that’s actively being taken away from #gaming, a stance I find myself sympathetic to. WoC feels as if these sorts of barbs have been thrown his way for a long time now, and amidst another factor or two he decided he would leave, at least temporarily. I’m not sure what exactly he hopes to accomplish with this, so I talked with him for a while about it today.

The SS13 channel is in fact a large portion of the concern, with it directly undermining #gaming. SS13, while not as active as mspa-lit is, still garners around 2,500 messages per day on average. #gaming, meanwhile, only sees about 1,000 messages per day, or as low as 500. This is a pretty unfortunate disparity, and I assured WoC that I would bring it up to the mod team (although I’m not exactly hopeful that any meaningful change will come about once I’ve done so).

Unfortunately, that’s not the only reason he’s decided to go again. He’s tired of people referencing the same stories about him ad nauseum, a declaration that initially confused me. After some clarification, it makes more sense though; he’s perfectly happy with sharing stories of himself and he enjoys doing so, but it seems people latch onto various incidents of his and refuse to let go, even after a substantial amount of time has passed. In his words, they’re beating a dead horse.

I’m not quite sure what to do about this, or if anything even can be done, strictly speaking. I brought up this issue to people and a few were immediately amenable to stopping this behavior, but others were skeptical for some reason. I’m not sure what they might be thinking, but it may be difficult to get everyone on board. I stressed to WoC that he would be better off talking to people himself; it’s more meaningful to express your feelings directly than to have it relayed by someone else. However, he insists that he has spoken about it at length already and people continued regardless. As it is, I’ll try to see what I can do to make everyone happy. It may be that that’s not possible in this situation, but as I’m so fond of saying time will tell.

Nothing more for today.

---

27^th of October 2017

I mentioned some time ago that I would be describing LOFAM at length once Cait finishes writing up a document with the necessary information. She’s still in the midst of writing it, but a similar file has been given to me today by wheals, concerning the history of CANMT. I’m very happy to have this document—it’s a rather thorough account of history of the group, with a precise amount of detail regarding dates, people involved, what projects were accomplished, etc. I’ll provide a brief overview of CANMT here, but I encourage anyone who wants more exact information about this community to examine the document themselves: it may be found in appendix B, under the name “History of Cool and New Music Team (CANMT)”.

The history of CANMT is better understood in light of the presence of another work that the HSD is heavily concerned with, being Cool and New Web Comic (CANWC). CANWC is a fanventure that started literally three days before the end of Homestuck on April 10th, 2016. It is a mix of Homestuck itself and another, ancillary work of Hussie’s called Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff (SBAHJ). SBAHJ was originally released far before Homestuck was ever conceived, back in the days of Hussie intermingling with his friends on the Penny Arcade forums. After Homestuck started to be released, however, SBAHJ became a part of it—it is canonically written by one of the characters in the webcomic.

SBAHJ itself is devoted to an aesthetic that can only be described as the lack of aesthetic, or indeed the lack of any sense at all. The art is very heavily broken, with all rules of design or basic drawing ability thrown out the window. The dialogue is similarly broken, with grammar being nonexistent and typos more frequent than actual English. These are both conscious, purposeful effects: in short, the comic is designed to be “BAD ON PURPOSE” (a phrase that has been the source of innumerable debates and discourse on the HSD). It has become as memetic to us as Homestuck itself (if not more so), with references being bandied about frequently and casually. It’s fairly well ensconced within our culture at this point.

If you’re at all curious, I recommend you seek this material yourself. It requires far less time and dedication than Homestuck itself, and seeing it will do it far better justice than any words I could ever write on the subject. This all having been said, we can return to CANWC. It begins as a simple retelling of Homestuck with the intentional shittiness of SBAHJ style, but after some time it transcends into something else entirely. Most people were either pleased with the humor itself or seemed to ignore it entirely at first, but then on April 30th or so a twist occurred that launched it into popularity. Suddenly people were talking about it in force. It’s worth mentioning at this point that Homestuck’s end had been received overwhelmingly poorly, but by the end of the month they were already exhausted of talking about why, so I imagine there was some eagerness to move away from the topic. CANWC offered a convenient way out for them, which may have contributed to its success.

The author of CANWC, an enigmatic figure simply known as “o”, posted it originally on the Omegaupdate forums. From the first post, o has never broken character—the same kind of haltering, broken speech as the comic itself—which contributes heavily to the mystery surrounding him. The general weirdness of the fanventure and its author have elevated it into something that is now more or less automatically regarded as part of the Essential Readings. CANWC is inextricable from this place just as much as Homestuck itself.

Shifting gears a bit, it’s also important to recognize that Homestuck has been accompanied with a wide array of music for its entire history. The Homestuck Music Team, which Tensei is a part of, released albums full of music that was crafted by artists for Homestuck, some of which was used in the comic itself. This became a significant part of our culture as well, with people fervently discussing the latest release or their favorites as time goes by. The last of these albums, simply entitled “Volume 10”, was released a couple months after the end of Homestuck, on June 12th of 2016. It was in the wake of this release that certain key members of CANMT first met each other.

At first there was only talk of creating a CANWC fan-album, but ost eventually created a new Discord server called “Cool and New Webcomic Soundtrack”, inviting Ngame, Niklink, Putnam, a fellow named daviddrawsgood, thunder413, a member of the Homestuck Music Team named Alexander Rosetti, and Jamie Paige. Wheals joined a couple of days later, and as he says, “the rest is history”.

The guiding principle of the group was originally to create music that would fit CANWC’s narrative style of purposeful shittiness. Most of the tracks in early albums, such as “Voulem. 1”, do in fact follow this rule. Eventually on the 8th of October of 2016, the name was changed to CANMT. More and more people joined, and some of the people involved in CANMT eventually got involved in the HSD itself, and vice versa. One of the highlights of CANMT was when o himself submitted some music tracks to the group. Additionally, CANMT’s songs have started being regularly used in flash animations for the fanventure. Minish, Makin, Difarem, and a host of others became involved at some point.

The group continued to grow for months. Eventually, through Makin’s involvement, CANMT projects became widely anticipated in the subreddit and HSD communities, with new album releases typically being showcased in a community stream. The types of music that were involved continued to grow as well, with more artists contributing their favorite genres and styles. Even outside of music, people were recruited, such as when “Bambosh was taken on to increase artist representation on the team”. The collective pool of creative talent only ever seemed to get bigger.

It was not without its hitches either, of course: as time went by, ost and minish (among others) were less enchanted with CANWC’s style and direction, and so wanted to distance the group from purely CANWC-centric content. This is what influenced the name change to Cool and New Music Team, and this was accompanied with a mandate for an increase in quality of tracks. Rather than accept any song no matter how shitty, ost wanted there to be standards. Many songs that were to be on the sixth album release were nixed, the composers being told “this will not be on the album as is”. This transition was accompanied by a large degree of argumentation; in retrospect, while people like wheals deem the change a good one, he also admits that it was “handled poorly”. Since the change has gone through, there are now rules for what kind of content they’ll publish.

Most of the recent activity for CANMT was laced within May to June of this year, with the release of their album “9”—this is, according to many, unquestionably their best work to date. Unfortunately, there’s been a lull: CANMT appears to mostly be dormant at this time, although according to wheals they “never stopped working”. He goes on to say that there is an intrinsic connection with CANWC, where the quality and speed of CANWC updates are reflected in the speed of updates for their music team. Even after the group distanced themselves from the fanventure, it has been this way. O himself has said “o is slow”; there is fervent hope that both will be able to return to the manic pace that they set earlier in the year.

Whatever the case, CANMT has firmly cemented itself in our community at large. The more I write about these topics, the more I consciously recognize that only writing about the HSD itself is an untenable and unhelpful way to describe the overall system affecting us here. I’m glad I’ve decided to write about these other projects and qualities of our place here. Once I have the LOFAM description I’ll also be writing about them as well; Cait has promised to contribute a significant piece of writing. I hope I’ll be able to follow up on this soon.

Nothing more for today.

---

28^th of October 2017

It’s been a very slow day. This state of torpor has been more or less consistent for the last week or so, and it’s this sort of downward trend in activity that starts to worry me more than I like to admit. Not a lot has happened, so I’ll use this entry to describe my musings on this topic more than anything else.

My thoughts on this matter are split in a couple directions. Part of me harbors doubt that my perceptions are accurate—this is an additional, unneeded phantom on top of my already profound feelings of unsureness. On the other hand, the brunt of my consideration in this matter focuses on a couple of factors that have heavily fed the idea that things are downtrending in activity. Despite the number of people on this server being higher than ever, it seems as if a rapidly dwindling number of people are talking at any given time. The exact numbers here are difficult to assess—I determined that mspa-lit has an average of about 5,000 messages per day, but I don’t know anything about what the average is for other channels, or how that’s morphed over time. Thus—with the exception of daily messages for mspa-lit—I’m forced to rely on my feelings in the matter, and I don’t generally consider that a good metric for much of anything.

Another factor to consider is the people themselves; there’s been a gradual disappearance of certain key members from the server. Nights has been gone for months, and Rune left when Hiveswap was released. I talked with Rune recently, who had joined the server briefly to shill something and left again; they stated that they’ve been happier after leaving the server, a fact that troubles me greatly. When I pressed for more information, they said that the channel organization is an unmitigated mess and that Makin’s methods for handling the server are what has influenced their decision to stay away, as it causes them too much stress.

I can’t really fault them for this of course; their health is important, and far be it from me to force anyone to be here who doesn’t want to be. Even if I plausibly could do that, I wouldn’t—the point is defeated if people are only obligated to stay here, and they don’t truly want to be. However, this leads me to my next thought: perhaps people enjoy it here less, and are going elsewhere to spend their time?

This possibility truly worries me. There’s been talk recently between people, including myself, that we would like to stay here and that we enjoy our time together. However, when we go through these lag periods it makes me feel the opposite is true. Has there been some sort of change in the server that is influencing people to spend less time here? Is it real life obligations getting in the way?

As to the former, the main reason that pops out to me would be the Patreon channels. The server seemed to have too many channels before the Patreon was established, with 13 visible to the public. Now that the Patreon has been around for some time and we have the play-ss13 channel, we now have a grand total of 23. That is entirely too unwieldy and exhausting to look at for many people. Additionally, it’s problematic because the ability of anyone to make channels for what they want ends up withdrawing conversation from the other channels it was already found in. This effect has been pronounced the most in altgen and mspa-lit—altgen topics, usually of shitty memes of some sort, are being held instead in a slew of channels elsewhere. The same is true of mspa-lit—hb’s channel has been converted into a Pokemon theme, which subsequently has kept conversations about it from happening in mspa-lit.

I think this sort of harsh conversational distribution actually leads to a net decrease in conversation. It’s nice to keep certain topics from completely overriding discussion, such as in the case of play-ss13, but it seems to discourage people from talking in either channel as a result. It’s disadvantageous and I’m regretting the proposal for SS13 to have its own channel. On the other hand, Sea Hitler has expressed that SS13 conversation being directed to #gaming would completely overwhelm any other conversation and flood the channel, so it may be that this is untenable as well.

My doubts on all of this are more agonizing than anything else. I’ve tried to remain objective throughout the course of writing this journal, but situations like this are sincerely bothersome. It casts a pall over my faith that I can write all of this in an adequate fashion; am I viewing this place objectively enough to write about it? Can I be trusted to not inject my biases into this document?

My own writing abilities aside, all of this leads me to troubling thoughts about the future of the place, broadly speaking. I’ve mentioned before that I would like to see the HSD persist as long as possible, and of course I’m sure that it will last for quite some time yet (9000 people don’t disappear overnight). I’m simply unsure of how long, or in what manner.

This actually brings me to a discussion we had the other night, where I felt it was necessary to point out that the emphasis of Homestuck on our server is gradually diminishing. We’ve already had channels dedicated to all manner of conversation since the server’s inception, so it’s not entirely inconceivable that we could simply rebrand into a server dedicated to some other topic. I don’t know if that’s advisable at this point, but in the future who can be sure? Makin seems fine with the idea of incorporating new content into our culture all the time, so I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if such a change did occur at some point in the distant future.

Furthermore, what kind of demographic changes will the server go through as time passes? It may be that the cabal of regulars we currently witness get totally recycled as time goes by, and within another year the differences will be quite noticeable. This aspect bothers me less, although is still bitter to process. I greatly enjoy talking to the people that talk here currently, it’s always a sad occasion when a regular departs. On the other hand, gaining newer regulars is a great thing; it keeps the place interesting, if nothing else. Optimally we would keep as many old regulars as possible while still gaining new people.

I don’t know. I’m simply filled with a great deal of fear of the future, my worst fear being of course that this place will suddenly break apart completely. Alternatively, if we are simply forced to go through great change as time goes by, then it’s a different matter. I will still be greatly disappointed in the loss of anyone that currently talks here, but as long as this place still exists and people still talk in it, then I will go forward. I am resolute in this matter: I will not abandon this place as long as there are others who I can share it with.

I sincerely hope that things improve in the future, and that my trepidation is baseless. Nothing more for today.

---

30^th of October 2017

It’s occurred to me that I’ve gone for quite some time without explaining one of the more seminal works that have been introduced to us in mspa-lit. Worm, by an internet author known as Wildbow, is a sprawling, ambitious work concerning superheroes. It was introduced by Makin some months ago, and—due both to the quality of the work and Makin’s intense shilling—it became one of the more popular works we’ve discussed here.

The story itself concerns a young woman named Taylor, who can control all manner of arthropods such as insects, arachnids, etc. Without going into too much detail, the story concerns her rise from being naïve, idealist, seeking to better things to being exposed to the harsher realities of a system that forces people to work according to its whims or be punished. The scope of the work is incredible; in many ways it’s reminiscent of Homestuck, specifically how it begins small and then rapidly balloons into a work encompassing the entire world and more.

This kind of pattern in the literature that attracts us is fairly evident at this point. I had come to the realization some time ago that it was what I really enjoyed, and the more we discuss such works the more obvious it becomes that this is the sort of thing we’re interested in collectively. It should be blindingly obvious based on the strength of our attraction Homestuck and its fanventures already, but it’s also arguable that the fanventures are more attractive to us because they specifically follow the plot devices of Homestuck, rather than just its general literary course.

As far as Worm on our server is concerned, however, it was the source for mspa-lit’s longest name change by far: read-worm was the dominant name of the channel for months, and (as far as I’m aware) has come to be regarded as a default for it. Now the name is the similarly entitled read-glow-worm: Glow Worm being the prologue to what is effectively going to be Worm 2, and is coming out now.

The story of Worm and the other works by Wildbow have injected a large amount of conversational energy and culture into our group, and since Wildbow releases new installments on a regular basis it may very well be that the primary focus of our channel switches from Homestuck centric content to Worm 2 instead²⁵. There is also the chance that Hussie begins writing a new work, in which case I’m confident in saying that we would very swiftly come back to MSPA content.

Of note, since Glow Worm has started there’s been a rather interesting development: appearing for effectively only one sentence, a random character named Mlekk has somehow captured our attention. Their line included roleplay, with them “oozing” into the conversation and leaving. This was just enough for us, it seems, and many of us in mspa-lit changed our names to reflect our solidarity with this unimportant fictional character.

There are at least a dozen people with #CultofMlekk appended to the end of their name; this sort of spontaneous change in atmosphere never ceases to entertain me, and it’s always heartening to see numerous people involved with it at any given time. There are many such examples of this behavior, although whether they’re short-lived or will actually acquire some longevity is never certain. I wonder if there’s some sort of definite quality that can help to determine the fate of these interactions.

Nothing more for today.

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31^st of October 2017

Today was rather nice on the server. I got home at around 6 PM EST, and at first there was a lag in activity that fed my fear greatly, and I became somewhat worried. However, I went and talked in #general for a while and refamiliarized myself with the channel a little bit. Some of the regulars were around, notably fash, Neth (aka “it’s ya boy”), sea hitler, Nujaka Knight, and Erieolae. I spoke with them for a while about things seemingly at random, and rather than worry about the relative level of activity I simply let things progress as they willed.

It was surprisingly enjoyable to not care about the progression of the conversation. I was able to take in the relative personalities of the people involved a little bit more; Nujaka is extremely concerned with shitposting in gen, to the point that they forcibly tell people to move it elsewhere. I’m sort of concerned about this, in that it may hinder discussion if they’re too domineering, but it is a rule that shitposting absolutely does not belong in #general. I guess that’s just how it goes. Neth is also an mspa-lit regular, one who has shared my concern of declining activity in the past. They seem to accept it more than I do, although I’m not sure if this is due to previous experience or lack thereof. They seem fairly calm and collected whenever I talk to them, although the more nuanced details of their nature are a mystery to me.

Speaking of mspa-lit regulars, there’s a rather interesting character I’ve yet to speak about. Cookiefonster used to have more presence on the server some time ago, expressing that he left because he was “annoyed that this server was basically nothing but arguments about dumb things”. Without fail I could find him talking on the CANMT server, however. After some months of this, eventually I received a message from him asking to see this journal. After providing the document, he started talking in mspa-lit again. I’m not sure what inspired his request, but he said he feels like he’s missed out on a wealth of history here and wanted to come back.

As a side note, I’m intensely pleased that my document was the catalyst for this. Inspiring interest in this place has become a rather significant goal of mine in writing this (if not a realistic one). That cookie felt the urge to come back after reading it is rather heartening. I wonder if this document will accomplish such again in the future.

More immediately important, however, cookiefonster came on to discuss some events concerning the nature of internet post history; apparently cookie has been the subject of some intense stalking behavior in the past, with someone going through his post history to an insane degree. This sort of behavior is referred to as “gremlining”, and is more formally defined amongst ourselves as “searching through someone’s posting history with the intent of discovering sensitive or pertinent information”. Toast and WHATISLOSTINTHEMINES both began participating in this conversation as well; it eventually snowballed into a fairly robust conversation that has managed to persist all night, although of course what we’re discussing now is nothing like what the conversation began as.

The conversational shifts have been wild and entertaining: we began of course with the talk of gremlins, but then it transitioned somehow into Youtube Poop history, school, our careers, the Patreon, and so on. The breadth and width of our discussions always entertains me; it’s fascinating how we can switch from serious topics into something extremely lighthearted and decidedly stupid, but then transition just as smoothly back into something serious or personal. It’s actually quite helpful in self-reflection, to talk about our problems and real concerns with each other.

This is a return to the activity that I prize so much in this channel, and is highlighting just how crazy and paranoid my fears of dropping activity are. I feel real sorrow over the fact that I’ve brought this topic up so frequently lately, to the point that it’s become obviously noticeable to anyone I’ve spoken with. I need to have more patience and understanding with people; there is indication that people still care to talk here and will for some time, but even if they don’t I mustn’t grow afraid. The eventual outcome of people leaving or not speaking anymore is why I’m bothering to keep this journal in the first place; it’s the nature of all internet communities to fade away at some point.

That having been said, today is not that day and it doesn’t appear that it will be that day for some time. I will do my best to end my current obsession by the end of this conversation, starting by saying one more time that I sincerely hope this place will not falter anytime soon. I care deeply for everyone here and the place itself, perhaps too much, but I cannot alleviate that feeling (at least not on my own). When the time comes that it does in fact fade away I will absolutely be distraught, but I’ll have this document with me when it’s time to go. As I’ve said, perhaps there will be others who are reluctant to move on as well, and we can remain together as a more tightly knit core? That outcome would certainly be desirable. While I still harbor some nervousness for the future, this idea fills me with some hope.

I wonder what others have to say about this topic honestly. I’ve asked once before publicly and to do so again would probably appear desperate, so I don’t believe I will; nonetheless, I’m interested to hear what others think about this idea of a more reliable cabal of regulars remaining, once all else has fallen away. Perhaps this would be a good idea for a story to write someday.

I really appreciate the presence of these people, and getting the opportunity to speak with them so often. Tripheus, Minish, cookiefonster, Toast, MrNostalgic, CanisLupusAqua, akaTrickster, Shoktherapy, Ngame, tori, wheals, Sardonyx, S, Putnam, Cait, Null, Archiewhite, Solarsail, phantos, sea hitler, and octacle (perhaps a couple more I missed) were all prominent in tonight’s conversations at one point or another. This is hardly an exhaustive list of the people who regularly speak in mspa-lit; it’s simply a small slice of the people involved, those who were present for this set of conversations in particular. Nonetheless, I appreciate them all; I am genuinely thankful that I’ve had the opportunity to get to know these people and talk with them on a regular basis for the past year.

Barring special circumstances, I won’t be talking about this topic any further in this journal. I’ve taken up an egregious amount of space talking about my fears; it’s not the purpose of this journal and I’m starting to worry that harping on this topic will drive people away. It’s time to return to at least a semblance of objectivity, if possible.

That having all been said, I’ll close this entry by saying: thank you guys. I don’t know how many of you will get to see this, but you mean a lot to me—even if I didn’t list your name, the fact that you’re reading this means I appreciate you. Here’s to another year, and hopefully many more after it. Nothing more for today.

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1^st of November 2017

Not much of note today. The only event that stands out was altgen getting a little unruly; this should not be surprising, but it’s important to remember that for some time they’ve been experiencing a significant decrease in utter shittiness, so this sort of outburst is—at the moment—somewhat uncharacteristic.

I didn’t get to witness this disturbance myself and I’m still not privy to what exactly the offending remarks or content were, but Tori described it as thus: “Altgen had gone into really bad topics to the point where I needed to tell them to drop it entirely three times, so on the fourth instead of saying if you keep it up I'm banning, I just third impact'd the channel for a little” (third impact being a direct reference to Neon Genesis Evangelion and yet another word for freezing the channel completely).

In light of the fact that altgen had been trying to improve their reputation over the last month or two, this development is interesting to me. I wonder what exactly catalyzed this extreme and sudden shift to their more popularly understood roots? I asked Tori if this behavior has been increasing in frequency or intensity lately, although she said it’s not very common. I wonder if there are newcomers that have upset the balance that was struck in the channel, or if people have gotten bored and are starting to lash out because of it.

Part of me also wonders if I’m partially to blame for this. On many occasions lately when I’ve been bored, I’ll go to altgen and explicitly shitpost to my heart’s content, and encourage others to do so as well. This is less in keeping with the newfound altgen crew, who have been emphasizing the community aspect more than the unmitigated fun side. It may be that my encouragement to shitpost wildly has been taken up by some—in short, it’s entirely likely that I’m being a bad role model.

This requires some more in depth examination and consideration. I may need to significantly tone down exactly how much I abuse my moderator position while in altgen. I already know that abusing the text to speech program is extremely bothersome to some people, so I’ve deliberately avoided it for some time now. I’m sure there are other such nuances to my behavior that may be disruptive (even if such disruption or instability are an inherent part of the place) and interfere with the delicate ecosystem.

More to consider for another time I guess. Nothing more for today.

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2^nd of November 2017

A project I’ve neglected to mention is a rather ambitious undertaking detailed by Sora. They’ve been talking about going through Homestuck in its entirety and making comments on each page that would detail the exact time it went up, commentary that Andrew Hussie has made in his physical print books, and other details. The project is ambitious not only because of the considerable amount of commentary that exists, but also because a lot of that information is so difficult to find in the first place—there is no telling exactly how much Hussie has said about the various details of the comic as the years have gone by. With eight years of history so far, the amount of comments on a given panel or facet of the story may range from none to hundreds, or even thousands.

Organizing this activity as it is now would be a monumental undertaking, to be sure. Even more complicated is the fact that additional content is almost assured to be released in the future; it was announced some weeks ago that the entertainment company Viz Media will be releasing volumes of the entirety of Homestuck, complete with new commentary²⁶ from Andrew Hussie on the development or details of the comic. This opens up an interesting line of thought that I’ll expound upon in a second; to finish this current thread, the project Sora is proposing—while certainly worthwhile—is unwieldy to me, principally because you would not only be searching for as much old information as possible, but as new information is created it must be catalogued as well. If I had more time I would absolutely be interested in engaging in this project, but as it is I’m not sure it’s even feasible to pursue. I’ll have to think about it for a while; I would be eager to see what Sora and others may turn up.

On a significant tangent, Viz Media releasing these volumes is an interesting development on its own; Homestuck’s nature as an online work, and especially its specific design as a webcomic with long sprawls of text and incorporation of different types of media, is not exactly conducive to a print book. Hussie already has three print volumes that have been available for years (themselves an immense source of commentary for various parts of Homestuck).

Viz will be remaking these volumes and then continuing, finishing the rest of the webcomic now that it’s effectively over, although it now begs a different question. The comic is essentially 100% complete, barring the presence of an epilogue. This final piece of the comic was promised to us long ago, in a now deleted newspost by Hussie himself. With the deletion of that post and the extraordinarily long period of time with no communication from him at all, as well as the presence of Hiveswap and untold numbers of other factors, we have no idea if the epilogue is still forthcoming or if it’s been abandoned. The Viz Media publications in the future will have to put that to rest: assuming the volumes sell well enough, they’ll be running through to the very end of the comic. At that point, an important question will have to be answered: will we receive the very end of the comic or will it be left as is forever?

The ramifications of this possibility are a lot to consider. Homestuck’s predecessor, Problem Sleuth, did receive an epilogue. To my understanding, Problem Sleuth’s end was initially not well received until Hussie developed an epilogue for it that effectively tied things together and made it more satisfying²⁷. This is a tantalizing element of historicity for us, given that the end of Homestuck has been received so poorly. There is real hope that Hussie will be able to fill the gaps and heal our collective soul, so to speak. The Homestuck fandom in its entirety marches on, and though the subject has been hashed to death in the past it may not rest fully until the ending is properly consummate.

Nothing more for today.

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3^rd of November 2017

Today was defined largely by a controversy in altgen that, for a time, appeared it might escalate into a full out war. The progression from start to finish was actually quite interesting; I was fully present for this issue so I feel at liberty to speak more conclusively about its nature than previous engagements.

The incident in its entirety didn’t even last for very long; from what I recall the ordeal lasted only half an hour at most. However, that half hour was turbulent enough to warrant extreme concern at one point or another. It officially began at 1:50 PM EST, when Tori asked in modchat whether the word “food” in altgen’s channel description could be changed to “furries”, a change that would make it seem that the channel is (jokingly) endorsing discussion of furry-related topics.

Tori’s request was, indeed, a joke—she explained that “furries moved into altgen weeks ago”, taking up residence and speaking on the topic frequently. She joked further that they had started a “communist furry nation in altgen”, at which point Makin chimed in saying that he would demod Tori if altgen became a furry haven. This harsh response naturally garnered the attention of other mods, especially Ifnar, who began launching a series of scathing, rhetorical questions in retaliation.

Things only began to escalate from there. Makin demanded that furries trying to override discussion be banned, which prompted even more of a response from us. The disproportionately targeted and unfair treatment of this type of people was alarming to us, and there was great confusion stemmed from the fact that Makin hadn’t clarified his stance at all (he would mete out his decisions in piecemeal and typically fail to elaborate further, a pattern that draws much ire in situations like this one). Despite all this, one of us went to altgen and broke the news.

Predictably, it was not received well. The confusion for them was even greater than it was for us, and mods floundered for a way to explain why this decision was going through. Members of altgen present at the time demanded to know what the reasoning for the rule was, how it would be implemented, what fell under the definition, etc. Unfortunately, almost none of us had those answers. I made a promise to go figure out conclusively what was happening so I could report back to altgen on the matter.

Unfortunately, my requests for more information were summarily ignored, and I began coming up with ways to improvise what should be said. I was getting ready to post the new and impromptu rule, but Makin came in to altgen and started joking around extensively with the local inhabitants. Nothing about the conversation resembled anything of even middling sanity, until finally people became fed up with the lack of cohesive information and demanded answers.

To this, Makin stated as plainly as possible that “furry discussion itself is not banned”, only that he wanted the channel to avoid becoming run by furries or dedicated to them. Without giving the appearance of anti-furry sentimentality, I more or less agree with this viewpoint. I feel as if this is an area of internet culture that must be witnessed thoroughly to be understood, and my experiences with dedicated furry communities have been rather mixed in terms of quality.

For those who may be unaware, “furry” is a loose term used to describe a subculture that is dedicated to the appreciation and artistic representation of anthropomorphic animals. The term has been around since about 1980, with drastically increased usage since the internet became publicly available in the 90’s. Today, furries congregate in a variety of different websites and even in real life at conventions dedicated to the topic. They end up catching a lot of attention and subsequent flak because of their passion for animals, which for some extends even into the realm of sexuality. Naturally, this sort of behavior gives rise to at least some level of persecution from people who view furries as an aberration.

The reason I’ve chosen to elucidate on this topic at all is because there is a higher than average proportion of furries within the Homestuck fandom, for reasons that are probably not worth exploring in detail here. As such, this new rule was immediately met with a considerable degree of hostility and disbelief; furries themselves and those who are sympathetic or otherwise supportive of them were, in a word, outraged. The confusion surrounding the actual nature of this new rule didn’t help either, where people were unsure of the exact extent of the punishment, what officially crossed the line of acceptability, and so on.

After some time of stoking the flames of discourse with his signature aplomb, Makin finally clarified in a succinct and serious enough fashion what was going on: furries themselves would not be banned, but he strongly discouraged the congregation of them, especially the formation of any sort of majority group. As I mentioned earlier, I’m more or less in agreeance with this: due to the passion and dedication furries tend to invest in this topic, they can become overwhelming and effectively dismantle whatever is currently going on if there are too many of them, or if they feel they can get away with it.

Personally I’m kind of ambivalent on this exact matter, but Makin feels it’s best to avoid letting that sort of dynamic shift occur in the first place, and I’m not one to disagree. I worry how this may feel for the furry members of our community, because assuredly many of them probably deal with issues on that front already. It feels uncomfortable and unethical to shift the blame on them for something innocuous, which I’m sure would lend even more to that generalized sense of persecution. My earnest hope is that this arrangement will not lead to any hurt feelings or animosity.

I wonder if it’s wise to limit the discussion on this anyhow. I’ve mentioned before that I feel as if the creation of too many channels is a bad thing, in that it fractures conversations and forces them to go elsewhere—as a result, the overall amount of discussion happening decreases. On the other end of the spectrum, however, having too much conversation in one place with no set categorization can lead to people being left out or otherwise unable to say what they want to. There’s a delicate balance to be struck with what kinds of conversation should be allowed, and where.

On the other hand, there are some conversations that definitely do not belong anywhere here. I received a report about someone saying some fairly disturbing things in #hiveswap, who’s been doing it for a while now. None of the people involved will be named for reasons of privacy, but the long and short of it was that the content of the messages dealt with pedophilia.

This server had a fairly unpleasant run in with this sort of content a number of months ago. I’ve mentioned in brief that we were suffering from a long series of raids involving child pornography, which Ngame and I collaborated on to get rid of thoroughly. For days, related accounts would join and spam these images in #general, leading to some rather stark changes in policy. At first, we decided to keep an extremely vigilant watch for any accounts that were suspicious. This proved to be an untenable method for dealing with the problem, so eventually we just restricted the ability to post images anywhere on the server. Thankfully the problem did stop, but all of us involved were fairly upset by the experience.

In light of this, it’s easier to understand why we’re exceptionally harsh towards people who display tasteless and even genuine support of this kind of material. The offending user in this scenario, thankfully, did not actually post anything that would merit a ban, but they were saying things about underaged characters that left people extremely concerned. Sometimes people joke about this, so it’s not prudent to completely ban them without warning; I ended up talking to this person in an effort to get them to stop.

When the subject is this kind of magnitude of seriousness, I give no quarter in dealing with the people involved: I made it absolutely, unremittingly clear that any further behavior of this sort would be punished swiftly and severely. I think the message got through—the offending user said nothing apart from a very serious apology and we moved on. There is hope that this person was simply misguidedly joking, or that they understand the severity of their actions.

I don’t really enjoy punishing people. I must do it when it’s deserved, of course, but it casts a pall over the place when someone has deliberately acted in such a way that they require being dealt with. It’s a much more rewarding experience to talk with them and try to help them understand why they need to stop or how to improve; a case that immediately comes to mind is Sky2o, whose improvement continues to be nothing short of miraculous. I always take the fondest pleasure in people who are able to recognize that they must improve themselves or their behavior, and then manage to do it!

Hopefully the future brings positive news in the case of this person I talked to today. Nothing more for this entry.

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4^th of November 2017

I was inspired to write about a couple of things today completely by chance. Nothing of great importance happened, so I’ll take the time to explain these small topics instead.

First is the remarkable relationship between Makin and MrCheeze. For clarity’s sake, when I say it’s “remarkable” I mean that it’s remarkable just how bizarre²⁸ it is. MrCheeze professes nothing less than utter animosity for Makin, while Makin appears to do everything in his power to increase that animosity. Their interactions are nothing short of flabbergasting sometimes: Makin attempting to verbally poke at MrCheeze in both obvious and subtle ways, MrCheeze responding more and more scathingly as the conversation goes on. At times the animosity is exceptionally clear and pointed, but at others it feels as if the two are performing some sort of elaborate ritual for courtship. It’s mesmerizing to watch, and can sometimes whip up the entire conversation into a frenzy.

I have no idea how to begin assessing this; I kind of want to ask MrCheeze how they found this place, and why they continue to put up with Makin if they detest him so much. Indeed, I’ve literally asked why MrCheeze stays here, since to all appearances it seems as if they hate the HSD and especially Makin. The only response I got was a noncommittal “I don’t know”, and I didn’t pursue the topic any further. I sometimes wonder if they thrive on the energy, negative though it may be. Regardless of why, their interactions are commonly recognized almost to the point of fame; no shortage of jokes surrounds the “black romance” of Makin and MrCheeze. I’m curious to see if any real breaking point exists, or if they’re content to do this forever.²⁹

Another facet I’d like to touch on is the word “misguided”, which popped up in conversation a couple times today. This word is draped in esoteric circumstances here: back in February when Linkslittlefriend was still a mod and shortly after my own modding, he and I started having a series of semantic discussions that centered around the use of the word “misguided”. He felt I was using it in a way that was inappropriate and derogatory, an assessment that literally no one else participating in the conversation agreed with. In fact, a more in depth description of him might help here.

Linkslittlefriend (LLF) is of some infamy here. He's perfectly nice, he just has extremely odd opinions about a lot of things. He fails to see why we think his opinions are weird and subsequently thinks all of OUR opinions are weird, but he's easily outnumbered in every case. In fact, LLF used to be a mod here, as the pseudo for the #homestuck and #hiveswap channels (a job Toast now bears) and still is a moderator for the subreddit. He was demodded on HSD because of some weird tendencies to dispute every little decision the rest of the mod team made, which slowed progress and problem solving down to a crawl in a lot of cases. LLF will relentlessly engage in semantic arguments, much to the displeasure of almost everyone else involved; if you demonstrate effectively that his viewpoint on a given matter is wrong, he will find another angle to try and indicate that, despite your thorough dismantlement of his case, he is still correct. It's an extremely maddening tactic so most people just tend to avoid discussing things with him and prefer to make fun of him instead. He takes this in good stride, and I think in a way he's fine with his status. Despite the frustration of talking with him, LLF means well and we don't regret his presence. At least not that often.

The disagreement over “misguided” followed a very recognizable pattern: LLF frequently argued with people over semantics and the definitions of words. Even when he had been thoroughly proven wrong, he would doggedly pursue the topic. There was no other word for it but “ruthless”—his determination was legendary, or it would have been if it wasn’t singularly exhausting to deal with in these cases. As it is, the behavior has earned him a spot in our history; “misguided” has become a profound meme for us, often incorporating a buildup and then the word itself employed with style. It is a testament to LLF’s stubbornness—it is his apotheosis.

There are a ton of other instances like this: seemingly small, unimportant developments that we—for one reason or another—inexplicably get attached to and turn into in-jokes. It’s a rather significant component of the tapestry that makes up our community. Easily half, if not more, of our content is derived from our own interactions with each other. It’s a special kind of arrangement that leads to this, and the chemistry that makes this possible is a significant part of why I like it so much in the HSD.

As far as my enjoyment here is concerned, I’m pleased as punch to say that this last week has been definitively more active than the one before it. At this point I’ve accepted what the others were saying, in that my worries were rather unfounded; less than a matter of declining interest, the timing of events in everyone’s real lives may conspire to take up the time of all involved. Especially during this part of the year, it’ll be more noticeable with the advent of midterms or especially final exams for many of the users. It’s just the natural course of things: real life takes precedence over whatever may happen here.

As it is, when everyone is on and talking, the energy is palpable. Or perhaps even when there is less energy involved, it’s simply enjoyable to be speaking with others that are interested in the same topic as you. I recognize that these statements are simplistic in nature, but their core is important. Sometimes I think that the fundamental ideas of why I or anyone else might enjoy this place can be lost, and that they bear repeating—especially in light of those occasions where we seem to spend an entire week arguing about the same topic nonstop, and by the end everyone is thoroughly pissed off or upset. Sometimes it’s easy to forget why we all enjoy being here, but in the end I feel like we persevere well enough.

Of course, there are people who have physically left, which is its own category of troubling. Nights, for instance: I was talking to him on his own server earlier today, as Yaz had pinged me because he wanted to ask a question. After catching up for a bit I asked exactly why he had left the server, to which he said simply that he would like to come back eventually. He did say that the “HSD is stinky” though.

There is also a striking selection of people who find the Patreon to be distasteful at best. The Patreon was a fun concept at first, but quickly ballooned into something that irks people, and still does. It may be time to bring it down, especially because the primary goal of advertisement on MSPA is no longer possible. Makin uses the funds to pay for advertisement on MSPFA, a TF2 server and the SS13 server, but I would be surprised if those things account for the entirety of the funds. I wonder if he has any actual plans in mind for the aggregate of funds generated; the plan to hold him accountable through publishing the funds hasn’t even gone into effect at all, so it’s impossible to say whether he is or isn’t being above the table with it all. Part of me is nervous that any request for updates from him will be met negatively, which would open up a series of questions and considerations that I do not look forward to. I’ll have to bring this up in the modchat very soon, before malcontents have a chance to seize upon the mysterious funds as an argument for non-transparency.

A discussion was had recently about Makin’s nature on this server. This is far from the first time the topic has been breached, but Makin commented on it himself today. I usually find myself in the position of defending Makin when these conversations occur, because I generally prefer to believe in the goodness of everybody involved. I made the usual comments about Makin only joking or turning it into a ruse when he does the more controversial things he’s prone to. At some point Makin reviewed this and mentioned that he does these things specifically to foster that image of unpredictability. I’ve also commented on that particular aspect of his behavior at length, but at times I have to wonder what it means about him that he specifically goes for the action that he thinks people will expect the least.

I think about it sometimes, but then so too I believe I overthink it sometimes. Both naturally and then while writing this journal I make myself prey to the habit of overly considering things to the point of meaninglessness. Perhaps it would be best to let this topic be, at least until something more drastic or important happens worthy of comment. My droning on the topic with no substance will not provide any meaningful conclusion. It may also prove to be that I want more control over the fate of things here than I can realistically be afforded; I desire stability, but it is not always possible or even desirable for things to be stable. I am concerned that, if allowed to grow out of control, that behavior may eventually destroy the group we have, but perhaps I just worry too much.

The dichotomy is troubling. As I said, I’m going to cease talking about this until I have something more substantive to comment on. Even now I remember the promise I made to return to a more objective analysis of what’s happening, rather than to continue processing things in such an emotionally vulnerable fashion.

I have a lot of thinking to do. Nothing more for today.

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5^th of November 2017

We have reached that time once more, where Makin and subsequent others have asked how this journal is progressing. I’m always at a loss when they do this; it’s pleasing to know others look forward to my writing and the information I have to impart, but it also feels like an additional burden of expectation. Nonetheless, I don’t begrudge them for this—it’s more amusing than anything else. However, I want to stress that I only include such events that I deem are important or significant enough. As I said to Makin earlier, would he prefer slower updates of 50 pages containing more interesting notes or rapid pace updates with nothing but crap in them?

This topic actually segued into another, which led to some rather interesting considerations. For some time now the scope of this journal has been slowly expanding: it began and still largely is an examination of the culture of the HSD in particular. I think it’s a good size for such observation, where there’s enough people that it’s always active but it’s not unwieldy or overly complicated (although it certainly seems that way at times). However, my time spent exploring the communities that are closely related to our own has been revealing. I mention occasionally the “tapestry” that makes up our collective culture, and the more I learn about these other facets of the Homestuck fandom, the more I realize how richly diverse and interconnected that tapestry really is. Some of these areas are less interconnected than others, but they all have common points of reference and origin.

In short, the HSD does not exist in a vacuum. It has intimate connections with other facets of the fandom, most obvious being the subreddit. It also provides access to CANMT and LOFAM, among other things. In light of all this, I’m struggling to ascertain whether I want to keep this journal HSD-centric or if I want to make that leap and dedicate it to an exploration of the Homestuck fandom in its entirety.

I feel as if the former would be by far the more accurate description of what I record here—even if I did deliberately say “I will examine the entirety of the fandom now”, my exposure to it is principally through here. In short, nothing would really change all that much. However, there are details I’m curious about that fall outside of the scope of the HSD itself. Would it be a betrayal of my intended goal here to pursue those pearls of knowledge, or would it ultimately not matter?

I find myself leaning more towards the latter. There’s nothing effectively stopping me from writing about whatever I happen to feel like. While the journal itself began—and ultimately will remain—as an exploration of the HSD in particular, as I said the culture of this place is finely intermeshed with many other distinct parts of the fandom. As such, it can only ever be helpful to describe something that’s even tangentially related.

One example of material I could search out involves the Music Team. It was suggested that I could go and seek interviews with members of the Music Team proper—perhaps starting with Tensei—and write on their history as well. The members of the Music Team are purportedly close with each other, at least to a limited degree, and it would be interesting to see why and how exactly they developed their camaraderie.

On the other end is the art team. Notice that Music Team is capitalized and art team is not; this is because, unlike the Music Team, the art team has not developed any sort of cohesive group mentality, and contributing artists tend to maintain some distance from others. The dichotomy between these two groups is fascinating, and I think it’d be worthwhile to figure out what exact circumstances conspired to lead to these outcomes.

This all having been said, I guess that’s my next project. There’s no telling when I’ll be able to begin, or even how I’ll go about it, but I’m excited to see if I can gain any useful information. The first step is of course to determine the best method of contact with various individuals, and I can ask around on the HSD for ways to contact certain members of the Music Team, or perhaps artists.

Important to note also is a rather cryptic set of warnings from Makin. He’s stated, in an unrelenting yet ambiguous fashion, that there are certain people I should avoid trying to talk to for reasons of personal safety. These kinds of statements are troubling, although they appear genuine and I greatly appreciate his attempts to protect me. However, they are also tantalizing; they whisper of a great secret laying underneath the surface, and I’m beyond curious as to what may be going on to promote such dire warnings. Makin has stated that he himself will never admit to what’s going on himself, and knowing him I have no doubt that he’s telling the truth in this matter. Thus, my only course of action is to forge ahead and try to figure out what the fuck he’s talking about on my own.

I am somewhat concerned as to what he could be talking about, because if the implications are as serious as he claims then I might not be at liberty to discuss them at all even if I do find out what he means. My intent with this document is not to ruin lives or careers, so if I find something that potentially threatens another person I’m going to have to omit it as I usually do. While I’m concerned with the ideal of journalistic integrity, I’m not exactly claiming to be Woodward & Bernstein.

A minor note of the discussion concerned the organization of this journal itself. Makin took time to explain to me the difference between an appendix and an annex today, the latter of which I had never heard of in a literary context before. While interesting, I failed to see the point of his bringing it up: the impression I got was that for matters of organization, having annexed literature is useful because it provides unfettered access to original documents that you didn’t write yourself. However, I’m already doing this: any and all documents that I am provided with I store along with the journal itself. The only potential way to improve access would be to create an appendix with the information directly attached to this document, at the end. I’m not sure if this would be altogether necessary or even desirable, but I’m going to play around with the organization a bit to see if the access to this ancillary information can be improved at all.

At any rate, as I said the way forward seems clear. It is time to seek more information in general, and if it’s to be found then it may go here in the future. I’m excited to see what I may uncover, and if it’s particularly interesting then maybe it’ll be preserved here instead of lost in the future. I’m beginning to more fully appreciate what I’m doing here, and I hope that my efforts will not go wasted. It would be a tremendous shame for all of the culture here to fall away in the future, even after my and others’ attempts to preserve it. Hopefully we can safeguard against that outcome.

Nothing more for today.

---

6^th of November 2017

I’ve been somewhat reflective today over something that Toast said to me in our discussion yesterday, about the nature of this journal. He described it as my effort to “describe the positive aspects of our community, and what makes it worthwhile to be part of”. My initial response to this was to deny it: this journal is, or at least was, simply an effort to document all events here, positive or not. However, there’s no denying that I take painstaking effort to describe all of the things I find valuable here. I guess I try my best to document all the bad occurrences as well, but the question remains of whether my focus is biased or not. And if it is biased, is it automatically a negative influence on this work?

As I’ve stated many times before, there’s a clear satisfaction and enjoyment I get out of being on the HSD and interacting with so many people. I’ve also detailed my involvement in previous communities, and how I dealt with them. At this point it seems fairly apparent that what Toast says has some merit. My narrative has shifted from a more objective account to one in favor of this community, a transition that I cannot genuinely lament.

The nature of Homestuck itself is in deep alignment with the story that has presented itself in the form of the HSD; both concern the activities of people who associate with each other online. While this is obviously an enormous simplification, the general principle still applies. I would be lying through my teeth if I said this parallel had thus far escaped me; I think about it all the time, in fact. It’s a fairly interesting bridge that has appeared between the thing we’ve all bonded over and ourselves. I’m sure to others in the community this connection is blindingly obvious and not even worthy of note, but I find myself entertained by the thought that we’ve fallen into the same sort of routine as the original comic.

When I get in these contemplative moods, I can’t help but wonder how exactly the community in its entirety will end up. I’ve gone on this line of thought at length before though, so I’ll spare the musings for now. There are more immediately relevant things to consider anyway.

Of note, today Cookiefonster gave out the first version of his own journal that he’s started working on, which may be found in appendix B under “Internet Communities and Homestuck: A Retrospective”. I don’t want to appear presumptuous, but he began this effort shortly after reading my own journal (he might have mentioned a direct link between those things but I can’t remember for sure at this point). Whether the connection exists or not, it’s quite exciting to see more people join in on this documentative effort; with every person who decides to record their observations, the greater the chance that pieces of this place will survive indefinitely. My ultimate concern is with longevity, and since the chances we’ll physically persist indefinitely are slim to none the next best option is to ensure the survival of our culture through writing. With every person who writes their own thoughts down, the more we can be understood once time has passed and we’re no longer around to convey the information ourselves.

Between this, wheals’ addition and Cait’s upcoming journal³⁰, it seems that there is an increasing number of points of reference to work off of. I’m very pleased by this development, and I earnestly hope that more people decide it’s worth their time to speak their piece. Perhaps if enough people join in on this, I can collect the information and develop a further repository for information on the topic besides my own document.

All of this aside, another thing to note for today is the birthday of a person we know as Shadok. An artist, he has been around in the community for some time, although is not seen speaking in the HSD very commonly, if at all. He’s recognized for his contributions to the album art of several projects across CANMT, and even some for LOFAM. His most infamous work is the development of animation for what was originally an album by Toby Fox, entitled The Baby is You.

The Baby is You, often shortened to TBIY, is itself famous in the community because of its incredibly high meme density and bizarre, quasi-offensive subject material. It’s chock full of references that are still employed to this day, and at the time of its release caused quite a fuss on the forums. After some time of people quoting it nonstop and being a collective nuisance, all discussion of the album was banned from the forums.

The album itself was released in 2010, but all of the forum drama happened in 2015 or so. A while later, on April 13th of this year, Shadok released his animation for the piece. It became hugely popular, serving well as an accompaniment to the original audio. Shadok has a variety of other additions to the fandom, some of which have become popular in their own right. Most recently is an animation concerning one of the main characters from Hiveswap, a silly video known as Jude Harley Bizarrely, which even drew positive comment from James Roach. I think it’s safe to say that many look forward to what Shadok may make in the future.

An issue we came up against recently involves the use of mspa-lit to shill Makin’s preferred works of literature. This has almost always been its intended use, and in order to do this he utilizes the channel description. This is unfortunate because the channel description has a limit of 1000 characters, and it’s impossible for him to effectively shill all of the works he’s interested in. Finally, today he decided that it was time to do something that would mitigate this problem. To this end, Makin designed a graphic that effectively lists all of the works he’s interested in. This way, he can simply update the graphic in the future instead of omitting any of the things he wants people to read. This also opens up space for additional information in the channel description, as up until now it had all been used for shilling purposes. Who knows what he may decide to put there in the future now that the space has opened up?

This also provides an interesting look into the history what this channel has been dedicated to. Some of the works included have definitively not been the focus of the channel, such as a work called Dream Drive (which Makin claims is the most underrated story he’s ever seen). Among the works that we have been dedicated to are of course Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Worm, The Northern Caves, and its current dedicated shill “Worth the Candle”. I’ve included this graphic in the supplementary information, and alongside the rest of the information I have I’m figuring out how it could be transferred into this document for reasons of accessibility.

Some far more upsetting news today: Tori has officially declared that she no longer wants to be the pseudomod for altgen. I was initially confused by this, as it feels pretty out of place for what I’ve come to associate her with. However, she had this to say about it when I asked:

it's a massive and painful chore to have to check altgen these days, it was pretty bearable before server ads and the like where altgen got really really huge. and with that there's just a lot more than I'm capable of moderating. a lot of the time i dont really feel like i have time to myself cause if i so much as play starbound all day instead of playign staround while checking every five seconds, zoey has to steam message me because theyre starting a communist revoltion or there's been 20 neo alts banned

Clearly there is more to altgen’s latent development than I or anyone else gave it credit for. In fairness this isn’t altogether unexpected; I mentioned back when initially describing her that Tori seems to be haunted by her job in altgen, even if it seems that she is okay with it most of the time. The increased server load appears to have finally proven too much is all.

And really, when all is considered who could blame her? Altgen, even in its more “positive” states, is a lot to handle. It’s probably the most active channel on the HSD, and even if it weren’t it would still be an enormous responsibility to handle exact types of conversation that go on in there. As Tori said, with the server ads the activity of the channel has only seemed to go up, an impressive feat for a place that is already frenetic beyond reckoning.

No, as it is I don’t think anyone could really begrudge her for not wanting to put up with it, even under more normal circumstances. However, it’s to be noted that Tori has gone through these states before, where she wishes to abandon her post and be on her own for a bit. With this in mind, Makin has made a bargain: he will not demod Tori right now, but if she feels the same way in a week that she does today then she’ll be demodded. This seems like a fair enough proposition, and in the interim I don’t think she’ll be expected to deal with altgen in any serious capacity right now. Perhaps a short respite will help her to feel better, and she’ll reconsider.

In the event that she does not change her mind, however, it is important to use this week to figure out what we want to do. We have our janitors, but leaving altgen without a pseudomod is absolutely unconscionable. As such, our options are these: find a new pseudomod from the general populace, shift a current pseudomod into a different position, and promote one or both of the altgen janitors we currently have.

The first case will almost certainly not happen; I would sooner expect Makin to delete the channel entirely than accept anyone currently using it as a new pseudomod (and indeed, Makin has threatened—perhaps jokingly, perhaps not—to delete altgen completely if Tori does leave, which he does not think will happen). The second is more feasible; Anervaria has already stated willingness to do this, as art-music has calmed down substantially from what it used to be in months past. They no longer need two pseudomods, so it would make sense to transfer one from there to altgen. However, that option is difficult because Anervaria doesn’t really talk much in altgen. I imagine she would start doing so more often if she were to be stationed there, but the question of recognizability is important.

On that note, the last option available—to mod one of the janitors—seems to be an obvious solution. TS and Malice have both demonstrated thorough usefulness with handling altgen; both are fairly active in their duties, arguably more than Tori was (one of the motivating factors in her decision to tender her resignation). There are some differences in the activity of both: TS is extremely vigilant and has been informative when dealing with NEO alts or the like, but does not talk as much. Malice on the other hand does talk often and is extremely recognizable for most people on altgen, but she is decidedly less serious at any given time.

Perhaps the latter quality is the most significant. Altgen’s very nature forbids seriousness, and it may be worthwhile to have a mod that’s not strictly interested in viewing themselves with any kind of practical weight. Toast also brought up the recognizability factor, which Malice definitively has. At the same time, Sea Hitler has brought up the fact that people listen to TS, and that her words have weight behind them.

Honestly, the decision is a tough one. I’d personally opt to have both of them become mods; Toast agrees somewhat, saying “this is a time to experiment”. Whatever we decide, altgen is clearly not doing well right now. We must do something to improve how we’re handling it or we may experience some real difficulties in the future. I don’t particularly look forward to crashing a party, but altgen can’t be allowed to destabilize other elements of the server, and hopefully whatever happens we can find a way to bring it under more control.

The new mod conjecture is assuming that Tori does decide to leave, of course. It’s possible she won’t want to once the week has passed, in which case the idea of what to do is less clear. With new mods would come swift change, but if Tori returns then maybe things will go back to the way they were. However, her despondency has alerted us all to the reality that something is amiss in the channel. I have a feeling that, even if she should return, we will attempt to do something to make the channel less unwieldy.

None of us expect her to stay against her will and be miserable; it’s not worth it if we have to sacrifice our happiness to do our jobs. I think I can safely say that I speak for the rest of us when I say I hope that, whatever Tori does decide, she can be happier that way. Nothing more for today.

---

7^th of November 2017

I wanted to consider something that happened yesterday for a bit before I described it here. With the journal update forthcoming yesterday, naturally there was a lot of discussion about the history of the place and how it’s looked in the past, or how it may look in the future. At some point, MrCheeze spoke with me about it, saying they find it to be a shame that no one was around to record the earlier years of the fandom, even back in 2013 or so before the Gigapause.

I sympathize with this, and actually shared my lament that I never decided to go and associate with everyone at that point in time. I only just joined this community a year ago, and it took me over half of that time already just to come up with the idea of keeping this journal. How much history has been lost so far? How much is completely obscured now, with no one around willing to document it? I often find myself fantasizing about being able to go back and begin recording things in earnest, from the very beginning.

Alas, here we are now. I’m late to this game, but there’s nothing stopping me from pursuing this project now and for the foreseeable future. MrCheeze seemed perturbed by my willingness to do this, and as nearly as I can tell they were under the impression that I felt that our history wasn’t worth recording until now, the exact opposite of my actual stance. After I explained my position more thoroughly, and how I specifically wish I was around to record everything before, they seemed mollified for once. I’m reasonably certain that we see eye to eye on this particular topic now, which is heartening for some reason. I find it difficult to gain any ground with S, but perhaps they have a little more tolerance for my whims now?

Curious by this change in subject I asked them a bit more about their involvement with Homestuck. I was afraid they would be withdrawn on the topic, but immediately they said that they had gotten into it near the very beginning. They then went on to say that the very start of Homestuck was boring, and that they stuck around because some of the content on the forums that was parodying it (even within a week of its release!) was more entertaining than the source material. They didn’t elaborate further on their eventual migration to the subreddit.

Part of the reason this conversation precipitated in the first place was because of a post made on the subreddit yesterday by a fellow named frig_darn, in response to a post asking about an old regular. The style of the comment itself is a little too dramatic for my taste, but it’s a love letter to the older days of the subreddit; in it, frig_darn describes how various activities that everyone mindlessly pursued and enjoyed together have eroded as time goes by. The message has resonated with many, and the full transcript is included in the related materials. The full contents of this post may be found in Appendix C under the section “Subreddit Nostalgia/Reminiscing”.

If I had to summarize the pathos of the message, it is simply: “the community is dead, and our memory of it is fading”. MrCheeze further takes this to: “the community will never be as good as it used to be”. I’m personally ambivalent on this topic, as I feel it’s extremely presumptuous to say that we will never reach such glory days again. While I certainly agree that the community will never quite be like it was so long ago, I’m not exactly interested in emulating the exact energy and culture back then—I’m more concerned with the continuation of what we have now, and making that better as time goes by.

Where MrCheeze and I diverge is in their treatment of the present, and the future. They’re of the firm mind that things will never be as good as they were, but I and some others, notably Makin, believe they see the past through incredibly rose-tinted glasses. I certainly respect their opinions, but I don’t necessarily agree with them; while the past is meritorious for its own reasons, who’s to say what the future holds for us?

Another facet of this discussion was, indeed, about the future. I’ve described our current status as a sort of Silver Age, based on what I’ve heard of the past. However, Toast—with his added authority on the matter from actually being around back then—has stated that we may be on the cusp of a second Golden Age entirely. I assume this is based on the number of people we have, how much they’re talking, and the types of content we have to look forward to in the future, among some other factors. His prognosis is exciting, although I couldn’t begin to say how accurate it might be. I’m just happy that the future seems bright.

These metrics I’ve mentioned will actually be easier to track in the future as well. Makin decided to add another bot to the server called Carbon, which gives some raw data on any server it happens to be in. While it’s not as comprehensive as I would like (barring some functions I don’t know about), it still provides information about how many people are talking, how many messages have been sent in the last hour, and so on. I’m curious to see what information this bot provides to us in the future; it’ll help firmly establish patterns of activity, and we’ll get a better idea of some of the more nuanced aspects of our server population.

Also important for today is that play-ss13 has been removed. Makin has said that the activity was not great enough to sustain an entire channel, and #gaming itself is so inactive that the two could very well go together. As such, he merged SS13 discussion with #gaming.

This has made some people very upset. As was predicted, the typical sort of #gaming discussion has been absolutely washed away in the flood of SS13 discussion. The channel used to see about 500 messages per day, and is now experiencing many times that. I’m not sure exactly how to reconcile these things; keeping SS13 as its own thing contributes to server bloat and robs #gaming of additional activity, but now that it’s sequestered to #gaming it’s overcrowding all else. I’m not sure if there’s anything that can be done about this except to let the few regulars learn how to swim. I don’t think there’s any other way to effectively handle this, and it may be best for the channel denizens to learn how to deal with flavor of the month titles, which are already a common occurrence in the video game sphere.

Despite this resolution to the matter, I have to remark on something that has provided some significant personal ire: WoC has firmly stated that he’s not coming back. I’m beyond frustrated with his stubbornness; one would assume that acquiescing to his requests would be enough to convince him to come back, and yet he’s said he is staying away based on the threat of this happening again in the future. I guess it can’t be helped—WoC is as stubborn as they come, and I don’t have the wherewithal to harangue him into coming back. He can pout on his own, and perhaps he will change his mind later anyway.

On a more positive note, user Gitaxian has also formed their own document: “What is a quest?” It is dedicated to explaining what exactly a fanadventure/quest is, and some helpful examples. I hope that this reference will be useful for people confused as to the nature of these stories, and have included the full text in the related materials.

I’m optimistic for the future. Nothing more for today.

---

8^th of November 2017

Not a lot of news today, but it’s important to note an upcoming event. I mentioned that the 25th of October is a date of importance for us due to plot relevance in Homestuck; the 11th of November is also such a date. It’s not quite here, but to celebrate this occasion What Pumpkin is dedicating each day of this week to releasing new products related to Homestuck. On Monday it was a set of mugs, yesterday it was a set of calendars, and today they’ve made mystery boxes available. These have typically been pretty enticing deals, if a bit pricey; I would be compelled to buy my own if I had the chance.

There’s also supposed to be some interesting news from Cohen arriving soon. In a Tumblr ask last week, he mentioned that more news about Hiveswap: Act 2 was forthcoming sometime this week. We assumed that such news would be released today as per tradition; Wednesday is typically when news from What Pumpkin is released. As it is, no such news came out today; instead, it’s possible that it may come out on the 11th proper. We’ll have to wait and see—the best bet is news on a potential release date, which would of course be fantastic news. It could also be something else of course, but I don’t know what else it might be at this point. Some speculate more interviews, but there isn’t really any indication one way or the other what it could really be.

Nothing more for today.

---

10^th of November 2017

I’ve been reminded of, and given subsequent details on, a facet of the Homestuck fandom called “Homestuck General”, stylized as /hsg/. This stylization is due to where /hsg/ was located, namely 4chan. I’ve described some /co/ comics based on Homestuck in the past, and /co/ is actually the board where Homestuck General threads were officially held. In order to more fully describe the inner workings of /hsg/, it’s useful to understand the nature of the place it’s hosted in. To this end, I will describe the general history and behavior of 4chan in as brief a fashion as I can manage.

Anyone who’s familiar with 4chan will understand the sort of tone that this might set. For the uninitiated, 4chan is infamous among the major internet communities as a place of uncompromising, often graphic discussion of all manner of topics. It is separated into many distinct sections, called boards, each dedicated to one topic in general, such as movies, literature, video games, and a plethora of other specific interests.

The posting system relies on more or less complete anonymity: people are identified only as “Anonymous”. They are known singularly and collectively by this moniker, or among themselves as “anons”. While generally an unpopular idea, they can also decide to identify themselves; people can utilize a “trip code” that distinguishes them as a unique entity, preventing other people from using the same name and pretending to be the same person (a practice mockingly referred to as “tripfagging”). While useful for maintaining linear and sensible conversations with specific people or for protecting the validity of interaction with more famous figures (for example, in an interview with a celebrity), breaking anonymity is seen as annoying at best and offensive at worst.

The anonymous nature of interaction on 4chan lends itself to an extremely specific brand of culture that has become widely recognized since its inception. 4chan itself was launched on the 1st of October, 2003, and for years remained one of the more obscure internet communities; beginning of course with a very small population, the culture that arose there was extremely esoteric, even hostile to newcomers. This sort of barrier served to keep outside people from disturbing the ecosystem, often by mocking them in cruel and excessive fashions for not already being familiar with the existing humor or unlisted rules. This encouraged people to wait and watch before participating; being able to call yourself a regular was for those already savvy in being able to observe and pick up information without guidance.

This sort of exclusivity also gave rise to a culture that was hyperdedicated to itself. Anons who were already familiar with everything were also able to create new content and culture for themselves at an astounding pace: one quote I can recall said, “Not an hour would pass by without a dozen new memes, and if you were absent for a day you would almost certainly be completely lost upon returning.”

This sort of behavior led to an increasingly bizarre and unrecognizable culture to anyone on the outside, which also contributed to the apparent viciousness with which anons treated outsiders. As time passed, 4chan would increasingly be seen as one of the “dark corners of the internet”; the anonymity led to an absence of the fear of societal taboo, and people felt unrestricted in their ability to view or discuss any kind of material. Often this material would be shocking or disturbing nature, although it only served to be entertaining to people who regularly used the website. The behavior of users in general grew increasingly harsh, to the point that it was seen as an opposite to Tumblr in social terms (the latter being considered a very progressive and welcoming website). Visiting 4chan started to be seen in many circles as a sort of rite of passage, and its notoriety grew as time went on.

After some incidents that put a serious spotlight on 4chan (even so far as to where it was featured on national news in the United States), the number of people who went to the website absolutely exploded. Since then, the culture that can be found there is far less esoteric, and decidedly less engaging. The influx of new people led to a near complete destruction of the existing atmosphere, and while activity greatly accelerated the amount of unique or interesting content being generated dropped through the floor.

There is an immense amount of detail concerning this topic that I could go into, but this journal is not the place for it, although I might write a more comprehensive document about this in the future. Suffice to say, the most relevant aspects of this topic are the extremely specific set of culture, and especially the pace with which the culture was created. /hsg/ was no exception to these qualities, and for some in the Homestuck fandom the Homestuck General threads included some of the greatest moments of the fandom’s history.

After some consideration, there is little about /hsg/ I can tell about that isn’t intrinsically tied to progression of the comic and website themselves; a purposeful lack of individual identities is not conducive to a readily identifiable subculture. Indeed, on 4chan in general jokes reach the point of unrecognizablility outside of 4chan itself, but with /hsg/ this problem was less substantial. Rather than the content itself being impenetrable, it is the behavior of the people involved that is more of a problem: the /co/ comics I described previously—themselves the product of these /hsg/ threads—more often than not employ humor or subject material that is innately offensive to many others, and indeed have been the source of innumberable controversies.

Disregarding the controversial nature of the place, it was notable for its manic behavior. By itself, the people involved were already extremely engaged with the webcomic, and speculation raged rampant at every little thing in the story. This energy heightened to the point of a fever pitch during updates—reactions came in from potentially dozens to hundreds of people in real time, all with their own flavor of incredulity, disappointment, excitement, anger, or whatever emotion may have struck. Major updates, such as key flash animations, in turn led to responses on /hsg/ that were themselves an event to be witnessed.

It’s difficult to describe these threads with accuracy because I never personally participated in any; by the time I was engaged in the community, the comic was over and /hsg/ had been effectively terminated as /co/ no longer allowed them to exist in most cases. There are still occasionally threads that form which are dedicated to Homestuck, but none of them can be called /hsg/ because they are not officially sanctioned by the people in charge of /co/.

Even if they were, they don’t resemble the same thing at all as their historical predecessors. While the /hsg/ threads of old featured extensive, even constructive discussion (usually in the form of intense theorizing, sometimes to the point of insanity), rapid-fire humor, and a myriad of other proceedings, the threads of today are often lackluster. Whether this apparent decline in quality is simply in comparison or is objective, the threads now are simply not compelling or worth being part of.

Thankfully, there are many methods wherein material from the past has been preserved. A common practice of people using 4chan is to almost religiously capture images of events that are important or otherwise notable. This is known as “screencapping”, and it is employed frequently enough that there is an unbelievable amount of picture evidence of these threads and what happened in them.

If that wasn’t enough, there are entire websites dedicated to archiving threads on 4chan. It is possible to input a post number and find it, although the farther back in time you go the less likely it is that a given thread was archived. /hsg/ threads were organized in such a way that previous threads were linked to, and then at the conclusion of a given thread a link to the new thread was provided as well. In this way, it’s conceivable that one could trace the line of posts indefinitely. There are breaks in the lineage which make it more difficult, and not every post has been archived. Thus the record is far from complete, but it is still navigable enough that the intrepid might find information enough to sate their curiosities no matter how deeply it runs. The earliest such thread I could find, dating on the 4th of July, 2012, may be found here: https://desuarchive.org/co/thread/38386514/.

Unfortunately, the images which formed the bulk of reactions and were responsible for much of the humor are now mostly broken, so it is effectively impossible to experience the place as it was back then (edit as of 2/12/18: Makin gave me an archive of /hsg/ threads complete with images, can be found in appendix D under “Collection of /hsg/ Threads”). Even if it was, it’s arguable that just being there in time to witness key events is part of the experience; if one takes this to heart, it is understood that the culture is now lost.

Now that I am personally aware of this particular facet of the community, there are a couple of things that I’m curious to see. First and foremost, the potential epilogue to Homestuck may effectively provide the conditions that used to be so ubiquitous in these threads. On the day that the epilogue is released, if it should ever be, then I will absolutely seek out the accompanying thread on /co/. It may not be /hsg/, and it may not even be of /hsg/ quality, but it will probably be the closest I can get; I won’t allow myself to miss the opportunity to witness it.

The second occurrence that I’m interested in seeing is Hussie’s “next project”. It’s been said in the past that Homestuck was simply preparation for Hussie’s next work, despite the scale and scope of Homestuck itself. It is almost assured at this point that any work of Hussie’s to follow this will be something avidly followed by an incredible number of people; I have no doubt that, should such a thing appear, /co/ or whatever relevant board at the time will serve to host discussion about it as well.

Whatever the case is, I look forward to the future in this regard. I would love to see these threads play out in real time; the manic energy reminds me of TPP somewhat. As it is, nothing more for today.

---

11^th of November 2017

The appointed time has come. Today was, unlike the 25th of October, not accompanied by any sort of stream or community event, but in turn there was an extremely good set of news that came out from What Pumpkin. Hiveswap: Act Two has a schedule release of Spring 2018! The exact date is not known of course, but “Spring” typically brings orients itself around the 13th of April. It’s difficult to say with only as much information as we’ve been provided, but I’m sure we’ll receive some more news along the way that helps give us a better approximation.

In addition to the release date, there is a feature that will be replacing the Hiveswap Team interviews of old. Now on Wednesdays, WP will be releasing character portraits in segments called “Troll Calls”; every week two new characters’ identities will be revealed. Two were already revealed today, and there are a total of 36 that we will become familiar with. There is considerable question as to how they will be involved with the story—36 is entirely too many for all to have thorough roles, but there was talk that they will be eliminated quickly. It’s something of a running joke for minor characters to suffer a quick end in Homestuck, so perhaps this too will pass for Hiveswap characters.

More related to the server, there has been continuing tension with MrCheeze due to the Patreon. Most other complaints have completely fallen away at this point (not to suggest they don’t exist—I expect that most people have simply deemed it unworthy of further debate, considering how immovable Makin tends to be), but MrCheeze continues to be unyielding in their complaints.

Despite this sustained feud they had an amusing moment of amicability that seemed to defy the all too prevalent animosity I’ve come to expect from them. Today, before we had any news come out, they made a bet: MrCheeze was adamant that no such news post would be released, while Makin maintained that there would be. As such, they bet $20 on the outcome, contingent that Makin must be allowed to wager using Patreon money and that if MrCheeze loses they must pay up by contributing to the Patreon for one month.

As one can see, Makin was the winner. S, to his credit, did end up contributing to the Patreon as they said they would, but of course they have refused to have their name associated with it and demanded to have the “Patrons” role removed from them once given. With so much of this exchange flying in the face of what I usually see from them, it was highly entertaining to me. I’m not sure if anyone else found it as funny as I did, but nonetheless I found it noteworthy. Soon after however, Sora ended up going on an extremely bizarre tangent of their own, where they began discussing such topics as were suitable for #social or were simply inappropriate for the server in its entirety. Despite repeated warnings they persisted until an mspa-ban was imposed on them, and by the end of this particular debacle MrCheeze had left the server.

They do this often, but the strangeness of the situation undercut the humor of it all. I’m not sure what possessed Sora to act in the way they did, but whatever the reason the damage is done. Despite my coming to peace with the server’s eventual fate, I’m still disgruntled by people leaving (even if temporary!). Even further, despite all of his rabblerousing—or perhaps because of it even—it is good to have MrCheeze around. I hope they comes back soon, and I’m sure they will.

Speaking of the Patreon, there has been a rather interesting development regarding the status of MSPA advertisements. Makin is still banned from advertising the HSD on MSPA proper, but there is a seemingly random ad that’s appeared instead: it reads, “Become a Baby: surrender your adult form and become a baby while retaining all of your current knowledge!”

You might ask why I bother to bring this up. Historically, MSPA ads have consisted of some extremely bizarre content, ranging from occasionally inappropriate to truly surreal. MSPA seems to attract advertisements for teasingly adult material, and then a wide variety of other content that can simply be nonsensical all the way up to completely bewildering.

Even with this in mind, the “Become a Baby” ad is not particular noteworthy. Indeed, many of the advertisements witnessed on MSPA have been exponentially more remarkable than this one. The crux of interest regarding this advertisement lay in the fact that clicking on it redirects you to the invitation link for the Homestuck Discord Server.

This raises some questions, the most prominent being “why” and “who”. Why has this person raised such an ad in this form, and who exactly is responsible for it? As to the first, it’s possible the ad is a “The Baby is You” reference, although it’s hard to tell for sure. The issue of “who” is substantially more interesting, and also potentially concerning. Toast I believe was the first person to recognize that the advertisement did this—he even brought it up a day or two ago, but was largely ignored at the time. The issue only caught on today, and now it’s on the verge of becoming a controversy of its own.

S, before their untimely departure, lost no time in making accusations as to who was responsible. Their primary suspect was, naturally, Makin. This is not an altogether illogical deduction to make, except for the absence of any actual proof connecting him to this. The second person they accused was Wheals, which in my opinion is far less reasonable. The third person they mentioned was myself, which while still amusing managed to cross the line from purely humorous to vaguely insulting. It’s disconcerting that they felt the need and justification to toss out these completely baseless claims, especially in a context that is more or less harmless. S’s sense of morality is strong to the point that it is frustrating to deal with at times.

To add to this conspiracy, after the realization broke on the HSD that this was occurring, the ad began redirecting instead to Shadok’s TBIY video on Youtube. From this, it is immediately clear that whoever was responsible was in the Discord server, watching the conversation unfold in real time. As of now, the ad is actually completely gone from MSPA, and the discussion over it has already faded away.

The community may never find out who was behind the ad, and as such it could remain one of the weirder mysteries we’ve run across even if it is not a particularly big one. I wonder if the person responsible will reveal themselves eventually. Only time will tell.

I’m also pleased to say that I’ve begun contacting members of the Music Team for details regarding their time together. I’ve successfully reached out to Alexander Rosetti (also known as Albatross Soup), RJ Lake, Kali (who is also on the HSD as well), and of course Tensei. Albatross Soup and Kali have both provided their responses already, and the former has even given me a small list of other people to contact on this issue, which I will do before beginning to write anything. I want as many points of reference as possible before writing about the Music Team, especially considering how little is currently known about them. Once I cease getting responses I will consider the research complete, but until then I will continue asking as many people as possible for their input.

Nothing more for today.

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13^th of November 2017

Apparently a previous description I had about Nights’ reason for leaving was inaccurate, and when he found out he requested I omit it. I have done so, but the damage was done and a rather strange brand of Nights-related discourse has popped up today. There has been some discussion of it that I’m pretty sure people have misconstrued into badmouthing, and that has only served to make things more confusing. Nights is a valued member of the community, and for some reason Makin is willing to go to great lengths³¹ (or at least great jokes) to get him back. Today these lengths included changing the server icon so that it has a dog with cinnamon roll imagery and icing layered on top of the original image, and soliciting reaction voting to “gain 720 fat huskies”.

Sometimes it strikes me just how esoteric our humor really is.

Eventually we did accumulate the requisite number of reactions with “Fat Husky”, which true to its name is an overweight husky breed dog. For some reason this dog became emblematic of Nights and his general demeanor/presence, and a long series of discussions and bargaining were carried out over the course of months to turn it into a server emote—a venture that was eventually successful.

With the reactions gathered, Nights briefly rejoined the server, posted his own singular Fat Husky and then left again. This bothered and intrigued me: why does he continue to stay away? For reasons both of curiosity and concern, I decided to see if I could ask him what’s going on, but he remains aloof. I can certainly appreciate this, and the last thing I want to do is appear unrelenting or accusatory in this sort of situation. I’m perturbed that he feels the need to stay away—at least for now—but at the same time it’s not my place to demand to know the details. I respect his wishes, and I’m heartened by the fact that he says there are some personal reasons involved for his possibly temporary departure, none of which concern the nature of people on the HSD (the organization of the server is itself another matter, but I won’t pretend to know his exact thoughts in this particular topic). Whatever the case may be, I hope that any remaining possible tension between people may be resolved soon.

In other news, Tori officially left the mod team today. We never did settle firmly on who would replace her, although it was assumed by at least a few that we would be modding one of the janitors in her stead. Makin predictably decided to go in a less predictable fashion and decided to “let altgen choose”. Of course, altgen itself doesn’t actually get to decide—we’re not exactly fond of putting monkeys in charge of the circus. Instead we’re taking a look to see who is most suitable during this hectic time.

The regulars of altgen even went so far as to make a strawpoll to decide who they wanted most. Of the four nominated, the one who seemed most apropos was Dingus. As soon as Makin set eyes on him it was essentially over, but we spent some time shitting around attempting to debate who would be most effective. After about fifteen seconds had passed Makin said we were “taking too long”, and went and made Dingus the new altgen pseudo mod.

This somewhat unilateral decision may have some adverse effects down the road, but for now it seems to have worked out well enough. Dingus is a well-respected member of the community actually being considered for the role of altgen pseudo once before on a separate occasion, and I have no qualms with his ascension in particular; rather I fear for how the janitors must feel. Part of our hesitancy rose from the fact that people were claiming they might not actually want to be pseudomods. While I realize now that if such were the case they could talk to us about it, it led to enough of us saying “let’s wait for a bit and see” that Makin seized the opportunity to instate the person of his choosing. Now I worry that TS and Molly may feel disregarded in some way, so at some point I believe I’ll talk to them about it to see what they think. I would hate to have them or anyone else become disillusioned over this.

More immediately upsetting to me was Tori’s inevitable departure from the team. It was, all things considered, an actually poignant affair in its own way. All present paid their respects (quite literally, using a meme actually referred to as “pay respects”). The last thing she said before leaving, for posterity’s sake, was: “soon we'll need a former altgen pseudo support group”. Upon her leaving, I felt a profound sense of upset. She’ll still be around in the server of course, but I’m going to genuinely miss her veiled and intensely surreal humor in the mod chat. The light digs and jabs and the earnestly quirky, unexpectedly hilarious commentary will be difficult to replace, if not outright impossible.

On the other hand, I’m pleased to say that Dingus may actually be able to fill those shoes. He’s been an altgen regular almost since the start, if not quite as active as others; his humor is less surreal and more precise; he speaks up less often from what I can see, but when he does the outcome is almost unanimously enjoyable. He also seems to garner the respect of altgen, so perhaps this will be the best outcome after all. Time will tell.

Unrelated to today’s events in particular, Toast gave me access to a document earlier that will be extremely useful: it is a comprehensive spreadsheet of all events concerning the development of Hiveswap, as organized by members of /co/. It is possible that some events are missing, but after a quick review the chronology appears to be thorough (edit as of 2/17/18: unfortunately the timeline had some fairly private information that is not appropriate for public display, and has thus been removed. It may be reintroduced with some edits to protect private information. More specific posts have now been introduced in its place, under “Timeline of Hiveswap’s Development” in appendix D).

Nothing more for today.

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14^th of November 2017

Today was rather momentous in a way that I and many others had not foreseen: Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff updated. Furthermore, it actually updated twice. The gravity of this is not to be underestimated; Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff was last updated sometime in 2014, and it being so is arguably more of an occasion than Homestuck itself being updated (although not since the comic ended of course). With this in mind, one may understand better the events that unfolded in the next two or three hours.

I must admit to being a sham, as this update happened on the very cusp of the 15th and not the 14th, but the deep hours of the night are functionally the same as the previous day to me (and indeed, with time zones this issue becomes even more muddled). Nonetheless, the exact time the first update happened is unknown to us, but it was presumably just after midnight on the eastern sea board. The fact that anyone caught it is either predictable or a complete fluke, depending on who you ask—with SBAHJ updates not being very forthcoming, it’s not like anyone religiously checks that portion of MSPA. However, there are many of us still around and it’s not inconceivable that at any given time someone will be trawling around the archives, reading through them. Whatever the case, we were alerted to the presence of a new panel in short order, and thus the course of the rest of the evening was set.

First came the utter disbelief; the sentiment of: “An SBAHJ update? Really?” spread rapidly. The channel suddenly came to a dead halt for a precious few seconds as everyone present feverishly found their way to the website in whatever fashion was quickest for them. Everyone’s subsequent return coalesced into the conversational equivalent of a bomb, the effects of which are still being felt hours later. The first update took us completely by storm, not only because of how unexpected it was but because of the content itself.

I’ve described Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff on a prior occasion, but I feel I did not render the style of its content justice. Again I urge whoever reads this to seek SBAHJ out themselves to understand fully, but the idea is that SBAHJ is intentionally as shitty as possible. Every facet of its existence is designed to be as utterly horrible as it can be through a surreal combination of meticulous design and sheer laziness. The subject material, what the plot actually is, is nonlinear and nonsensical assuming one exists at any given time. There is no attempt to reconcile existence with meaning, although some would claim different.

Andrew Hussie made a comment on his Formspring back in 2011 about the relevance of SBAHJ to Homestuck as a whole. The comment in its entirety was thus:

SBaHJ is absolutely inseparable from HS, and has been almost from the start. If you don't understand this, then you don't understand HS very well. SBaHJ is like the mentally handicapped step brother of MSPA, requiring special attention, but no less cherished as a part of the family. It was originally intended as the chief source of in-house memes for dialogue, but this is ultimately a superficial purpose. Though it only has 20+ strips, it contains a pretty dense and internally consistent language of recurring symbols and typo-driven grammars, applicable as a rich sub-cognitive lexicon for highlighting elusive elements woven into the mythology of the story which tend to be shrouded in the unconscious.

All of this is to say that events in SBAHJ reflect things that will happen in Homestuck. While not always true in the strictest sense, there have been some definite events that were presaged by a SBAHJ update. In this way, speculation about SBAHJ extends beyond simple conjecture about the comic itself, but about what ramifications it may have on other material Hussie works on.

Important to understand is that SBAHJ comics generally range in content from the mildly perverse to the utterly obscene. For example, the very second comic involves one of the titular characters accidentally fucking his own mother as the other laughs at him. Each instance of this sort of content desensitizes us to the next, so that eventually it begins to feel normal. However, with the extended absence of any content, I feel as if that desensitization has fallen away. Thus, the content of the comic tonight was especially outrageous, and in its own way this contributed to the entertainment we derived from it. To be brief: a quasi-new character named Peaches the Dog was introduced, and in a stunningly short amount of time Hella Jeff ended up fellating this poor dog by accident.

Naturally, the night came unhinged as soon as this image was revealed to us.

A small but importante aside: in the later portion of SBAHJ the comics took on a decidedly less broken format, with images appearing uncharacteristically clear. Character outlines were more or less cohesive, image artifacting was almost nonexistent. In a comic where the entertainment lies in just how utterly distorted something is—a property that is referred to as being “baked”, “fried”, or an assortment of other names—having that element stripped away is kind of disturbing, and admittedly not as funny after a while. The punchline of each comic was less punchy and more of a gentle push which was its own flavor of amusing at first, but quickly grew less interesting. Finally with a multi-year hiatus, no more thought was given to it.

I bring this up due to an interestingly timed event occurred during this update. The incredible hype concerning its appearance remained largely vigorous for some time, but even the greatly unsettling image of canine penis being unwittingly swallowed was doomed to fade—inevitably some criticisms appeared about halfway through the hour. Most prominent concerned the lack of baked imagery: the characters and backgrounds were all more or less sterile in their presentation. This is not in keeping with the style we’ve come to expect from SBAHJ. For the span of about 20 minutes this was discussed, with some consideration towards why Hussie may not be using that style as prominently anymore.

As fate would have it, this conversation would prove to be most ironic. At about 12:50 AM EST, the second update came through. It was literally the same image posted a second time, but heavily baked. At this we were mollified and entertained once more. However, something deeper was at play: the comics are all one image collectively, so the resolution is rather high. In this way, we didn’t properly notice until someone saved the image and zoomed out: an image of Hussie’s face had been layered unceremoniously on top of the comic in its entirety.

Such is the nature of SBAHJ. Of course the conversation did fade away again, as it must. A number of people felt that, despite the intial excitement, the comic was not up to snuff with some of its earlier material. I can agree from a stylistic standpoint perhaps, but I feel as if the very nature of the comic precludes any sort of judgment, good or bad. Certainly people can have their opinions on whether they like it or not, and as many of us hate it as enjoy it I’m sure. However, as to whether the content is objectively good or bad, I’m not sure it can be said whether it falls into either of those categories. At the very least, I personally don’t have the capability to answer that question. I think it is detached from concepts of good and bad, existing in a strange artistic vacuum that defies the common conceptions of quality. When a given work literally relies on how bad it is to entertain others, how can one come to expect any sort of quality or consistency on the matter? The very idea of consistency seems anathema to SBAHJ, to my eyes if nothing else.

That’s enough of my musings on the topic. Nothing more for today.

---

15^th of November 2017

Not a lot to discuss today. There was some potential for issue earlier today: TS claimed that someone had access to a leak of Hiveswap material, specifically details and portraits of 33% of all the characters being revealed for the Troll Call. It wasn’t clear if revealing this information is allowed or not, so I asked in the modchat whether it would be alright, to which Makin firmly responded that it is NOT okay. Thus, we set about trying to quell the information from being spread around here. We definitely want to avoid undermining WP, and I imagine that allowing leaks to proliferate here directly would be a serious ethical violation in that vein.

Important to bear in mind is that we can only officially ban people from talking about it on this server proper, unfortunately they’re free to discuss it amongst themselves as they wish. Malice actually inquired about this, which gives me some pause. I feel like it’s a bit too blatant to ask about such things in the open, but at least she’s honest. Might need to reexamine how discrete she is about certain things however.

Nothing more for today.

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16^th of November 2017

A rather interesting day. There was an even more interesting development continuing off of yesterday: there is a SBAHJ book in the works. This is the second of such books—the first came out a number of years ago, and exhibited all of the characteristics that have come to be associated with the comics themselves.

The first book was more or less a simple collection of the comics that Hussie had written up to that point, but a considerable number of extras were included. I bought a copy of this book for myself, and I can personally attest that it contained: a gigantic, plastic, stylized paper clip called the “paperclop”; a commemorative coin with one of four characters displayed on it, kept stationary in the book by scotch tape; a lenticular bookmark depicting a key scene from the first comic; a picture of “the author”, in the form of a person cosplaying the character that canonically writes SBAHJ; bits of commentary from the same, written in character; and a poorly constructed coupon to Subway for $500, “UNLESS YOU DON’T YELL LOUD ENOUGH”. There were also scratch and sniff stickers depicting corn chips that smelled like pizza, a heavily baked sticker of Tony Hawk, and a barcode that, were one to actually scan it, would ring up a bag of Doritos.

As if all this weren’t enough, the construction of the book itself even assists with the image of intentional shittiness: the front cover has a laminated coffee stain, and the back cover is embossed with numerous items including a marijuana leaf and the words “pRINTED on cANADA", among other things; the pages have been attached in such a way that you can frequently see the spine of the book, and the pages themselves have been attached upside down, sideways, and numbered such that they repeat numbers many times or skip them out of order.

Honestly, I could go on for hours about the immaculate shittiness that this book exemplifies. It is a product worth its own editorial, but in the interest of not harping too long on the subject I’ll move on. All of these reasons and more are why I look forward to a second book coming out, but the announcement was not without its own set of bad news. The second entry in this series will be released only if the project receives enough backing on Kickstarter, much like Hiveswap four years ago.

This did not hold well with many people, and I’m sure one can imagine why. The most obvious reason of course is that the previous Kickstarter, while immensely successful, suffered from interminable delays (to the effect that we’re still not through with the product even so many years down the road). There is understandably significant doubt that the finalized products or what have you will be shipped on time.

This concern is alleviated at least somewhat by the fact that the book has apparently already been finished, as in completely written out and illustrated. This is, however, another huge problem that people have with it. Hussie, with the business deal currently struck between him and Viz Media, should not require additional funds to complete this project. To many this feels tone deaf and perhaps even mocking, and there are some who already lament this book’s existence. I’m currently ambivalent one way or the other; it was brought up that the ability to push out the books will depend on how far they try to go with stretch goals, something that many feel contributed to the lengthy delays and issues concerning Hiveswap. If they can manage their extras well, then Hussie should be able to accomplish this in an adequate fashion. To that end, I will wait and see what sorts of rewards are associated with backing this project before I make a decision one way or the other.

This sort of crowdfunding talk inevitably segued into discourse over the Patreon, initiated and maintained almost solely by MrCheeze. This conversation has always been at least somewhat tiresome, but it has firmly crossed over into the territory of pointless and annoying. It has managed to garner the ire of more than just myself lately, and in a frustrated attempt to ascertain exactly what they want we tried to figure out what about this was bothering them. Unfortunately, MrCheeze keeps changing their answers in such a way that it’s almost impossible to fully understand what they’re trying to say. They use examples that don’t exist or are otherwise inappropriate, and then try to use abstract reasoning that doesn’t actually make any sense. The closest thing to a real answer we could get was that they felt the Patreon was so we could “destroy other Homestuck communities”. After demonstrating why this was ridiculous, I think MrCheeze disappeared or at least ceased posting as much. I’m not really sure what to make of them at times, but there isn’t much that can be done about it short of banning them. Of course, that is impermissible considering most or all of what they’re doing is simply disagreeing with us.

On an unrelated topic, I wanted to comment on a behavior that I’ve played witness to multiple times now, and even engaged in once or twice. Tonight there was an unbelievable number of people in the voicechat. We have multiple voice channels, but as it tends to happen everyone was clustered in only one channel. Furthermore, it was the one belonging to altgen. Over a certain threshold of people, it is generally expected that one or more of us go and monitor the voicechat, which consists of listening to them as long as they make use of the channel and banning or muting those in violation of its rules.

It is not typically a pleasant task, one that usually falls to Anervaria. I’m not sure how it is she puts up with that noise for so long—the voice channels may be in use for several hours before the conversation dies down and people leave. I don’t know if she simply tolerates it or somehow enjoys it on some perverse level, but classically she is the only one willing to deal with it for so long. That having been said, tonight the number of people involved was so great that not just Anervaria, but Dingus and Sea Hitler all decided to keep an eye on it together.

While not unheard of for multiple mods to be in the voice chat I wouldn’t exactly describe it as common, either. Circumstances requiring more than one mod are either extremely disturbing or have the potential to be so. With the voicechat it’s more just a matter of how much you’re willing to bear with, but we resolve to get rid of people who act like nuisances at the bare minimum. Considering then that the group of people involved were almost exclusively from altgen, the chances that people would be nuisances asymptotically reached 100%.

Thus, I decided to check out the voicechannel for myself, and maybe talk with people actively. Sometimes it’s good to do this and reestablish to them that you are indeed a real person, and you can get some fun out of it. There is however an incredible array of behaviors associated with using voice chats that were employed at full force sometimes, especially near the beginning. I won’t go through these behaviors exhaustively, as most of them rely on generating an intense amount of noise. While hardly surprising based on the medium itself, one might be surprised at the sheer range that can be reached using sound alone.

I did not stick around until the chat’s conclusion, as it is exhausting and it was already a late hour. Dingus, the poor soul, stayed up nearly until the end. It’s worth noting that this is a kind of loose rite of passage for the mod team: surviving a night in a heavily populated voice chat is something that most mods go through at least once, and usually gives them some fun stories to tell later should they so choose. It also affords Anervaria a night off every once in a while, which I’m sure she appreciates.

Nothing more for today.

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17^th of November 2017

The SBAHJ kickstarter has gone up. As I said I would yesterday, I immediately scoped what choice rewards would be available, and the top tier at $125 includes the book itself, some shitty goodies such as fidget spinners, a signed bookpanel, and a bottle of BBQ sauce.

I have no idea why or how they conceived of BBQ sauce as an additional reward³², but I was unable to help myself. The projected delivery date is April 2018, and assuming they hold to that date I will be providing a comprehensive review of the book in some way.

An interesting side to the book coming out is the accompanying authors aside from Hussie, namely the webcomic artist KC Green and the surrealist internet funnyman known as “dril”. KC Green is the author of Gunshow Comics and has a variety of projects going on; his humor is well suited to SBAHJ and he has even contributed to the comics before, in the form of another project called Paradox Space (which I will describe another time). dril, on the other hand, is far more enigmatic and strange a character.

For those unaware dril has been around since almost the very start of Twitter, and became widely recognized for his oddly phrased, often complete non-sequitur posts. He is almost indispensable from the fabric of internet humor at this point, with many phrases or jokes he coined becoming so ridiculously common that many aren’t aware that he made them, or may use them without even knowing he exists. It’s important to keep in mind that dril’s identity went unknown for years, and many people have begun to suspect that he is nothing more than an extremely well maintained bot account of some sort.

The reason I elucidate this is that dril’s identity became an object of focus by complete accident back in September, by people on the Homestuck subreddit. Through some process not intimately familiar to me, they determined that he was a mystery writer on Hiveswap and managed to cross reference his name in the Hiveswap credits. While important to note that Dril’s identity has been publicly known for at least a few years, the spotlight is now on us because of Hiveswap and the SBAHJ book.

While not particularly bothersome in its own right, this event is nonetheless extremely strange and has the potential to cause problems. dril is such that he has a cult of personality surrounding him, and people may be upset that his identity has been revealed. I’m sure it won’t actually lead to any sort of significant problems other than people deriding the subreddit for its sleuthing skills, but Makin is nonetheless paranoid about it reflecting poorly on us.

He seemed genuinely distressed at the prospect, expressing some bewilderment at the idea that people thought he was okay with outing people’s personal information. While and others certainly know that he’s not okay with this, I felt compelled to chastise him: his capricious and purposefully confusing tactics contribute to people not knowing what he believes sometimes, and may even give him a particularly impish impression sometimes.

That having been said, I definitely don’t want this to injustly fall on him. He seems exceptionally worried about it, so I tried not to dig into him too much. It’s important to remember that the crazy guy on the other side of these exchanges is still just a guy after all³³, and not even really that crazy. Sometimes people forget that, and it can lead to terrible things on both sides.

We’ll see how this situation may play out in the future. Part of me wants to believe that this is not a big deal at all, and I’m probably more or less right about that. On the other hand, who knows? People may put up enough of a stink for this to matter somehow, although I wouldn’t necessarily bet on it.

Nothing more for today.

---

18^th of November 2017

Not a lot for today. There was one important occurrence, which itself consisted of a collection of smaller events throughout the day that defined it. The long and short of it is that Discord is experiencing server outages again.

I wasn’t paying the closest attention to this event myself, but the effects were pretty clearly felt at times. Periodically people would be unable to send messages, and some became worried because the server seemed to disappear entirely. Entire conversations were halted or prematurely destroyed. This occurred numerous times throughout the evening, but eventually the problems settled down. At that point, the discussion inevitably turned to the server lag itself.

I have to imagine that some people simply weren’t around because the lag was too disruptive, but there were a few who stuck around despite all of the problems of the night. We talked for some time about the nature of these disturbances, but then mused about the eventual fate of the HSD if these problems were to continue. Carlarc and one or two others said that they were afraid of the server going down because they wouldn’t be able to keep in contact with everyone else from here, opinions which elevated my appreciation for them. This did remind me of another angle from which to consider our fate, however: rather than the server dying as time goes by from lack of interest, it may be that Discord itself ceases being a suitable platform for us to exist on.

We discussed this for a while, jokingly bringing up alternatives such as a 9000 member Skype group. We agreed that more than likely it’ll be such that a new platform exists at that point, which is honestly an exciting prospect to consider. I’ve grown very familiar with Discord, to the point that I’m reminded of mIRC. The degree of control offered by Discord isn’t quite as tight, but there is still a lot you can do with it. It’s interesting to consider that Discord will disappear someday, but there is plenty of precedent for it; I wonder what the next real-time chat client we adopt will be?

I think that the people gathered here, now, are tightly knit enough that they will seek to stay together in the future. It’s hard to say how many will try to stick together in the event that we must move, but at the very least such communities that have arisen in mspa-lit and altgen would try their best. I imagine that the exact result would depend on what the next chat platform, if any, looks like. IRC is a valid alternative up to a certain number of people, but anything above that can get unruly. As always, I can only wonder what the future may hold for us.

Aside from all this, another article about dril’s identity being revealed was posted. Neither of the websites that have posted about it thus far (to our knowledge) are particularly noteworthy, but there is already someone that posted on the subreddit about it. They were likely just a troll trying to bait us, but they denounced our existence based on dril being outed. Mostly an annoying affair, it does make me somewhat nervous that similar posts in the future will arise. Depending on the amount of people who get upset it may turn out to be an incredible problem for us in the future. As it is though, there’s very little we can do to mitigate the problem ahead of time—we can only hope that it doesn’t become as such.

Finally, there was an extremely unfortunate circumstance wherein Sora was trying to talk about something concerning religion. Sora has classically had difficulty with introducing topics to mspa-lit and has been banned from the channel a few times for being weirdly off topic or difficult to deal with. I’ve spoken with them before about this, and they resolved to be less obtuse with talking in the channel; I felt that they had been successful, but for reasons that I don’t understand Makin immediately mandated that Sora be mspa banned.

I was extremely perplexed by this; by all indications Sora was following the “rules” of the channel insofar as starting discussions is concerned. I think there was some misunderstanding involved and Makin simply jumped the gun. Whatever the case, Sora was upset by it and I tried to figure out what happened. A long story made short, I unbanned Sora and advocated against this kind of hasty decision making in the future.

I’m not sure what compelled him to do this, but it was distasteful in my eyes for two reasons: first of course being that it was unwarranted, and second that it was an egregious display of Makin’s power. He has the ability to make these unilateral decisions and there’s not much we can do about it except voice our dissent, with the hope that he’ll accept our viewpoint and reverse whatever decision he’s made. The fact that Makin holds ultimate authority over all of us is something that has given me pause in the past, not because I expect him to abuse it with reckless abandon but because it means there’s very little oversight we can provide in the case that something was to go wrong.

Makin can often be stubborn, and often the worst public displays involve him doing something wrong then subsequently refusing to own up to it. Instead he’ll do one of three things: recognize the mistake, but then claim it’s “the truth” or otherwise the correct outcome; refuse to acknowledge the mistake at all; or attempt to distract from the issue with something controversial, often unrelated to the discussion at hand. All three of these tactics are infuriating to be met with, because often these conversations are meant to be held in earnest. It’s often up for debate whether Makin himself is being serious at any given time, but it’s a typical enough occurrence that everyone will assume he’s being sincere the entire time and then it turns out he was joking. It may also be that he refuses to specify until he needs an out, and then claims the opposite of what people may have thought in order to save face.

As always with examining how or why Makin does things, it’s a frustrating exercise to pin down his patterns of engaging with other people. I’m still not even sure if he wishes to be this way on purpose, or whether he cares that it’s upsetting to others. It is such a laborious process to deal with that many who have left have cited it as the reason they’ve done so.

I wonder if there’s anything that can be done to mitigate this issue. Otherwise it’s not really worth discussing in this fashion; indeed, it may not even be worth discussing at all. While Makin’s tendencies in this regard are frustrating on a small scale, they also contribute to an overall greater amount of activity by way of controversy. Whether this is an acceptable tradeoff is up to the individual, but I’m content enough with it so far. It may be in the future that Makin commits some kind of horrendous fuck up that is absolutely unable to be avoided or dealt with in the aforementioned manner, and if such a day comes then I’m curious to see how he handles it.

Hopefully it will not be too destructive an event. Nothing more for today.

---

19^th of November 2017

Honestly, nothing of importance has really happened today. However, it’s the first day in a long time that I’ve had the chance to sit down and exhaustively talk to everyone throughout the day, and it has been a rather refreshing experience. The conversation has switched rapidly between a host of topics that are all as equally as pointless as the last, but still entertaining in their own individual fashions. I must admit that I’m extremely pleased with how the evening has gone.

Sometimes we even talked about nothing in particular, instead engaging in an increasingly stultiloquent series of dialogs that, if it were with anyone but the people I’ve come to know here, would be variously embarrassing or incomprehensible, or perhaps even both. Despite the inherent silliness of the evening it still felt meaningful to associate with them—I’m reminded of why it is exactly that I so heavily favored a community like this in the first place. In short, not everything has to be a federal fucking issue.

It’s easy to get bogged down in the heavy minutiae, and indeed such is what happens to me often. I wonder if I’ve dedicated myself too fiercely to this place; it may be time for me to take a step back and reappraise my position here. Yet, I don’t think I could bring myself to do so even if I wanted to. It may be a source of great pain to me in the future, but I genuinely care about this place and especially all the people who use it. Even now there are people I care about and others that I’m unfamiliar with, and they all serve only to make the discussion more exciting. The blend of old and new gives rise to this delightful conversational palate that is nothing short of supremely enjoyable.

Even as I speak, the conversation has entered a nonstop repeat of the same joke repeatedly. To anyone unfamiliar with the content we’ve discussed in the past, it must appear completely mad for us to converse in this way, and yet for us it all blends together in a perfectly hilarious fashion. I haven’t laughed this much at a simple conversation in months; it feels good to let go and allow the wave of nonsense to take me away from shore.

I wonder what exact conditions must manifest in order to make these sorts of conversations happen. They’re not exactly ubiquitous—there must be some sort of combination of factors that allow them to arise. Whatever they may be, I’m not privy to them. I think more than anything else, there has to be a good balance of people present. There must be those who are brash and willing to approach any topic, which is something that older members typically are more cautious about doing. Once the floodgates have been opened, however, the chat is usually awash in miscellaneous, often more inappropriate material for hours.

It’s also satisfying to note the diversity involved here. I say diversity not in a racial context, but in an ideological sense: the participants here range an impressive gamut, with a decent representation of most branches of politics or social thought. This naturally leads to some strife, but I am also pleased to be able to say that almost everyone involved is able to control their feelings on any given matter with a significant degree of success. There are a few occasions or people I can think of where this is not so, but the overwhelming majority is to my satisfaction. It’s rather heartening to know that civilized discussion may happen even in the face of parties that are often diametrically opposed to one another. Hell, they even get along with each other when the discussion isn’t about politics.

It’s difficult to describe exactly how I feel about all of this. I think I feel a profound sense of pride at seeing this group rise up in the way it has, with all of the various people involved as they are. I am happier than I can really say that I’ve been afforded the opportunity to talk with all of these wonderful individuals. More than I have in a long time, I feel emboldened about the future and I’m excited to see where we go from here. I fervently hope that only good things are to follow.

Nothing more for today.

---

21^st of November 2017

It’s been a slow few days. I don’t have much to talk about on the server itself, aside from #general being a bigger bunch of dipshits than is usual. Usually there’s good separation between gen and altgen as to what’s being discussed, but for some reason it feels like those positions have been switched: general is being used for an intense bout of shitposting while altgen is being fairly calm and cohesive in its discussions.

While an amusing role reversal it’s also annoying to have to step in and tell people to shape up. You’d think it would be easy to tell people to go to a more appropriate location, and yet the socialites normally hanging out in these places are unbelievably truculent. It always helps to arbitrarily ban a few people and strike the fear of moderation into their hearts, but I don’t have it in me for that today. Maybe I’ll delete altgen for a few minutes instead.

One interesting topic that came up today was a brief discussion of the nature of the internet and how it’s changed over time. Specifically, when it was becoming more popular in a public sphere the internet felt more like a Wild West situation, where things were hugely unknown and the potential for anything to happen was very real. This is in drastic contrast to now, where that potential still exists in some form but is largely diminished. Instead it feels like the corners of the internet are well defined, and while creativity still abounds it’s constrained by particular mediums now. It may just be looking through rose-tinted glasses, but it feels as if there is less “opportunity”, so to speak.

I mention all this because it feels as if that sentiment contributes to the atmosphere sometimes. If it were even five years ago, then I can’t help but feel as if there would always be something new or interesting to look at, no matter what time of year or day it is. There was always something different to be found if you looked hard enough. Perhaps I’m simply misguided and those hidden corners do still exist, or perhaps I’ve simply exhausted the store available for my particular palate. Whatever the case, it’s a little dispiriting to contemplate at times.

It’s also important to note that I feel as if this sort of gradual settlement of the internet has contributed heavily to communities like ours, which exist because of a common topic that we’re united in our appreciation of. Before, it seemed that communities could exist on their own merit, with people being able to generate enough content to satisfy themselves with it. They were self-sustaining for a time, but now communities above a certain size absolutely require input from the outside or else they’ll die off. Thus it is that the HSD has attached itself to Homestuck, and Hussie’s works in general.

Nothing more for today.

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22^nd of November 2017

There’s an old event that I’ve neglected to speak about up to now, referred to simply as “caveposting”. The behavior is a carry over of 4chan “greentext stories”, which are descriptions of events or stories that are told in a detached first person narrative style through a series of short, concise sentences. Over the years they’ve become ubiquitous enough that many variations in style exist, and some are developed as an intentional parody. One type of this sort of behavior got popularized on the HSD in particular: the stories were told from the point of view of a cave man, and the HSD was conceptualized as a “cave” of sorts.

This led to the coining of many different in jokes, and for all of one day it absolutely took mspa-lit by storm. For the span of about seven or eight hours the regulars of the place, and especially in my memory involving Toast and Tensei, were creating their own caveposts about the HSD and the people in it. Notable examples include using “Makunga” to refer to Makin, or variations on “x-cave” to refer to the channels, such as “paint-cave” to refer to art-music. I could explain all of the various examples I remember at length but it would do a disservice to the original content; the way I describe it here would be the furthest thing from funny possible.

Instead, it’s worth noting the eventual fate of caveposting: Makin finally came online a number of hours after it was started, and upon seeing how it consumed the chat for hours permanently banned all caveposting from the channel. I can’t quite recall at this point the exact events of the evening, but he may even have frozen the channel over it for a few minutes. Suffice to say that his response caused quite a stir, and to this day there are still people who resist and cavepost when he’s asleep.

I would also like to give a brief update on the Music Team interviews, just for recordkeeping’s sake (although kept vague on purpose in order to avoid drawing attention to any one person in particular): most of the answers I’ll be utilizing are in, I have one more person who has definitely agreed to give them who is still ostensibly preparing their response. Otherwise I think I have everything I need, and once that last set of answers has been received I can start writing up an entry about it. There is some rather interesting material to talk about in it, so I’m excited.

Nothing more for today.

---

23^rd of November 2017

Today I was alerted to some intense drama that occurred on the LOFAM server. The events themselves appear to have been spread out over the last week or so, with things finally calming down. I’ll do my best to describe them briefly here, for reasons I’ll specify afterwards (edit as of 2/14/18: the contents of this section were deemed too private and unrelated to the HSD or the larger fandom, so it’s been removed to protect the privacy of the people involved).

The situation is upsetting for all involved; my own stake in this matter is complicated, but not deep: I simply wish for all involved to end up okay. I’ve spoken extensively with the people involved over the last couple of days about this, trying to understand their positions on the topic and help them to feel better or perhaps more forgiving of each other.

I did talk to Cait some, mostly to assess whether the people involved were fine and to offer my help if it could be of use. I’m not quite sure that there’s much to be done, but I couldn’t go without saying something about it if possible. Now I worry if my meddling goes too far in these cases; perhaps my interference in this system will alter it more substantially than I give myself credit for. The last thing I wish to do is cause more problems, and it’s entirely possible that I may destabilize a situation that was already improving on its own.

No matter; it’s too late for me to take back what I’ve said. In the process I did inquire what this meant for the journal segment that Cait’s been working on. She did mention that she considered abandoning it, but now that some time has passed she asserts that she wants to actually finish it. Further, she says that sometime in the near future it may³⁴ be ready. These vagueries aren’t exactly assuaging, but it is definitely reassuring to know that she’s still interested in working on it. Once I receive her piece I can finally begin writing on that entry here as well. All in due time I suppose.

Nothing more for today.

---

24^th of November 2017

Today had the first discussion approaching proper discourse that we’ve experienced seemingly in months. The topic of note was the SBAHJ kickstarter, opinion of which has turned definitively negative. I feel as if my previous coverage of it does not highlight this adequately enough; perhaps it was a lack of observation on my own part or maybe opinion of it really did shift so aggressively southwards, but whatever the case the kickstarter for the second book is now being heavily reviled.

Tipsy spearheaded the discourse today, arriving in a fashion that can only be described as “primed and angry”. I expected it to be more controversial but a lot of people end up agreeing with her points as to why contributing to the Kickstarter is a bad idea, which surprised me—I had imagined that the reception was neutral, if not slightly positive.

As it is, the points they’ve brought up are more cohesive than I can be comfortable with. I’m heavily considering removing my contribution, or at least reducing it substantially. Most prominent of the complaints are Hussie’s business practices in general, which are too often unsavory at best and offensive at worst. Mismanagement of the Hiveswap kickstarter understandably has led to the most reluctance, and then it’s been directly stated that the Kickstarter is a form of preorder for the book, where they’re using it as a gauge for how many copies to print and distribute. On the surface this doesn’t seem like a bad idea, but for many it’s actually a particularly egregious offense.

I guess I shouldn’t represent this as being the only opinion: a fair few have ascribed to apathy on the topic, which is to be expected. Cait has said she doesn’t feel that strongly about it one way or the other, an understandable position. Others are even positive about it, much like I was (and would still like to be). I’m sure that the overall feeling will shift again once the Kickstarter is funded, again when it comes to a close, and then again when the book itself is released. Whether those shifts will be more positive or less are yet to be determined.

Moving on to more important events, something kind of upsetting happened in altgen (perish the thought). For some time now we’ve become used to assault from various people who constantly create alt accounts in order to circumvent their bans, most notable in my mind being NEO and of course Talons. It’s to the point that we couldn’t possibly keep track of the place at all times to root out every single one, and to this effect we’ve asked regulars of the place to keep track of things for us. In the course of their day, if an account joins that seems suspicious based on a number of behaviors that we’ve identified as being unique to each offender, they will alarm us and we will investigate further. This system has mostly been effective up, with few problems that are usually not worthy of comment. However, today such a problem occurred that escalated to unacceptable levels.

Normally when someone detects such an alt, they notify a moderator through private messages. This is preferable because it’s discreet, and if the accusation is false then no harm is done. However, some people try to turn callouts into a game, and it causes problems in public. With known alt accounts this is more or less fine, but it leads to bad habits if left unchecked. In this way, someone was called out inappropriately as being an alt of someone called Maylin, who was recently banned from altgen as a consistent problem user. Once the public callout was made, people derided this newcomer. As expected of someone who is accused wrongly in a new community, they felt genuinely harassed and deemed it necessary to leave.

I wasn’t around for this initial problem, nor was any mod I think. I and Sea Hitler heard about it through discourse in #serious afterwards, where someone was arguing on behalf of the newcomer that got edged out. I was initially dismissive of this because another altgen regular claimed there was evidence pointing towards the person actually being an alt account. After calling the conversation to a close, I went about my business for a little while until Ifnar called us out in the mod chat.

Usually Ifnar’s complaints are teasing or otherwise non-serious, but such was not the case at this time. He was distinctly pissed, and was very clear in his appraisal of the situation: his disappointment was second to none, and he felt we had shat all over our jobs as moderators by ignoring the plight of a person who was probably genuinely wronged in this scenario.

I was personally taken aback by the trenchant nature of Ifnar’s comments. He’s usually not one to offer such scathing input, so naturally I took his complaints seriously. To be sure, the “evidence” submitted by the altgen regular was scant at best and completely invalid at worst. I felt bad for shirking my duties here, and resolved to set the situation as right as I possibly could. To this end, I froze altgen for a little while and explained the situation at length to everyone involved. The process itself, known as witchhunting, has been a problem before, and is technically already a bannable offense. I just made sure to remind them of the perils of engaging in this activity, which I think most of them took to heart.

Unfortunately, these witchhunts are also symptomatic of another, related problem that we refer to as minimodding. I’ve touched on this subject before with Tainted Angel, who did it in general some time ago. However, a new generation of these people has arisen: in particular, one fellow we had to admonish for this activity was Nujaka Knight, who had started doing it in gen a while ago. Another person doing this was Zoey in altgen. Often enough these people are encouraged by their long history in these channels, which they feel gives them license to dictate how people should behave. We districtly discourage this because it takes authority away from the people we’ve officially given privileges to: the only people that should be dictating policy is us, so regular users asserting any kind of unfounded authority is a huge problem. Needless to say we tell them off when we notice this behavior.

Of course, it can be hard to distinguish between those who are trying to usurp authority and those who are simply trying to help. There have been a few occasions where we chided some who were genuinely just trying to discourage someone from breaking rules, usually a fairly disappointing event. It’s difficult to toe the line where you’re offering valid criticism or simply lashing out inappropriately, but Makin is fond of the “tough love” principle: if they can’t handle a simple mistake then they probably won’t be able to handle genuine criticism. I have my own reservations with this but that’s a story for another time.

The last thing I wanted to comment on for today is a rather silly occurrence, wherein someone called Ainara was discussed at length. Apparently they were someone very prominent on the subreddit, who gained recognition for her contributions. She checks up on the HSD every so often, but her opinion of the place is not high at all (hearing such always manages to make me feel a little worse, it’s very unfortunate). She became the topic of conversation through a negative post on Tumblr, apparently calling out Makin for something I can’t recall. The post itself was removed and Ainara herself came to talk on the server briefly, I assume in an attempt to clear up any confusion.

The entire time this conversation was happening I was thoroughly confused—it seemed as if everyone except for me knew what was going on. It was resolved in a timely manner and things went back to normal, but it was one of those instances that highlights just how little I actually know about the history of the fandom, at least in comparison to others who have actually been around for a substantial amount of time. I wish I had decided to start participating far before this. Maybe I would be a better historian if I had actually been around for many of the events I cover in this document.

Nothing more for today.

---

26^th of November 2017

Today has been pretty strange, especially in comparison to the big nothing that’s been going on for the last couple of days. It’s had its ups and downs, and I suppose I should start with something that’s more down than up. To be specific, MrCheeze left yet again, but this time in a slightly different condition than normal. Usually their absences are initiated after a conversation with someone that leaves them indignant. To be sure, this was also the case tonight; the difference lay in the fact that not just one person was arguing with them, but seemingly everyone present was.

I’ve talked at length about how MrCheeze picks fights with people on various topics, especially the Patreon lately. I’ve written this off as an eccentric trait of theirs in the past, and in the process I’ve failed to appreciate the widespread nature of their actions. As time has gone by it’s become more obvious that S’s behavior is not just taken for granted by most people, but is actually a legitimate source of frustration for many. After I started paying attention to this I noticed that people tend to describe them as nothing less than a “hate-dynamo”, someone who feeds off of negative energy in a way. Their opinions are somehow always pessimistic or exceedingly derogatory, or both. I’m not quite sure what drives them to speak in this way, and it’s disconcerting in its consistency.

At any rate, the incident that transpired today was one of the usual sort. I believe it stemmed from some SBAHJ Kickstarter discourse, in the process of which MrCheeze had taken some rather predictable jabs at the Patreon and at Makin’s ethical standing for running it, as well as insulting everyone who contributed to it. This was all typical behavior, and for some time now I’ve disregarded it almost on sight. I figured this was the case for everyone else as well, but then someone took a shot back, calling out S’s incessant complaints. This was followed by another, and then another. Before long it seemed as if everyone present was positively shitting on them for their constant whinging, something I will be the first to admit was cathartic to witness.

As expected, shortly after the dogpiling began MrCheeze left the server. While hardly surprising, I found myself wondering shortly thereafter what their eventual fate will be here. There are some types of people that, while not explicitly shitters and not bad people, are distinctly incompatible with the group in certain ways. Revlar comes to mind; while he contributed to the group significantly, he also had some quirks to his personality that made it explicitly difficult for many to interact with him in a way that wasn’t unpleasant. MrCheeze may prove to be such a person, as much as it pains me to admit. Their obstinance on the issue of the Patreon has driven people somewhere just short of mad at this point. I hope it won’t come down to an ousting, because there’s a lot of history with them and I value their insight on most matters. Emphasis on “most” I suppose.

In other news, Red came back to the server after a very lengthy retreat. I had been hesitant to bring up this idea up with her because I was afraid it would seem hamfisted and rude to ask, but she claimed that coming back had simply never entered her mind while she was away, but she was happy to come back. Thus, she has returned once more. Hopefully it stays that way, as many beside myself were also happy to receive her. There is a significant degree of camaraderie surrounding her, and I genuinely believe that she makes the place livelier.

She is not without her controversy, though. As a reminder, the last time she left was due to some poorly-timed and worded criticism towards her, in that the way she speaks to people can sometimes clutter a channel up or derail it. Shortly after her return this time, she had succeeded in drawing Makin’s ire by talking about “#social topics” incessantly. This has been an ongoing problem for the last few days apparently, with another incident transpiring on Friday and then again over the weekend.

I dare say that Makin’s aversion to topics that could be deemed #social seems to border on the pathological, with even the slightest mention of something personal being followed shortly by cries of “#social #social #social” or some such. He has threatened to and subsequently frozen the channel for people “socializing too much” in the past, which usually succeeds in pissing off everyone present. This in turn leads to further derailment of the channel in the form of people berating him for a variety of reasons, chief among them power-tripping and his responses to criticism on the topic are usually dismissive, ignoring the criticism entirely and focusing on the content of the original disturbance: “if it draws attention to the fact you're not an AI, it doesn't belong here”.

These sorts of statements are really puzzling to me, but at the same time not completely baseless. I think that Makin has been conditioned by a history of people growing so comfortable with each other that they decide to go and create their own groups together; splinter servers have been responsible for a not-insignificant amount of trouble, both in terms of reducing activity in the original location and in providing more opportunities to generate drama, which usually comes back to haunt us in some way.

Based on this and undoubtedly many other factors, Makin appears to have taken a fierce approach to keeping more splinters from forming (if that is indeed his goal with all of this). While I disapprove of his methods, I must confess that I understand the reasoning for them at least somewhat. There is a real need for balance when trying to manage a community, in that having a populace that is too interconnected with each other makes them lose focus of the original content that brought them together. On the other hand, the balance comes from the need for camaraderie to exist. Without amicable association, even if there is a common ground of understanding people aren’t going to want to associate with each other. I would even go so far as to say that they are inextricable qualities—it is almost certainly impossible for two people to talk about something they both like without developing a level of deeper appreciation for each other.

Sometimes it seems as if Makin is hellbent on having people associate with any of the human element to it, an endeavor that I would not hesitate to call foolish. But then, I don’t know if that actually is his goal. It may be misunderstanding on my (and others) part, but his overwhelmingly heavy-handed responses at time leave little to the imagination. As always when it comes to discussing Makin’s inclinations, who can say what his true intentions and desires are? All I wish to say on this topic is that the right mixture of dumb socialization and proper discussion is needed to foster a community properly; too much of one or the other may lead to ruin.

One of the topics that came up today was a figure in the community at large called BKEW, short for “bladekindEyewear”. For some context, the Homestuck fandom is well known for its tendency to conceive of theories in response to the most minor of details that get revealed to us. After every update there is no shortage of wild proposals about what the content of the latest panels may mean, or what their potential ramifications are. It is not difficult to imagine that almost every facet of the story was laboriously studied at one point or another by a person seeking higher meaning in it, often in ways that would appear quite mad to the casual observer³⁵.

It is with this in mind that I wish to describe BKEW, who was infamous for some of the theories he crafted. The majority of the time, fan theories are loose and simply entertaining to imagine or speculate on further; where a theory became truly devious, and therein popular, was when it was tantalizingly solid in its construction. It’s unclear to me whether BKEW had a distinct talent for making these theories where people found them compelling enough to believe them wholesale, or if he simply stumbled on theory paydirt by accident a few times. I’m also unsure if there’s anyone else in the fandom that is recognized in this particular topic, but I don’t exactly feel at liberty to discuss them at great length. To do so would require talking about the actual theories they came up with, which is far more depth than I think is necessary for this journal. Perhaps I will cover that topic in the future, if I decide to increase the scope of this document much more.

This all aside, there was an event later in the night that was spontaneous and honestly quite enjoyable, although somewhat disturbing in origin. There was a decent spot of conversation already in progress, with a multitude of people participating. When such is happening I like to watch for a while and just soak in what people are saying; it’s a good buffer against the feeling that things are slow at other times. At one point a lag seemed to start, and I decided to zone out for a bit; in retrospect this was a terrible decision. There’s a fellow named soup_main that is a regular participant on the SS13 server who, for some godforsaken reason, decided to post a comment about looking up obese versions of characters from childhood cartoon shows.

This prompted a very swift and horrifying discussion change, wherein people began talking about various fetishes. This is not a unique occurrence, although when it does happen it tends to be a complete circus. Gnawms is usually blamed for such topics cropping up, a reputation that is more often deserved than not, but in this case he was completely blameless. At least until he started participating and managed to stir the place into a veritable frenzy alongside a few other choice users.

The resultant shitstorm was unlike anything I’ve seen in months. It was truly a rare occurrence in its intensity, with more people than I thought possible engaging in all manner of uncontrollable nonsense. The guiltiest of course consisted of those who served to stir the frenzy further, seeming to delight in the chaos of the evening. There was a considerable number of people who were simply lost, and it was they of this group that first requested the channel be frozen to halt the flow of terrible discussion. Eventually we caught the attention of some altgen regulars, who decided it was time to step in and pour their own gasoline onto this dumpster fire by utterly clogging the place with shitty memes.

After urging people to stop for all of ten minutes, with only worsening conditions as my pay-off, I decided it was time to freeze the place. I instituted a 5 minute Za Warudo, hoping that people would be a little more well behaved by the end of it. I know now that I was foolish to expect this of them, as evidenced by the fact that when I unfroze the channel the shitposting resumed with even greater intensity than when I started it.

I complain, but in a perverse way I really enjoyed the occasion. So many people were posting so manically, and a whole host of in-jokes were being utilized. At times like these you can’t help but feel the energy, and I greatly appreciated the absurdity that was on show. People quoting lyrics to songs in force, posting random images under threat of ban—wanton chaos in short. For a brief moment, it was possible to let go and enjoy the unmitigated carnage of a group of shitposters unleashed.

As these things go, however, it was soon time to stop. Things went back to normal, but I think that the channel’s mood was better off for the brief respite from seriousness. This goes back to what I was saying about allowing questionable behavior sometimes—it’s impossible to expect perfection from people and get it, they must be allowed to fraternize or engage in dumb shit on occasion in order to maximize efficiency of interaction. Or enjoyability, rather. Either way, while the event itself was frenetic and turbulent as hell, the end result was something far more enjoyable than I would have given it credit for. I think everyone regards such moments fondly, in their own way. Hopefully we may witness more of that in the future.

Nothing more for today.

---

27^th of November 2017

We got a rather incredible update pertaining to Hiveswap today. Andrew Hussie released a newspost midway through the day, wherein he described an “Extended Zodiac” in preparation for all of the new characters that will be featured in the game somehow.

For context, Homestuck has a number of characters who are identified through the regular zodiac, the astrological signs corresponding to the date of one’s birth, and each character associated with a sign was given personality traits somewhat related to horoscopes or astrological significance. The reasons for this are complicated and in depth, and I won’t go into it here. Suffice to say that it was a very popular part of the story, and these kinds of characters are an extremely big part of Hiveswap’s story.

With the multitude of characters that will be appearing, it was apparently decided that having an extended system was necessary. To this end, Hussie and Cohen (probably more the latter than the former) created a set of 288 symbols, dividing them among the 12 original Zodiac symbols and using each of the originals as a “sign class”. This sort of needless complexity is a hallmark of Homestuck, and indeed most of Hussie’s writings in general. The usage of the zodiac is also one of the reasons that Homestuck became so wildly popular for a while, with the admittedly less complicated and original system paving the way for this monster that we’ve been confronted with today.

As if the zodiac signs weren’t enough, there is another complicated system intimately associated with Homestuck, something called the class and aspect system, or classpects for short. I run the risk of overexplaining this system here, but in short as the name implies it consists of two titles put together, a class and aspect. The class concerns the intended role or function of a character, while the aspect describes certain features of their personality or powers. They are thus used to describe characters in a mythological fashion; this system became exceptionally popular and gave rise to a huge number of fan tests that could be used to derive a given readers classpect, often through a series of disreputable personality tests and the like.

The classpect system is insanely popular with almost anyone who reads Homestuck. There are few things that come to mind which can immediately be considered as important to the integrity of the fanbase as classpecting, itself an activity that at any given time can take up more than half of the conversation. It is understandable then that we reacted very energetically to the news that the Extended Zodiac would itself have the first “Officially Sanctioned” Aspect Test.

As a side note, it’s important to mention that, despite the inherent popularity of the classpect system, very little is actually known about them. Aspects already have some details revealed but classes have almost nothing available for explanation, and thus a significant reason for our excitement is not only being able to use the test results for fun but also because it provides important background information for us. However, that feature of it all is a tad more esoteric than is needed.

Returning to the main point, as soon as this news reached us the entire server was positively set ablaze with the topic. I think the initial conversation went on for no less than three hours, after which it seemed to peter out over time. However, as soon as Makin came back online later in the night the topic immediately resumed in full force, with people curious to see what results he would get.

The test that’s used to determine these things is hardly comprehensive, as it must be accessible—I assume—to people with short attention spans or little interest in this topic. The quality of the test itself is suspect, and many people have professed discontent with it in one form or another. That hasn’t stopped us from having a very entertaining time with it of course; people are taking their results in good stride, and with an exception or two I don’t think anyone has reacted poorly or anything. There was one person who threw an absolute shitfit because they received an answer they didn’t want, which was a disturbing but not altogether unexpected occurrence.

This brings me to the other hand of this entire affair, which is that while classpecting is very emblematic of the Homestuck fandom, it is also emblematic of what is often considered the worst part of the Homestuck fandom. Classpecting is singlehandedly one of the most infamous traits associated with us, mostly because of that period through 2011 and 2012 where the community was at its height in popularity. I tried not to pay attention to this at the time so I don’t quite know myself, but I think it was such that the Homestuck fandom was so popular and recognizeable in places that people grew to resent members of the community on sight, a behavior that was helped in no small part by the fact that a large majority of the fans were themselves annoying teenagers with no sense of respect or decorum. There are definitely good parts associated with the fandom at any given time, but that one particular feature is so prevalent and still recognized enough that people have a tendency to remember us with some distaste.

While most of us were chattering away on the topic rather animatedly for the brunt of the evening, there were of course the detractors that were less than pleased at this development, notably Niklink and—of course—MrCheeze. Now that I mention it, Niklink often voices his own dissent, but the key difference between him and MrCheeze is that Nik will never continue to harp on something past its expiration date. Today after receiving this news they were both lamenting the return of “the worst part of the fandom”, which—while probably an accurate assessment—was also a grim portent in contrast with the vast majority among us enjoying themselves. As it might be expected, this behavior did not curry them any favor. As usual, though, MrCheeze took it exceedingly far and succeeded in annoying the hell out of a lot of people, myself included.

This annoyance was compounded with the fact that, after some time of this and dealing with genuinely irate people, MrCheeze had the gall to say “wait, I just started to realize that people are actually getting angry”. They then explained that, while their feelings of dislike for this development are very real, they were playing up a significant portion of it. Goodness knows why they was bothering to do this; it manages to cast doubt on almost everything they’ve ever argued about, and it makes me wonder about their motivations.

Sometimes I entertain the thought that MrCheeze is an elaborate alt of Makin somehow, that the latter keeps around for the express purpose of generating discourse without directly appearing too controversial³⁶. One might remember as well that MrCheeze left about one or two days ago, and already they’ve returned. This sort of leaving/rejoining behavior is becoming the rule with them, and it’s beginning to seriously erode any sort of semblance of integrity that they might have wanted to foster. Perhaps my views of them are growing too polarized, but this sort of nonsense strikes me wrongly.

To their credit, however, they did not leave this time when people began to dogpile them. I’m not sure what might go through their head; maybe now that they have verbally recognized that people don’t appreciate when they do this, they’ll slow their roll a little bit. I don’t have much faith in this happening, personally, but one can hope. It’s also interesting to note the difference in reception between their complaining and Nik’s. MrCheeze is often seen simply as a whiner, while Nik’s comments—despite being in a similar vein—are seen as funny or even insightful by most. I wonder if Nik simply has a better sense of humor, and knows when not to harp on a joke. This could potentially explain a few things actually.

At any rate, the night was more or less erratic in this way. I think the reception of the Extended Zodiac has been overwhelmingly positive, or at least it seemed that way here. I wonder what the response on Tumblr or with /hsg/ folk was, I didn’t get a chance to look. The subreddit has been pretty receptive as well; people are happy to have more information at their disposal, certainly, and the system provides a framework that is both positive and negative in various ways.

One such reason for it being positive is that it makes it easier for people to create “canonically accurate characters” for their fanventures. The corollary to this is that it takes creativity away from the people involved if they care too much, and kind of influences them to work within this framework if they want to appeal to purists. This also retroactively affects fanventures created before the release of the Extended Zodiac, although I assume most people won’t care too much about that. I do worry that people will feel obligated to go back and change their existing characters to fit into the mold, which would be a waste.

For as much as we might disagree with them, Nik and MrCheeze do bring up a cogent point. The intensity with which the fandom takes to fan tests like this is reminiscent of horoscopes. Honestly, the test itself is little more than a glorified Buzzfeed personality quiz. In this way the very nature of the test is kind of suspect, but I’m not terribly worried about it for a couple of reasons: first, even with actual horoscopes and fake, terrible personality tests there’s usually disclaimers that it’s not meant to be a truly predictive tool or anything. This doesn’t exactly deter some people from using it that way, which is hugely unfortunate, but there’s always going to be fools who misuse any given thing. While moral objectionists like MrCheeze will claim this sort of thing is evil for “taking advantage of dumb people”, I feel as if that’s unfair to people who understand these things are for fun only.

Speaking of “taking advantage”, I neglected to mention that a definitively more controversial element to all of this is that a significant swath (not all 288) of the symbols are being sold now as shirt designs on We Love Fine, which has now officially rebranded as For Fans By Fans (a name that has drawn ire from many for its generic nature). While not a terribly big deal in and of itself, the new merchandise has been far more polarizing one than the test, because it indicates that the tests primary function was to earn money.

To many it feels like this was a cheap way to introduce a topic that hits at the heart of Homestuck’s fan base, namely teenagers with the desire to individualize themselves somehow. Having so many symbols in this system that differentiates people so thoroughly leads to many people feeling as if their symbol is special, and leads to a greater chance that they will purchase the shirt, at least in theory. It’s worked well enough in the past with the limited designs that were available before now, I have no doubt that this will be the case here.

All of the negativity aside, it is difficult to ignore the fact that this has galvanized the fanbase somewhat. James Roach himself tweeted something along the lines of “Homestuck resurrection!”, and I think it’s safe to say that many people share this sentiment. There is a sheer difference in general energy between now and immediately prior to the news coming out. Excitement abounds, and there is magic in the air.

I suppose that’s enough on this topic; I’ve gone on about it for far longer than I thought I would. Nothing more for today.

---

28^th of November 2017

Not a lot happened today, but I feel it’s an opportune time to cover some details I failed to mention or discuss in previous entries. First, after the SBAHJ update so many nights ago, Makin created a new channel to go along #homestuck and #hiveswap, appropriately named #sbahj. I’m sure one can tell what it was about. As it is though, the channel was taken down earlier today, I presume due to lack of activity since the hype from the kickstarter has died down considerably.

Second of all, the server saw a pretty significant bump in people since Hussie’s newspost came out yesterday. While there’s usually a small trickle of people flowing in at all times nowadays, there’s been a far greater number of people visiting the subreddit, and subsequently a large increase in membership on the HSD. The last time I checked a few days ago, the server had about 9250 people, and at the time of writing we’re sitting at about 9350 instead. An increase of 100 people is quite impressive, and there’s no telling when the pace will slow down. There’s a possibility for more surprises from Hussie and WP in the near future, in which case we may see an even greater increase soon.

On another note, the Music Team interviews are going well. I mentioned that I wanted to prepare the entry yesterday, but Makin and a couple others came out of the woodwork with their own suggestions on people I should contact for more information. There is apparently a lot of hidden information sequestered away with the Music Team: Makin in particular was adamant that I ask about “the Music Team forums”, which are so obscure that I have literally never heard of their existence apart from him.

I’m curious to hear about them, assuming that the Music Team members are willing to divulge information about the topic. From just a preliminary standpoint it seems as if these forums are hidden knowledge, which makes me wonder if outside knowledge of it is somehow suppressed. In a similar vein, Makin’s access to esoteric knowledge like this continues to be of considerable fascination to me. Without going into too much detail yet, he has mentioned things to me that were altogether cryptic yet insightful. I must confess myself hopelessly curious as to the exact path of his history with the Homestuck fandom, and to what degree he’s managed to intermingle at the “higher levels” of it all, so to speak. At the same time I worry that I may be shining a spotlight on him that he is reluctant to have, and if it comes to be that such is the case then I will begin to omit details from this journal, at least until such a time that it is acceptable for me to write about them. As controversial as he is, I (mostly) trust him and his judgment, so long as I believe he is being honest.

While my utmost wish is for transparency and accuracy, since people read this on a frequent basis I must exercise caution around subjects that are potentially dangerous for the people involved. It feels somewhat silly to refer to online drama as “dangerous”, but it’s not inaccurate—peoples’ livelihoods could be at stake if the situation is severe enough. My last wish is to damage others’ futures or reputations; again, if it comes to be that my writing will do this then I will not include it here. I genuinely hope that every detail may eventually come to light, though.

Speaking of writing, there’s been an increasingly noticeable trend on the HSD over the last week that is of a decidedly positive bent. Given that the nature of mspa-lit is based around reading stories that Makin recommends a lot of the time, there’s a tendency to analyze the writing at great length. Between this and Griever’s Jojostuck, I feel as if there is some motivation to write our own stories. I was not immune to this, and I tried my hand at writing some fiction some days ago. While the product was less than good, it was still an earnest attempt that I felt like exposing to the rest of the group for critique. They were nothing short of brutally honest, and while I’m not exactly sold on my ability to write stories I think it was a genuinely worthwhile activity.

If it had been only myself, then I wouldn’t have found it worthy of mentioning. Instead, this has become something of note because more and more people have begun to write their own stories, it seems. Andrew is beginning to write a story, Oda is in the process of writing one and is actively seeking feedback, and Barry has expressed interesting in writing something, and numerous others have as well. It’s quite exciting in its own way, to see all of these people want to collaborate and assist each other in honing a craft that they otherwise might never have been interested in.

This kind of development is extremely important to me. I can’t properly express the joy it brings me to see everyone supporting each other in this way; what we might never have attempted on our own has suddenly become accessible because of everyone’s willingness to associate with and help each other. I think Toast was right when he described us as being on the cusp of another Golden Age; it truly feels as if this community is beginning to enter into a distinct period of glory. We will have our ups and downs as usual, but I can’t suppress this feeling of excitement at the idea of where we might find ourselves in the future. The strength of this place is more apparent every day, and I have never felt better about it than I do now. It is my sincerest hope that this feeling will only intensify as time goes by.

Nothing more for today, but plenty ahead. Here’s to the future.

---

30^th of November 2017

The Patreon experienced a sudden drop today. I guess this was expected because it’s the end of the month and people are going to be trimming what they spend on stuff like this, but the exact degree of the drop was unexpected. We went from around $600 to just under $250, which Makin was understandably upset about. This begs the question of what will happen to our SS13 server and others as time goes by. It’s unfortunate, but I honestly suspected something like this would happen; the Patreon is novel but there are a lot of complicated factors that go into making it self-sustaining, chief among them being a continuous supply of new people. With MSPA banning Makin’s ads, that cut off the vast majority of people we could have hoped to grab. MSPFA does help somewhat but it’s not the same flow by any means.

I suspect that this trend will only deepen as time goes by: less people will feel it’s worthwhile to contribute to the Patreon, and we just don’t have enough people to replace those who stop. I’m not sure if Makin will ever take it down, as it costs nothing to keep up and there’s the offchance that newcomers may find it and think it’s worthwhile anyway. We’ll just have to see.

Aside from this, we learned yesterday that Dril and KC Green would be doing an Ask Me Anything, or an AMA on Reddit at 2 PM this Friday, or tomorrow! They’re going to be answering questions about the new book and their involvement with it, as well as anything else they feel like answering at the time. We are very excited about this, and many have already begun preparing the questions they want to ask. I might ask one myself, but I’m not sure if there’s anything I have a burning desire to posit. I might just observe as best as I can—this sort of event is not to be taken lightly, it’s an extremely fun and engaging experience. We might even learn something important in the process, if someone asks the right question and it gets answered. KC and Dril are both funnymen, so it’s expected that the vast majority of their responses will be jokes or otherwise, but we might gain some pearls of wisdom on the side. More on that tomorrow as it happens.

Aside from this, some minor events on the server today: Minish made his own channel. I had no idea about this but apparently he is obsessed with the Christmas holiday, and he wanted to make a Christmas themed channel. He was messing around with it for a while, deciding what to settle on (asking me at one point whether it should be a channel themed around him if I recall, which made me laugh), but then eventually settled on it being Christmas themed like he had originally planned.

In addition, a recent Discord update led to some weird channel permission issues—like pinging everyone—that he, thankfully, did not abuse and actually worked with us to try and fix. He, Ngame, and I believe Wheals all worked on that for a while, and it was nice to see him cooperating so willfully on the matter. Ngame described it as “grey hat hacking”, which I found funny. The term is probably completely accurate and/or professionally applicable, but the terminology surrounding that aspect of computer science is just amusing to me for some reason.

Otherwise, another community thing worthy of comment is an album being made by WHATISLOSTINTHEMINES, designed as a sequel to the infamous vore album (entitled “YUM! The Vore Album”) that Mines also made some time ago. I don’t know what drives them to make stuff like this but the vore album is just what it sounds like—it was joke music centered around the concept of the fetish “vore”, which involves eating people. It’s more nuanced than that but I don’t think I need to go into anymore detail. That album also featured a full-length rap by ost, and at its release I believe it was deemed “the most cursed thing to ever be composed” by a number of people.

The next album Mines has in store is relatively tame but still strange on its own: they have simply called it the “feet album” so far, and I imagine it’s obvious what the subject material will be. It’s a work in progress and I say with serious hesitancy that people are looking forward to it. Realistically I’m sure people are looking forward to it, but in the same kind of bewildered fashion they looked forward to the vore album. We’ll just have to see.

Nothing more for today.

---

1^st of December 2017

The AMA was slated to happen today, and it was far beyond what any of us were really hoping for. We were simply sitting around waiting for it to start. I’m not sure where I heard that it would begin at 2 PM, but it started instead at 1:30 PM. This was not a big deal, as we were still prepared by that time to ask our questions. Our preparedness came in handy, and most people in the HSD got their questions answered, although a choice few like Olki ended up getting passed by for some reason. KC had some actually very informative responses, and Dril of course was shitposting the entire time but all of his answers were gold as usual. I think Dril ended up responding for a very respectable amount of time.

At the same time, an unexpected development arose. Someone named horse_enjoyer ended up responding to some questions, beginning with one that Makin asked pertaining to Hussie’s degree of involvement with the project. People immediately seized upon this as Hussie posting, and the same account later verified that he was in fact Andrew Hussie. This only served to intensify the energy until the room was essentially in a furor.

It was naturally very exciting to have Hussie responding, although I and the rest of the mod team were concerned about how people would react. Hussie’s involvement in the fandom has been slim to none recently, and Makin especially feared that people bumrushing him in this AMA would lead to a more serious withdrawal than the one we’ve been experiencing for years now. We attempted to avoid drawing attention to his involvement, and Makin even froze mspa-lit for a few minutes to get people to stop talking about it.

Despite this, it seems as if Hussie was more or less eager to involve himself in the AMA and dealt with a few other questions admirably. He responded to Hb, Carlarc, Gitaxian, and Griever separately, although the majority of these responses were simply for purposes of humor.

We were also concerned because technically speaking this AMA is for KC Green and Dril, not for Hussie. Any involvement on his part is excellent and we are more than happy to point it out, but we didn’t want it to seem like people don’t actually care for Green and Dril. Their involvement on the SBAHJ book is important, and there was distinct worry that Hussie’s presence would considerably overshadow them. At one point Tipsy even posted a link to the AMA on her blog with a direct call to the fact that Hussie was posting in the thread too.

In spite of this, it feels like the AMA was spread rather well. Hussie only answered about five questions, if that, whereas Green and Dril both answered an incredible number each. The attention, I think it’s safe to say, was all on those advertised. Thus, we were pleased with how it went, and there is a distinct feeling of happiness surrounding the AMA. Makin commented while it was still going on, striking a distinct note of satisfaction and even excitement: “is the homestuck fandom actually coming back[?]”³⁷. I think many others, including myself, felt this way at least in part. It was an extremely exciting time for us.

It’s important to note something: while it appeared relatively minor, Hussie’s response to Carlarc yielded a crucial nugget of information to us. The future of his projects are uncertain at best, and despite the recent updates and even the book coming out there was considerable concern or at least curiosity about what would happen to the website-hosted SBAHJ, its original form. Hussie’s answer to Carlarc stated that, in no uncertain terms, SBAHJ would experience more updates in the future. This is extremely heartening for those of us who enjoy the serial, and we look forward to what it is he will produce.

Everything lately has been so positive for us. The sentiment I expressed at the end of the entry on the 28th of November is alive and well among the community, at least for now. I almost worry about some sort of negative event in the future that will counter all of this in full and then some, but such concerns are not really worthwhile to assume until something has actually happened. As it is, the last few days have been incredible for us, and I hope that the trend will only remain upward as time goes by.

Nothing more for today.

---

3^rd of December 2017

The Music Team interviews are winding down, and thoughts are turning to other facets of the community that I can tackle. I was given some rather great ideas today by various people, which involved interviewing some other content creators like people who make fanventures. Griever and Jojostuck is an excellent example, and then Austinado is in charge of a project called Vast Error, a deconstruction of the type of story that’s usually portrayed in fanventures. There are a myriad of others who would be available to interview, as many people as there are fanventures if not more.

The onlyproblem for me that I can see with this is that if any discussion of the fanventures themselves happen, it’ll become too esoteric for the purposes of this journal. However, there is probably an incredible array of more generalized information available as well. I’m sure that talking to enough people on the topic would be enough to give me a timeline of fanventures (starting on the forums and eventually ending up on MSPFA), and to inform me of what the more famous stories are both in a modern context and then historically. I’m not sure if any of the information presented will be new to members of the fandom, exactly, but I guess that’s not strictly the point. Rather, it will help to keep it as informative as possible for people who may not have any exposure to this topic previously.

There are a few other figures in the community that it’s been suggested I interview, most notably among them o of CANWC fame and Gankro. I’ve actually already completed an interview with the former, which I will elucidate on shortly. As for the latter, Gankro is the name of the coder who was behind some of the more interesting pages of Homestuck. He made a number of games for the comic, further playing into the feeling of it as a multimedia work. These games are few and far between, but their importance in contributing to the overall popularity of Homestuck is not to be underestimated. Despite this, much like the Music Team I feel as if Gankro is a relatively little-celebrated member of it all, so I feel determined to seek him out and gain his input on matters.

As for o, he responded in a frank and forthright manner after I messaged him today. The interview was surreal and I wasn’t even strictly sure what to ask him about; to this end I recruited the entirety of mspa-lit to give me a list of questions to provide, which everyone was more than happy to do. Given the nature of CANWC and especially o’s general demeanor, the tone of these questions were more often than not fairly silly. This is all in good keeping though: o is famous for generally refusing to break character, even in bouts of private correspondence (as with my interview) or when posting publically. There is purportedly one occasion where o has broken character, but I’m not exactly privy to the details of this incident, nor are they particularly relevant to this ordeal as a whole.

True to form, when I interviewed o he remained in character the entire time. He writes from the perspective of someone within the narrative of Cool and New Webcomic, speaking in broken English and using a healthy number of grotesque emojis to convey his points on occasion. He also claims that CANWC is a completely true story and that, rather than inventing the tale, he has been charged with writing down details of a story that already happened and are real. I believe the denizens of mspa-lit kept this in mind when formulating their questions, as you must find a way to ask him things in a way that doesn’t require breaking character. The questions we brainstormed did manage to wrangle some answers out of the mysterious fellow, but without compromising the integrity of his persona. In this way, I would call the interview a distinct success.

As I mentioned, most of the questions were utterly silly, such as asking what o’s favorite ship is, or what kinds of video games he plays (both responded to with his signature humor). However, there were some important nuggets tucked away in the general silliness. Something I was happy to hear is that o’s collaboration with CANMT has been an extremely positive experience for him, and he wishes he could incorporate more of their music into the story; there are a lot of excellent tracks that have been produced by CANMT which he unfortunately doesn’t have time to animate, otherwise he absolutely would.

More generally speaking he has been pleasantly surprised by CANWC’s reception by the community at large, and he says it drives him to keep writing. I also asked whether he believes he’ll actually be able to finish his epic saga, to which he replied that we’re not even halfway done yet, but he has already plotted out the rest of the story to some degree. All of these answers are genuinely exciting for people who follow his work, and the response when I shared them with everyone in the HSD was beyond positive.

I think it’s hard to overstate the appreciation that people in our community have for o, and his influence since June of last year is extremely noticeable if you look in the right places. CANMT in particular owes their existence to him; there’s no way to tell exactly how many people he’s inspired with his unique style, but there is no denying that his standing in the community as a whole is an impressive one. If one is interested in reading the transcript of the conversation I had with o, it can be found in Appendix C under “Cool and New Web Comic Interview.”

More pertinent to the HSD, today we gained some information about the Viz Media books—installment three was revealed to us, which included some art and commentary. This was initially exciting, and such information is usually enough for Makin to decree an official post on the matter, which I prepared summarily. However, once people began to look further into it the most noticeable thing for most was that some of the commentary was in fact old, appearing in the physical books that were released years ago.

This naturally garnered some rather intense ire. The responses of people across the subreddit and the HSD swiftly turned from receptive to nothing short of peeved. This was compounded with some aesthetic choices that people were less than pleased with, which I won’t go into detail about here. However, after a closer look people realized that there was new commentary, as well as old.

This raises an interesting question: will Hussie include both in these new releases? That would be extremely useful for people interested in archival, like myself, who didn’t have access to the original books for whatever reason, also like myself. I’m curious to see what comes of this, but the exact extent of this will have to wait to be seen until the books are actually released. It’s possible that the samples we’re seeing may not be representative of the final product, or that not all of the old commentary will be included. Or a plethora of other possible outcomes, there’s no real way to know yet.

One particularly disturbing note to me was a dash from the introduction that was leaked to us, itself being new. In it, Hussie describes the comic as “being completed” on the 13th of April, 2016. I’ve mentioned before that there is serious hope that we’ll receive an epilogue of some sort, but with this those hopes feel prematurely done away with. Is what we’ve been given truly it? Will there be no satisfying resolution to the tale?

Problem Sleuth’s own epilogue tied together numerous elements that left readers disgruntled—I had naturally assumed that Homestuck would have its own form of these events. At this point, I have no idea how likely that outcome is. By all means it seems as if Hussie has no plans to give the comic such an end. If this is the case, then I hate to imagine the bitterness that people may feel for the story as more time goes by.

Time will tell. Nothing more for today.

---

4^th of December 2017

Today was quite pleasant. Nothing out of the ordinary happened—on the contrary, this day was virtually devoid of any sort of substantive event. Rather, the source of satisfaction today came from simple association. Everyone seemed engaged with each other, talking for hours; I was happy to be able to participate extensively this time, and made full use of the evening.

I’ve actually been rereading Homestuck for some time now. When I first read it, it took me about two or three weeks to read because I dedicated an unhealthy amount of my time to the activity. This current read is actually somewhere near my 10th time, and alongside with the fact that I have a lot on my plate I’ve slowed down considerably—it’s taken me on the order of a couple of months to get to the end once more.

The last chapters are arguably the most controversial section writing-wise; while the exact details of their construction are debated frequently, there is a common consensus that the quality of the story deteriorates noticeably as it gets close to the end. With this observation comes an anti-parallel increase in the amount of debate: the worse the apparent quality of the comic, the more fiercely it is discussed.

At least, this is what it was like historically speaking. I think that as time has gone by, the fires have cooled somewhat. I reached the controversial sections in question last night, and began liveblogging my response to them. Liveblogging Homestuck is an activity that’s enjoyed by almost everyone for obvious reasons. Even liveblogs of rereads are more or less welcome—the metric for how acceptable liveblogging is concerns the quality of the observations, rather than the novelty of the material being reviewed.

This is important to note because as I got closer to the end, my liveblogging picked up steam and, naturally, kickstarted more discussion about all of the various factors involved. This is pretty typical, but for some reason there’s a certain magic to it—without fail, discussion can sustain itself for hours if someone brings up the end of the comic. It’s never as hostile as it used to be, if one may call it that, but there is still a definite solidness to the things people say. It’s polarizing, and I think people being pitted against each other drives the group at least somewhat. Too much of it is bad obviously, but a little rivalry goes a long way.

On an aside, I think there’s an important factor to all of this as well. The last time I bothered to read Homestuck through was in preparation for the end, a pattern that was true of many others as well I’m sure. After it ended, I don’t think anyone felt up to reading it again for quite some time. My own reread was colored by a distinct exhaustion at points, and for a long time I thought I would never make it to the end because it was hard to grapple with the reality that the end is unsatisfying. All of this is to say that I don’t know of many people who have read the comic to completion after its end, aside from people reading it for the first time. In this way, we make a distinction between “serial readers”, who were around for the update cycle, and “archival readers”, who are reading the comic now that it’s largely over and done with.

To my knowledge, no one who ended the comic as a serial reader has yet bothered to reread the comic in its entirety afterwards as an archival reader, at least in our circle. If this is the case, then I may be the first. I have to assume that there is at least one person who has already done this, but I have no idea who they could be. This puts me or whoever commits to this in a unique position as having experienced the end both serially and archivally. There has long been speculation that the later portions of the comic may be more enjoyable as an archived experience, but aside from the word of people who read the comic after it was already over there is little that can be done to examine this.

With this in mind, I was quite excited to finish the comic because it meant I could contribute to this body of knowledge. I still sharply remember how I felt at the time, with the serial experience of Homestuck coming to a close. It’s been relatively easy to compare and contrast my feelings then to now, and that is why I’ve been liveblogging the occasion so extensively.

In accordance with what I described earlier, this sparked an incredible bout of discussion that did indeed last for a considerable length of time. Also as expected, instead of ceaseless discourse that succeeds in being agonizing to everyone, the discussion was pretty respectable and enjoyable. Everyone’s opinions of the end are still fresh in their memory, and it was fun to hash out the conversation even if we’ve had it a hundred times already. This continued unabated for at least a couple of hours, but then as is natural of talk that lasts for so long we began discussing some other, related topics.

With Makin’s tendency to shill literature, there comes a habit of talking about the nature of entertainment. This is one of my more favorite topics, as it strikes at the very heart of why we enjoy things. Understandably this is also one of those conversations that can become excessively heated—people may run up against a barrier where their beliefs are impenetrable to each other, and that can either lead to a dead conversation or raging discourse if handled inadequately.

There’s a facet of this discussion I’ve had with Toast once or twice before, and I think Makin as well. It concerns the nature of narrative, and how the art of storytelling works. I can’t really do justice to this conversation, as I couldn’t describe Toast’s viewpoint on this matter without seriously misrepresenting it probably—it would also take up too much time for me to describe my own position, so I’ll refrain.

Suffice to say that we both believe differently about what makes something enjoyable or “good” in as objective a sense as possible. The last time we had this discussion it petered out into “let’s agree to disagree”. This time, however, it escalated. There was talk about the nature of writing in an objective and subjective manner—the exact context is not important I suppose, but it culminated in Toast saying: “objective subjective opinions are subjective opinions that are objective in that they are widely accepted enough to become subjectively objective”. Whether sarcastic or sincere, accurate or no, this comment functioned as a signal to everyone involved that the night was officially off the rails and had entered new territory. From here, all bets were off.

What had been a pleasant and amiable discussion turned into a highly amusing fracous. There were people on the sidelines who, content simply to throw their opinion in every once in a while, were now leaping into the conversation and amplifying the already considerable energy with their own contributions. Even if they weren’t enjoying it quite as much as I was, people began creating their own pictures to make fun of Toast with, and other people as well (this activity usually being a sign that something remarkable or noteworthy has occurred). There was no chance for rest—only the ability to increase the den of noise and hilarity. I don’t know what the secret is to unlocking these sorts of conversations, and it’s highly likely that if I did I would abuse it, but they are immensely enjoyable to me. The conversation itself wasn’t even of anything particularly obtuse or strange, it was simply the energy associated with it that was so great. Everyone was enjoying themselves, posting both helpful or constructive ideas while doing so in the silliest and most outlandish ways.

My enjoyment of it is such that I may even misrepresent the occasion. I feel like I paint a picture of absolute chaos, which is only vaguely true. The reality of it is hard to describe—not even overtly manic, the sheer feeling of participation and togetherness was incredibly gratifying. All I know is that it is extremely pleasing to me when the night turns to these conversations, almost of barely-bridled energy and camaraderie. My appreciation for the people involved is intensified many-fold when this happens, and on top of the already-impressive wave of good feelings that have come for us in the last week or so this was a boon I couldn’t have dared wish for.

It really is almost too much to ask for, honestly. When these sorts of conversations happen, my contentment and satisfaction with the people I’m privileged to call my friends deepens even further. There is an incredible peace of mind that has stolen over me in the wake of this event; it would be difficult for me to overstate just how much I appreciate them all. It is my only regret that these sorts of conversations appear to be happening with decreasing frequency as time goes by, an observation that fueled my previous hesitancy and paranoia some weeks ago.

Amusing on its own is the idea that, were someone to be dropped into the fray at random with no prior experience or understanding of what we are, they would almost certainly not enjoy it. It’s almost certainly irrational but part of me derives some satisfaction out of the idea that we’re a self-contained unit of culture. There is a distinct history to us, and although people may be able to overcome it if they try hard enough (indeed, an outcome that we desire), we still have a formidable barrier of entry.

That idea in particular is somber to consider; the esoteric nature of our merry band may prove to be our undoing as time goes by. Even now, the “group” that is mspa-lit is almost completely unrecognizable from how it was this time last year, I believe. I still wasn’t terribly familiar with the place so I can’t say for sure, but I believe I recall a mishmash of different people who are all gone now. I wonder if this will prove true next year as well?

What seems likely to me is that, as time goes by, people will fall away for whatever reason, until eventually our cultural bubble is so destabilized that it has no choice but to pop. At that point, with no effective barrier, new people will join in and start participating. While we will almost certainly retain a number of people from before, the cultural landscape will have changed enough that it will assume its own distinct identity. These may be identified as “generations”, if you will.

I have no idea if this will actually be the case, or if it is then how long it will take. I may actually be full of shit, it’s hard to say from this current perspective. The optimal outcome, from what I can see, is that we take on new people to keep the energy flowing and assimilate them into the existing culture (while also adopting any positive characteristics). Whether it will work out in this fashion is basically impossible to determine for now, but one can hope. Whatever the case, I just want to see this community thrive and develop for as long as humanly possible. The future is murky, but we may yet come out the other side, stronger as a community, for whatever mysteries lie ahead.

Nothing more for today.

---

5^th of December 2017

There hasn’t been a lot to discuss today; more a small event concerning altgen, where there were people complaining about some supposed rule or another. The way this usually works by now is TS or Molly ping me and let me know something fucked is happening and I have to go check it out. I’m usually pretty fine with this arrangement, because it motivates me to pop in regularly and mess with people until they regret having to involve me.

However, life has been fairly busy recently so this is not the most enjoyable task to be faced with. It’s important to note also the frequency at which this occurs; as often as several times a week I’ll have to step in and break up an unnecessary fight or eradicate some poor child for being an idiot. This brand of distraction is amusing when the time is right but is otherwise a serious annoyance, and my agitation begins to shine through after enough of these incidents occur.

A slow progression over time, it rapidly becomes more noticeable once my patience begins wearing down. I like to think I’m usually fairly amiable, even when it comes to altgen, but my responses may become short and significantly more terse. I begin to hand out joke punishments with reckless abandon, or if I’m particularly agitated then I may begin to actually punish them (not undeservedly, but still). I think that the more astute regulars have begun to recognize these symptoms, and depending on the nature of their agenda they seek to mitigate or exacerbate them. The results vary considerably based on who and what is involved.

Today’s disturbance was less on the scale of “monstrous fuck up” and more just “mild annoyance”. A prevalent in-joke is the use of cropped pornography as avatars, a practice that (while not strictly encouraged) is currently allowed. This has been the source of contention before for obvious reasons, but the prevalent attitude is that it doesn’t actually constitute as NSFW because nothing risqué can actually be seen. Despite this, people manage to cock it up somehow; there were apparently people posting today with these avatars, or posting the images outright, that were over the line. I never got to see this myself, but I was summarily pinged by TS to come handle it.

Once I arrived, I was greeted by a clusterfuck of disappointing proportions. No one actually knew what had been posted, so with a heavy heart I started questioning people to see if they knew anything. I did this for about five minutes before I became fed up with the little shits, and at that point I made a generally declarative statement that cropped porn would be disallowed if people kept abusing it. This was when people came out of the woodwork and said that no one had actually abused the rule in the first place, a response I did not expect to see and was intensely confused by. It turns out that a choice few individuals, who I am still not totally privy to, were trying to “mini-mod” the place and institute their own rules on what counted as acceptable imagery.

After a disdainful few minutes of silence I finally put out yet another statement that discouraged this, but I didn’t have the energy to pursue it further. I haven’t heard another peep since, so I’m hoping the nonsense is done for now. After having a few hours to consider this, it is all vaguely more amusing than I remember thinking at the time. For all the complaining I can do about this, it’s important to realize that the capacity for petty idiocy is just within altgen’s nature at this point; the thought is comforting enough to convert their foolishness into a cheap source of entertainment, if nothing else.

Nothing more for today.

---

7^th of December 2017

Today there was some rather intense discourse about splinter servers, which we actually haven’t had in a while. I had thought that this particular discussion was over and done with, but I suppose I underestimated the lack of understanding that surrounds the topic. A lot of people don’t even know what strictly qualifies as a “splinter server”, probably not even me. Anything that most people approach only a nebulous understanding of is, by nature, going to generate a lot more discourse. In this way, LLF began the discussion because he wanted clarification as to what they are.

After multiple people attempted to provide definitions according to their understanding, the conversation naturally mutated into something far less innocent; there was additional confusion around the distinction between a true splinter server and a simple “personal server”, or a server created to host one’s friends irrespective of where the friends come from. Red in particular seemed to get pretty heated at the insinuation that her own server, or any personal server, could be construed as problematic. I ineffectively attempted to clarify for a bit, but then she began insulting Makin’s reasoning for and handling of the creation of other servers; the nature of this discussion was somewhat murky to me, but it hinged on the reasons why people may leave or remain on the server. Nights was dragged into this discussion again, a tactic that at this point strikes me as unfortunate due to his desire to be left out of any ensuing conflict here. As it is, Makin firmly declared that he thought he never would have left if it wasn’t for splinter servers existing.

Many wasted no time in leaping on Makin’s throat for saying this. It’s better that I not go into the exact reasons for Night’s departure—not for any controversial reason, but rather because it is simply unimportant—but suffice to say that people found this declaration to be disingenuous at best and provided numerous other reasons for it. The ensuing fracas was kind of intimidating in its intensity, and it became exceedingly obvious that the discussion was going to remain ugly.

On the one hand, I really appreciate it when the place is active and people are talking, but on the other it’s difficult to reconcile that desire for activity with the idea that sometimes the activity is unpalatable. There’s a tipping point where any discussion becomes invalid or unworthy of being had by dint of just how terrible it is. It’s hard to say where that point is exactly, and I’m not saying the conversation last night in particular deserved dismissal, but it is a principle that sticks out in my mind sharply when it seems that a given topic may get to that point. The only thing that immediately comes to mind that has successfully and especially consistently reached this level of discourse is Not On My Watch, which has effectively become taboo to even bring up.

At any rate, the conversation seemed to spiral out of control at a certain point. Rules of civility were broken, and although everyone discussed the matter no one was making any progress towards understanding, it seemed. There were too many harsh feelings on each side, even my own. At one point Makin’s responses seemed to become mocking almost, insinuating that he was “the most important person on the server”, which—while the content of the message may certainly be debated—was phrased in such an outrageously unappealing way as to be unacceptable to a number of people. I personally disdain this sort of sentiment and ended up accusing Makin of “rolling coal”.

Rolling coal is recent terminology that may or may not stick at this point. It refers to a practice that is common in the Midwest and southern states of the US, wherein one modifies their vehicle (usually a fuel-intense truck of some sort) to spew black sooty exhaust in copious amounts as they drive. Such is commonly employed to protest “rampant environmentalism”, or as a rude gesture towards other motorists and pedestrians, among others. I’ve begun using the phrase to refer to two things: unnecessarily harsh rebuttal over something that isn’t strictly important and/or responding by doubling down when proven wrong. My employment of the phrase isn’t accurate to its origin, but such is the way of language I guess.

At any rate, claiming that Makin is rolling coal is something that I’ve done in the recent past when he starts to lose an argument and starts acting out because of it (a fairly predictable response at this point). The idea, I believe, is that if he does something distracting enough then we’ll forget about the previous argument and let him off the hook for it. This has worked in the past but is becoming more obvious as time goes by.

Speaking more immediately I’m not sure if this is actually what he was doing in this argument in particular, but the conversation was negative enough that it felt correct to say in this instance. Predictably it only confused the already disorienting conversation even further and made things even more difficult to parse than they were.

Makin’s statements were particularly self-aggrandizing in this matter; on top of the “most important person in the server” comment, he continued to indicate that his decisions carried a lot of weight. While this is true, there is a particular rhetoric to be followed when making statements like this and it seems Makin dismisses it in favor of bluntness. I can appreciate this idea but in practice it makes him seem like he considers himself all-important, a viewpoint that is difficult to stomach for a lot of people. There’s an arrogance in it that is unappealing, no matter how true—a humble leader is more respectable than a braggart.

I won’t harp on this much more. Nothing else really happened today—I just feel it’s important to comment on the less palatable aspects of being here when they do happen. I enjoy this place and think its existence is a net-positive of course, but it would be doing a disservice to say that we experience no problems. Objectivity is important.

Nothing more for today.

---

8^th of December 2017

Today was a marked improvement over yesterday’s kerfuffle. We had a community stream in support of a new LOFAM album out, entitled “Xenoplanetarium”. The album’s reception was more typical than the previous I commented on: from what I could observe, most people felt that a majority of the tracks were simply alright, with a distinct few being very good. In my experience, this is usually how new albums go. This is not to say that the quality or presence of the albums is lamented—people are very happy with the results, and the fact that so many people feel like contributing in this way is pretty impressive. Even with the recent controversy I think it’s safe to say that their latest album was a success, and they deserve to be proud of their efforts.

As is standard with community streams, there was also a number of movies we watched, including the infamous Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff: The Moive. With everything I’ve said about the comic, it may be easy for one to imagine what the movie must be like. “The Moive” was and is a frequent in-joke surrounding the mythos of SBAHJ, where Hussie originally made a single flash animation to accompany the comic entitled: “MOVIE #1: hooly SHIT, wear a MOVIE???????????”. However, it has since ballooned into something far more outrageous and daunting.

A group called Monifate, self-described as “spanish amateur creative team (somewhat akin to japanese doujin circles)”, created their own version of a full-length feature film of Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff. The final product is about an hour and forty minutes long and is, as expected, a bastardization of everything that has ever been associated with filmmaking in any way, shape, or form. The videos are available on Youtube but I don’t know that it’s advisable to go watch them unless you have a particularly strong mind—they’re just that absurd.

For those of us who are fond of the source material, this is basically as complete and effective a pursuit of the medium as we could have asked for. There is absolutely no cohesion of any sort in its production: sound has been warped significantly at any and all times so that dialogue is incomprehensible, ear-splitting, or both; the video itself has been fed through a variety of programs in order to destroy it as thoroughly as possible; after watching it I couldn’t begin to tell you what the plot was, and that’s probably how it’s supposed to be; the physical movement and speech patterns of the actors was so unbelievably awkward that it stretched the limits of physical perception to try and watch them accomplish any sort of action at all.

I personally found the entire experience exhausting as hell. Makin wanted my impression directly after it was finished, but my brain felt like too many squeezed lemons to really give a proper answer. Some time after viewing it I still feel that way about it honestly. There’s some content on this earth that’s so surreal that it defies any attempt to understand it by nature. I would say that I’m glad The Moive exists, but that would be too definite an assessment to give it.

The more exposure I gain to all of the elements of this fandom, the more I realize just how utterly bizarre and unique its circumstances are in some respects. In that way, I think it’s safe to say I am glad. It’s not everyday that you encounter a cultural goldmine like this.

Nothing more for today.

---

9^th of December 2017

There is some further consideration that I have to wonder about after today. I woke up today, greeted with a ping from Makin saying I should check out some people from the forums that MrCheeze was talking about. Prominent figures in MSPAF, who I still am not fully aware of even after some small exposition. I have no real inclination to interview them, although strictly speaking I probably should—my brief entry on the forums was hardly a comprehensive examination of the actual culture surrounding the place.

And yet, I find myself unwilling for some reason. I’m not sure if the time just isn’t right or if there is some deeper malaise going on, but I feel compelled to turn away from the suggestion. Perhaps it’s a spot of indignance in me; Makin seems to be involving himself more readily with these efforts, and while I certainly appreciate his assistance on these matters I’m extremely wary of anyone intruding too much. I’m not even sure how it is he would “intrude”, if at all, and I’m sure that these thoughts may be interpreted as paranoia for many, but nonetheless I feel it necessary to spell these thoughts out, for myself if nothing else. I should talk with him about this sometime and see what his thoughts are. Maybe he’ll have some insight on where to take this journal in the future, insofar as what to do with it once all is said and done. It would certainly defeat the purpose if it were to never be seen again.

My thoughts on this matter have probably been exacerbated at least in part by a response I got in the interviews, concerning the nature of this journal and my investigations. I will avoid going into further detail untl the entry about these interviews in particular, but suffice to say that one of the answers I received felt like a rather unfair jab at my methodology. It did bring up a more or less cogent point about who I’m interviewing and what I’m writing about though, so in the interest of maintaining as complete a record as I can I’ve taken it into due consideration. I understand that this description is rather nebulous, but it will make more sense in the future entry dedicated to this topic—namely, I feel I will describe it in some more detail once the Music Team entry is complete. Time will tell.

Of a more specific bent, there was a rather entertaining swing to the evening that was somewhat unconventional. I’ve been struck with a particular ennui lately, and thus a subsequent boredom. I was trawling around on the HSD and not saying much, but then was struck by a small piece of inspiration: I started inviting people to play Left 4 Dead 2.

In my experience, the idea of people playing games together has been often touted but rarely executed for some reason. SS13 is more the exception than the rule, with a somewhat stable userbase (although dwindling as time goes by). Getting enough people together to play any sort of game is nothing short of wrangling chickens, but occasionally it may be pulled off successfully. Tonight was one such occasion: myself, TS, Nostalgic, Putnam, Toast, Sora, and Dingus all got together to play. VirtuNAT was going to join us but couldn’t download the game in time, but they were with us in spirit nonetheless.

Thus launched one of the more stupid, yet enjoyable nights I’ve had. The teams were horribly unbalanced but none of us were in it for victory—rather, it was simply about enjoying some good, old-fashioned tomfoolery together. I have to say, the energy was palpable; we all made each other laugh, and it never quite stopped being interesting. All too soon it was over, though, and it made me feel a bit sad to realize the fun was over. The times where we get together like this are miraculous in their own right, and I sincerely hope that it can be done again in the near future.

This was followed by a more typical arrangement: Putnam, Barry, and I have all been playing Minecraft with each other on a semi-regular basis. This is a more common and pedestrian occurrence, so I won’t go about it at too much length; rather I just feel it’s noteworthy because I have come to associate them with the game in my own way. This is actually the second iteration of a server we’ve played on together, both hosted by WoC.

I have to confess an extremely profound sense of satisfaction at having two people to play with on a more or less regular basis. I feel it speaks to an inherent ability of the HSD, that us three seemingly random individuals can all find a game together and play it so regularly. It is doomed to fade just like last time, but by some confluence of nature the three of us have inexorably been pulled towards this game and enjoyed it together for some time. It seems a silly thing to bother remarking on so thoroughly, but there’s an odd and endearing sense of magic to it in my eyes. I think I can understand a little of what people mean when they call things fated.

Nothing more for today.

---

10^th of December 2017

Today took on a distinct tone that reminded me of the night I described a couple entries ago, where mania ran rampant and coated the day at certain points. However, the balance of wacky behavior with earnest involvement was not maintained very well, and at many points the conversation crashed as a result.

An early event was Makin tightening his grip on mspa-lit—there was discussion he wasn’t fond of happening, so naturally he attempted to shut it down with his signature bluntness. I believe it was some rather characteristic talk of Dragon Ball, and he threatened to shut the channel down over that if it wasn’t moved to #anime. It might have been a different discussion, but the exact show in question isn’t necessarily important. Makin’s attempts to divert the discussion from topics he doesn’t like strike people as disingenuous because it is almost always an attempt to assert his own interests over others.

I protested the dismissal because the channel wasn’t even being used at the time, at which point wheals described it thusly: “i don't care because anti-anime laws will never be enforced impartially”. This has been a fairly consistent theme in mspa-lit, where Makin’s will takes precedence over that of others in the discussion. It continues to serve as one of the main points of contention between him and a variety of people on the server, adding considerable fuel to the idea that Makin is hypocritical, among other things.

This is less the point than the fact that it is aggravating to have your discussion shunted elsewhere, often to the effect of death. It served to disrupt the momentum of the conversation in palpable ways, and I believe such tactics were responsible for some pretty heavy periods of silence. Today in particular was marked by some distinct areas of quiet, despite the intended goal to increase the activity level of the place as much as possible. I quickly became bored with this and decided to check on altgen.

This foray, perhaps predictably, did not yield any entertaining fruit. I’ve talked at length before about how altgen has been following a marked trend of de-extremization, and is beginning to turn into a more socially dominated place. This development has served as a particular point of ire both in the past and recently, as it feels as if altgen has been coopted and is being fundamentally misused. The form of altgen that I was familiar with seems to have died months ago, a fact that brings me much bitterness. I wonder if it will be this way forever.

I went back to mspa-lit, which had since become more active, but something felt almost imperceptibly wrong the entire time. It’s hard to place my finger on it exactly but it was almost too shitposty for what it should be. There was an excessive amount of social-like posting from people, and whether joking or not it helped me to understand why it is exactly that Makin tries to institute these barriers in conversation; the degree of flirtatiousness goes beyond comfortable levels, and the discussion is easy to derail into a ridiculous bout of navel-gazing. Even if I fundamentally disagree with how he does things, he—presumably—does in fact have a reason for the things he does. Perhaps there’s a way to reconcile this, I’ll have to think about it.

Nothing more for today.

---

11^th of December 2017

Today was confusing and, all things considered, rather onerous. I may have already been in a bad mood when the events of the evening began, but there was a definite progression over time that led to unmitigated bullshit unfolding.

This began with a discussion in mspa-lit, as one might learn without any surprise whatsoever. Everyone’s posting habits have been somewhat erratic as of late, owing probably to the fact that finals are here, and everyone is scrambling around like chickens with their heads cut off. Even if finals are not involved, people have been acting exceedingly strangely and it’s beginning to grow tiresome.

Trickster is a great example of this, having been “Ifnar-posting” lately—he has taken on the mannerisms and typing style of Ifnar, but he is regrettably unable to actually speak as such. We consciously recognized this only a little while after it started and called Trickster out on it, but without any real intent to quell the behavior. We were more or less content to let it continue for a while and incorrectly assuming that it would go away on its own, but after two days it had grown incredibly annoying somehow. Along with everyone else I told him to stop, at which point he seemed to openly mock me and continue doing so anyway. Trickster can be an urchin—perhaps somewhat apropos given his name—but he is not a brazen fool. I was almost shocked at this display, too much to even ban him for it. Instead I tried to interface with him and figure out what the fuck was going on to make him act this way. At that point he admitted that he was on a trip that was making him feel weirdly, affecting his posting habits.

Such nonsense has been the stuff of the day to day lately. Today I thought we might witness a reprieve from the neverending absurdity, because somehow Tipsy and Putnam started discussing ethical frameworks of all things. I described an occurrence earlier this year where Makin and I were discussing some rather philosophically oriented topics, and while it may appear pseudo-intellectual in nature to some I think we genuinely enjoy these conversations because it offers a chance to understand each other on a more base level. The same would have been true of today: I was quite looking forward to this discussion, brought up on a silver platter as it were.

I should have known it was not to last. The conversation was approaching full swing, and though it may have been cumbersome to people not currently engaged the discussion itself was fairly interesting. Putnam and Tipsy, among others, were on the cusp of a deeper understanding of themselves and their position in this group as a whole, but then hb came out of the woodwork and threw a dong-shaped wrench right into the gears.

Even now, hours later, it still incenses me to think of it. Hb and a couple others, Toast and Dingus included, felt that the conversation was circlejerky or otherwise unimportant and shortly began sabotaging it as thoroughly as possible. They employed tactics not unfamiliar to me at this point: shitposting subtly, derailing the conversation in slight ways that threw the entire discussion off balance, baiting, the works. The following fifteen minutes were some of the most grueling I have ever spent on this server, with a small, dedicated group of saboteurs shamelessly working in tandem to destabilize a discussion because, as one remarked, they were “bored” and unhappy with the current topic.

There are few words capable of describing how upset I was by this development. As with Trickster I was almost unable to respond—how do you handle a situation where people you are familiar with and thoroughly trust act like petulant brats? I grew angry, perhaps too much so. I didn’t ban them, because this sort of thing isn’t technically breaking rules. However, it was so flagrantly disrespectful that I made it clear I wouldn’t tolerate it again. I think hb accepted this more or less with a grain of salt, although he was clearly disgruntled at the admonishment.

I ranted about it shortly in the mod channel as well, although I tried to keep my grievances more or less to myself. It’s difficult to respond to something like this: how much backlash is too much? In the end I think I did the most respectable thing I could and let it go this time. I’m not sure if this will help, but next time I won’t be lenient on them. This sort of intense disrespect for others is unacceptable. Then again, I can’t say I feel comfortable making a rule protecting discussion, because sometimes there is in fact an excessively shitty conversation going on that could benefit from being interrupted. As usual, it will have to be a case by case thing.

Needless to say, this put me in a considerably foul mood for the rest of the night. Thankfully I was able to take my mind off of it for a while by playing more Left 4 Dead with the fellows from the previous night and Sea Hitler, but then once that was said and done I was forced to return to my agitated contemplations on the matter. I didn’t want to shit up mspa-lit with my grouchiness so I decided to peruse altgen instead, figuring that the lack of seriousness would enable me to move past my frustration.

Unfortunately, the trend I’ve remarked upon for altgen, with its gradual increase in socialization, was in full swing. I hate to admit it but this served to make me even more upset than I was before, although at this point it was purely irrational. I decided to ignore their group behavior and start posting things at random. For some reason Sea Hitler and the janitors all caught on and started indiscriminately shitposting. Before long, other people caught on and the chat devolved into nothing but screaming for a while. It was almost magical; the transformation itself was subtle, but once in full swing no one could ignore it or swim against the tide. For any who were part of altgen for the community, it must have been an utter nightmare.

Eventually the screaming itself subsided, but it had given way to a peculiar kind of mania. Borne out of the sheer indignance at altgen’s apparent wussification, I think it proved too much for myself and others who have been around for a while; we were swept up into a tide of anti-social sentiment, and we started attempting to shake up the place. We decreed that altgen would go back to its roots as a shitpost-centric channel, and that all “socialization” would be moved to the appropriate channels or dealt with harshly.

I think it goes without saying that this did not go over well for people who were genuinely trying to associate with each other openly. I can say this with confidence because many who were doing so said they would leave over our rule change, to which I believe the reply was more often than not “good, there are other channels for you besides this one.” As time went on, however, there was no decrease in the number of people posting such messages. The backlash to our attempts to reinstate the original, more harsh environment was fierce, and I couldn’t help but feel increasingly that our sudden interference was ill-advised.

Finally, people began daring us to delete altgen entirely if we were going to do this to it. Not one to shy away from hiding altgen for a while, I obliged and closed the channel. The conversation went to #general; at the closure of altgen, more regulars began coming out of the woodwork, including $trider. While most people who use altgen are unmitigated children whose participation is usually cursory, $trider is a fully capable adult who often employs pretty solid reasoning. As soon as he became involved, the discussion took a more serious bent; I felt compelled to address him more fully, and it was then that my façade of confidence began to truly falter.

I’m glad that I talked with and unbanned this fellow some months ago, he’s proven to be quite reasonable about most things. After talking the situation through with him, I became fully cognizant of the fact that what I was doing was blindingly stupid. When faced with the truth, you have two options: accept it responsibly or deny it to further your own agenda. Anyone who dares to call themselves decent or rational could never consider the latter an acceptable course of action.

Faced with this Hobson’s choice, it was time to put a stop to the charade. I reopened the channel with a temporary gag so I could explain my actions for the night and request forgiveness: when it comes to matters like this, I feel like a direct approach is best. People were understandably pissed at first, but in the end I feel as if my rhetoric won out. Once I unmuted the channel, people were more than satisfied with my apologies, so I feel as if everything turned out well enough.

Pigeon Jude, a notable altgen regular like $trider, talked with me about this in PMs; they were also critical of my actions and helped persuade me to see reason again. Additionally, they admitted that, while happy with the resolution wherein altgen was not in fact reduced to a cesspool again, the hugboxing had grown rather intense and that it needed to be reduced. They mentioned being in talks with TS about the issue, and I have some hope that altgen will be able to retain its community feeling while also edging out unnecessary drama or embarrassingly private posts.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that a hugbox, according to urbandictionary (the only resource I could find with a definition for this idea), is “a derogatory term for an environment, usually on the internet, in which a group with similar interests gathers to discuss topics in what they intend to be a safe, comforting, and confrontation-free environment.” This seems fine in theory, but in practice it usually leads to a place where no one can speak out against the current consensus of the group: to do so usually leads to one being branded a heretic, and subsequent castigation. Hugboxes are immensely undesirable as they destroy the ability to discuss new ideas that oppose groupthink. Communities that suffer from this are usually doomed to become ultra-secluded and die. Makin and the rest of us mods are not okay with this, of course, so we try our best to eliminate the chances of it happening.

This all having been said, keeping a hugbox from developing was half of my motivation for beginning this poorly-planned crusade against altgen’s transformation into another #social channel. However, as I’ve admonished (or tried to admonish) Makin for, it does not do to try and stamp out a community that simply admires and cares for each other. Genuine concern and appreciation for one another does not equate to hugboxing, and is actually desirable if you want people to remain in your community and strengthen it.

While I will still foment as much chaos as possible within altgen for my own amusement and to keep the channel on its toes culturally, I think that the night was left on a rather positive note with regards to my involvement. I hope that the camaraderie between myself and altgen regulars will only deepen as time goes by, so that further misunderstandings may be avoided.

Nothing more for today.

---

15^th of December 2017

Nothing of much note has been happening for the last few days, although an already bothersome trend has only intensified lately. Makin has been seemingly redoubling his efforts to edge out conversation he deems unwanted—where before it felt like he was content to leave conversations be for a while as long as the people involved were engaged and enjoying themselves, now he wastes no time in relocating discussions (and more often than not killing them in the process) when the pop up.

This has left us little recourse. Now most of the interesting conversations are had once he has gone to bed for the night—attempting to engage in topics that he doesn’t approve of while he’s awake is a quick way to earn admonishment and, historically at least, a channel ban if you refuse to comply. Needless to say, this newfound hostility has been disquieting.

It’s actually difficult to assess exactly how other people feel about it. As near as I can tell, no one has openly complained about the tactic yet, at least not in this most recent form. I haven’t even bothered to ask most people, because the prospect of doing so seems pointless. I’m not convinced that, even if everyone in the channel were to complain about it, Makin would change these tendencies. I’m not sure if this is an effect of us indulging him too much or if he’s simply playing around with us, but the only thing I know for sure at this point is that I find it aggravating.

Realistically mspa-lit has always been Makin’s treading ground, but as with the altgen incident a few days prior the purposes and strengths of a channel will change over time. My trying to force the channel to conform to how it used to be proved disastrous—I wonder if Makin will eventually come to the realization that forcing the channel to conform to his whims does not endear him to anyone else? Does he even care about that? It’s difficult to say.

I’m not even sure exactly how much I should care about this behavior. I imagine that if outcry is great enough then Makin will consider changing his ways, but so much is unknown about him at any given time. His motives are unclear, his argumentation is confusing and purposefully nonsensical more often than I would prefer. Perhaps all of this is just his way of having a laugh over the rest of us.

Yet, for all of this it hasn’t been totally miserable. I guess my complaints really are my own, in that I couldn’t begin to tell if others share them at this point. Perhaps it’s not worth worrying about until I know for sure one way or the other? The last thing I wish to do is to cause waves unnecessarily. We find time enough to discuss off-topic nonsense when Makin isn’t around, this policy hasn’t become too draconic just yet. Hopefully it stays that way.

Nothing more for today.

---

17^th of December 2017

The last couple of days have felt kind of rough. I feel a very prominent sense of agitation for some reason, owed partially to real life circumstances, but also exacerbated in no small part by events of the HSD or at least my own perception of them.

Yesterday I openly voiced my concerns with Makin’s behavior, but the ensuing conversation cast some light on my self-doubt as to whether those concerns are accurate or deserved. My own frustrations are no doubt amplifying how I feel about Makin’s joking nature; I put out some feelers to see how others felt, and although many still retain the sentiment that Makin is inscrutable and sometimes obnoxious in his dealings, no one feels as if he has been more so than usual lately.

Thus, I am forced to assume that it is my own perceptions that have changed, and far more greatly than I would like. A break may serve to help this—I’m sure with the chance to relax will come a loosening of this internal tension. Makin himself didn’t really respond much to my questions or musings on the matter, which, as always, I’m not sure how to receive. It has been the case in the past where I realized I was taking everything too seriously, and had to consciously remind myself not to do so. This is looking more and more to be one of those times.

The HSD itself has been rather lazy lately; I believe the lull in activity is due to a confluence of factors, most important being the holiday season. Members are no doubt celebrating the end of the year in whatever fashion is most appropriate to them, and I’m sure that visits to family or some other activity is the primary focus of their time. Such is the case everywhere—even outside of the HSD’s bubble, things feel a little more slow than usual. The holidays have always managed to withdraw passion and energy from the public sphere and donate it instead to more private settings. Places usually brimming with activity seem almost forlorn. I hope that all manage to enjoy their time this winter, and then I think it goes without saying that I look forward to their return. Perhaps not “return” in a physical sense, but the restoration of their participation here.

Perhaps my focus is too singleminded in this regard.

More positively, there are still vestiges of what I prize about this place lingering even in the dead of winter. Later on the night of the 16th or so, a variety of people seemingly came out of the woodwork, including Cait, LLF, Putnam, virtuNAT, DeceasedGentleman (aka DeadGuy), SomeRandomGuy, and a couple others. The tone of the ensuing conversations was actually pretty typical for what I’ve come to expect from all the people involved: Putnam in particular is pretty vocal on a wide variety of topics, usually pertaining to math or programming of some sort. It’s almost comforting to see him go on at length about these topics—he is simply vociferous in topics he is well versed in or finds fascinating. This can sometimes prove to be a problem; in the past he has been known to talk about things far beyond any level of interest others may have expressed in the topic, sometimes talking to himself or a dead room for over an hour. While it is occasionally necessary to shut such monologues down, it is far from odious—in fact, I would say that it’s rather endearing.

Aside from this, the night was dedicated to discussing things of a particular brand of mundanity. Even now I fail to remember what it is we were talking about, if anything in particular—whatever it may have been, the tone was decidedly familiar and unremarkable. I don’t mean this poorly, however; even when not much of value is being said, a worthwhile quality may come from elsewhere. Such was the case that night, where despite the topic being excessively unimportant we felt compelled to speak with each other. It lent itself to an air of relaxation and joviality.

I find that it is a hallmark of particularly strong and tightly knit communities to be able to talk about nothing in particular while still enjoying each other’s company. It reminds me especially of the Sydlexia community, where the same sentiment was so prevalent as to be taken for granted. It also, in my mind, cements the idea that everyone here may be considered friends, not just with me but each other. As someone who possesses a significant degree of uncertainty in their dealings with other people, it is rather comforting to realize such things. The idea, I think, is hampered by an unspoken desire to keep from saying such things aloud, but I’ve never been one for stuffy social propriety.

No, being able to discuss even the most common of topics with these fellows is a great thing. There is nothing special or unique about Dragon Ball or Harry Potter at this point, and there is even less that is special about random nonsense such as reverse-image searching a black background (a real thing that Putnam did, goodness knows why). Despite this, we are able to enjoy talking about such with each other. That’s a wonderful thing to be able to do with people.

I’ve gone on at length about this more than I deserve, though. More meaningfully, the SBAHJ kickstarter ended today. It accrued nearly two times its original goal, and this alongside its close has garnered ever more ire from some in the community. I would be lying if I said I cared sufficiently enough about it to protract out any debate on the topic, but even so I did end up arguing with Minish and hb for a little bit.

The most charitable way I could describe the opposition is that the Kickstarter is viewed as unnecessary and inappropriate—the website is ordinarily used for funding projects that “otherwise wouldn’t be”. The SBAHJ book project does not fall under this for a couple reasons, most notably being that Hussie has the influence and (probably) the wealth to organize such a project without a Kickstarter. It also seems inappropriate because the book has apparently already been written and illustrated in full, and the Kickstarter is being used as a preorder service, to gauge how many people would be interested in buying the book.

While I don’t necessarily see anything wrong with this, or would like not to, I am forced to recognize the validity of these concerns. Minish attempted to present the problem with financing as an issue with Hussie’s apparent deal with Viz, where he already has a million dollars to pursue such projects. I feel as if this is too vague to be a recognizable complaint, but speaking more generally I would find it hard to believe that Hussie does not already have the funds for printing and shipping of the book, or would be unable to strike another deal with Topataco. From our current perspective the situation is simply too muddy to see through clearly, and I guess that’s the source of my objection to these concerns.

At the end of the day, I can’t really blame them for feeling the way they do about it. Hussie is historically untrustworthy with such projects, and there is no shortage of ill will towards him lately. I try not to hold such a cynical viewpoint, but perhaps that is simply because I have not been around long enough. Then again, I’ve survived almost an entire year of moderating this server—that must count for something in this.

Speaking of which, there was some additional talk about The Reckoning today. Since I wasn’t around for it initially, the original event is somewhat obscure to me. The exact extent of “damage” that took place was apparently far greater than I thought, with all channels and mods being wiped out completely while the server was restructured. Tori posited that “part of the chaos was from everyone being dumped in one channel”, which is hardly surprising to me. Makin continues to outwardly hint at the coming of another such event, referring to it as “Judgment Day”.

The potential seriousness of this notwithstanding, I can’t help but laugh at the thought of “The Reckoning 2: Judgment Day”. I’ve said before that in some ways I actually look forward to the next cataclysmic event on this server, it would do much to shake things up. With a sample size of one so far, and especially taking into consideration the vastly different circumstances involved, it’s hard to say how it would turn out. Yet, rather than anxiety, the idea is tainted only with a curious brand of excitement for me. I guess that constitutes a sort of jinx—I’m not exactly looking forward to the mass outrage and panic that Makin implies will accompany this, but it will be amusing nonetheless.

A minor note, but Makin found an immense repository of old /hsg/ threads, from the time period in which archives are less reliable. It may be of only limited interest to most people, but I definitely appreciate the access to this material if nothing else. A link to a Megaupload with all of the information has been provided in appendix D under “Collection of /hsg/ Threads”. It seems to be a very well categorized collection, worth looking through for historicity’s sake if nothing else.

Actually, after looking through a number of these threads I’m kind of stunned at how deeply different they are in content and tone from what I’ve grown used to in the present day. Some of these threads are from over seven years ago, and it’s kind of unsettling to go through these old messages. The people involved are almost all completely unnamed, aside from a few people using tripcodes. I’m reminded distinctly of the graffiti that has been found in parts of old Roman society, serving as glimpses into the day to day life of citizenry that no longer exists.

The content of these threads is almost naïve in their simplicity. Of course it’s really easy to say this from my current perspective here, after the comic is pretty much over, but seeing how things were through this window directly into the past is almost surreal. It calls to mind that idea of the Wild West, where the lay of the land was not yet known to most, and there was opportunity to explore and delve deeper into the content. It’s almost kind of scary to see where these people came from and contrast it with how things have ended up. There are a myriad of fanworks that were started in complete earnestness, ambitious projects that were grand in their posture and exciting to contemplate, that were abandoned days or weeks later. Yet the baseline posts never stop, it seems. It is unending discussion for years worth of real time. How many people talked in these threads on a regular basis, I wonder?

There is an incredible complexity here that is almost impossible to describe with words alone. Even without any prior involvement with this, the underlying energy and delight of participation in these threads is evident. The mania is infectious, and it’s giving me a strange sense of nostalgia for something that I was never even around to witness. What other parts of this fandom have I missed out on? What details will I fail to note and preserve? How much is even possible to preserve at this point?

It feels like I need to rethink what this journal is about, again. There is so much perspective offered by these threads, I may spend more time going through them. I need to work harder to gather as much information as I can about these cultures.

This entry has gone on longer than I anticipated, but stuff just won’t stop happening today, it seems. Just got word that Miro was having a poll on MSPFA regarding the use of slurs in fanadventures. This poll appeared to be a sham to all who were watching it, because he only left it up for one hour and as soon as the option for “remove slurs” started to win he closed it and announced that the victor. This is an upsetting development, and most people are unhappy with what Miro deems “slurs”, including such terms as AIDS. As Makin indicated, “homestuck would definitely be censored or outright deleted under the new mspfa rules”.

If Miro decides, he could easily get rid of any fanventure he thinks is unacceptable. The fate of fanventures like CANWC and innumerable others is now in jeopardy, and no one knows what will happen. Nixshadow and Miro actually came on just now to defend the poll; they either suspected or perceived that there was some significant misrepresentation going on here

Nixshadow’s position in all of this is kind of strange to me, although understandable: they simply appear to want to stay away from the fandom drama as much as possible. On the other hand, Miro wanted to “clear his name” however possible, and set the record straight as to what he’s doing. Despite his protestations I feel unconvinced—this censorship is almost assuredly a bad thing in a broad sense. Of course, this opinion is the companion to a very widely spanning series of discourses about the nature of free speech, which it will be better to go into another time.

The overall point here is that there is significant fear over what Miro is doing now. Some are perturbed enough by this that they’ve brought up alternatives: Gnawms suggested a place called “Hiveworks”, which I’m not familiar with. Other suggestions have been similar, sparking contention for one reason or another. This is a pretty good lesson in why decentralizing your community is important though—if everyone is localized in one place and is subsequently destabilized, you risk losing everything.

There is some hope that we won’t have to resort to anything drastic; at this point it’s simply too early to tell what will happen. If enough people get upset using Miro’s service then they will simply leave for the next best alternative. Perhaps this move would be advantageous in the long run, but splitting up the community in the meantime seems like a great way to kill it by accident. It depends on the relative levels of passion that each person goes into it with, but I can’t help but think that it wouldn’t turn out well. With luck, nothing dramatic will be necessary anyway.

This conversation wound down as most do, by descending into madness and random memes as people got tired of debating it ad nauseum. The future of MSPFA now at least vaguely uncertain, I imagine that any aware of this must be considering what it means for their fanventures. Is this the beginning of the end for MSPFA, or will it bounce back well enough? Will this mark the eventual rise of other fanventure websites? Who knows, man. We’ll see eventually.

Nothing more for today.

---

18^th of December 2017

Today was rather intense in its own way. It started off innocently enough, with some well-intended elbowrubbing among us in the morning. At some point though, it became immediately clear something was off.

The lighthearted mood of the morning was abruptly shaken by a sudden skirmish (as I perceived it) between Minish and Tensei. The source of the conflict was some foolish nonsense: Minish had made a one word joke response and Tensei mocked him for it. This sort of banter, if it can even be called that, is the most basic form of interaction here for most people. Minish did not take well to it, though, and before I knew it Minish was complaining about his general treatment in this channel. Normally I would roll my eyes at such a display but he appeared to be genuinely distraught, feeling that we were treating him poorly.

The conversation became complicated from here. There is, I assume, never any real intent to insult others here; a significant part of our interactions tend to involve ribbing, but it is hardly a bad thing. I’ve described how I used to be more stilted and that this bothered me, but over time it has become significantly easier to take in and understand what’s going on. Unfortunately, in such places as ours, there will always be at least one person who doesn’t appreciate the common mode of interaction. This may or may not be their fault—sometimes it’s unavoidable or cannot be helped. I’m not sure what the case is with Minish, whether he’s too anal-retentive to handle everyone’s jokes, or if he is simply unable to for some reason. Whatever the case, when situations like this arise it is typically the best course of action to take a step back and see if something needs to be changed.

I would be lying through my teeth if I said such behavior does not bother me anymore; the fact of the matter is that it does, but not nearly as much as it used to. I am fortunate that I’ve been able to learn the ins and outs of associating with others in this group, but it will not always come so easy to others. With people like myself and Minish, there are three methods for handling it: adjusting your behavior around the individual in question; continuing as you were and hoping that they adjust; and spurning them and their concerns. The latter is of course not really an option, unless your community is founded on exclusionary tactics like 4chan. What tends to happen, in my experience, is a mix of the former two. It is useful to dial back the jeering to appease the person in question, but only temporarily. After doing so you can gradually return to the normal mode of talking, and in doing so condition the person to be fine with it. This may be seen as insidious by some, but it is a tried and true method of assimilation into almost any internet culture I’ve seen.

I guess all of this is besides the point, more or less. The focus for us and Minish was not “how do we assimilate him into our fold more fully,” but rather “what can we do to make him less upset?” Minish is a valued member of our group, and although sometimes he can go off the rails and cause problems he’s not irredeemable or even deserving of scorn. With these things in mind I wanted to try and meet him in the middle, to appease him and then help him become more acclimated to what we do. I fear that my explanations were unhelpful though—to be fair, the focus should have been on making him feel better at that moment. Explanations can come after, when everyone involved is more level-headed.

At this point though, Makin came online and involved himself directly. To my faint surprise he echoed the sentiment that Minish’s concerns should come first. It is now such that we’re to try and avoid making too much fun of him. It bears repeating that no ill will was intended towards him, and we had no idea that he was sincerely bothered by our mocking. Of course, if he does something that is unconditionally deserving of it we will still probably make fun of him; I have faith that Minish is reasonable enough to withstand this treatment.

As things go, this conversation eventually transformed itself into a discussion about rationality, hardly an unusual circumstance for us. More atypical was that during the course of the talk we started talking about the qualities of various people in the server. I believe the first quality to be exemplified was “wholesomeness”, which I and many others attributed immediately to Phantos. I associated Makin with energy and creativeness, although he surprised me and attributed energy to me. I had always attributed this property to him due to all of the events he organizes, and the way he manages to galvanize the server; I’ll admit that it was very pleasant to hear him compliment me in this way.

I feel as if there has been a relative increase in the number of conversations that are like this, namely that we ascribe each person to some sort of qualifier. They have definitely happened in the past as well, where we compare members of the group to characters in a story, especially Homestuck, but I’ve always figured that sort of subject was either too juvenile in nature or too socially oriented for Makin’s taste, perhaps others. They are certainly effective at bringing people together, at the very least in a superficial sense, but it’s difficult to tell how exactly such talk affects the community in a broad sense. I’m more than certain people like WoC would find it disgusting, an idea that brings me some mirth.

Later in the day, Austinado was talking about the project he’s on, Vast Error. This is a more typical and, indeed, palatable topic for the likes of mspa-lit. It usually involves a hefty amount of criticism, as we are not shy about remarking on qualities that we find unsuitable. This can be very useful for people able to withstand the criticism, but often I fear we may be too harsh or demanding. In the course of discussing Vast Error, Makin made a comparison between Austinado’s writing to gambling for some reason: “you are falling for most of the early writer pitfalls but you think you'll be the one to make it regardless, like a gambling addict that thinks they can win if they play one more time”. Even after considering this for some time now, I’m unable to parse what exactly he might have meant by this ³⁸.

Regardless of the intended message, Austin seemed to become despondent afterwards and then mentioned he had to go. He is a fairly cherished member of the community in his own right, so this sudden departure was concerning. Makin even remarked, “I might have gone too far in a few places,” which while a meme phrase reflected a real and rare sentiment of regret from him. At this point I was torn between concern and amusement, but given Austin’s popularity I let him be. Hamfisted analogies aside, he doesn’t have thin skin and I figured that at least a couple people were comforting him already.

Sure enough, such was the case. Red and Toast got to him shortly after the conversation ended, and I imagine one or two others as well. Austin also messaged me personally afterwards and explained that he wasn’t upset, which I was grateful for. He really was busy preparing for the release of a new album about Vast Error, which is always an exciting event for any fanventure team. With some reassuring words he left once more, inviting me to attend the album release later in the day.

Situations like this one are rather heartening to me. I mentioned recently the feeling that the community has become more tightly knit in recent months, and these ocurrences do much to cement that feeling for me. It feels that, with each day that passes, people become more firmly implanted here, and the sense of togetherness grows. Even Makin, for all of his posturing, leaks little bits of feeling³⁹ here and there. He talks harshly but I can sense underneath that imposing virtual frame is a softie who appreciates the group that he has built for himself here.

That’s right Makin, I’ve got your number down. Now watch as he deletes the entire server to spite me.

Anyway, I did actually attend the volume release, and as always I was impressed with the sheer amount of dedication and talent pumped into the project. There were many genuinely enjoyable songs on the album, and afterwards people got into voicecall to discuss it and generally hang out. It was markedly different to be on call with these people, as the Vast Error team is its own collection of people. Many of them exist on the HSD as well, but nonetheless it was a unique feeling to be enmeshed, however temporarily, with a group that is more or less divested from what I have come to call my home. The internet is a fascinating and wonderful medium for people to congregate and collaborate on all manner of things, and seeing such a group in real time and recognizing their dedication to each other and their project was pleasantly stunning.

Speaking of other communities, the Homesmut server finally reached their own sort of Schwarzchild radius recently. It was bound to happen sooner or later, but I think that we are witnessing the beginning of another dedicated community. The number of people on the server recently breached 400 people, 75% of which have access to the NSFW channels, and though I’ve checked in periodically it never seems that anyone is really talking instead of just enjoying the pornography. After the death and collapse of the NSFW community on the HSD, this has been an incredibly disappointing development.

However, after poking my head in today it seemed as if there were people discussing things in a general and relaxed manner. Curious, I observed for a while and confirmed my suspicions; these members had started talking amongst themselves, and were actually fomenting discussion. It is difficult to call them a community at this point, it is too prototypical for that, but nonetheless there is the beginnings, the merest hint of, a culture starting to form. At this point I involved myself, talking with them for a while. A mostly friendly bunch, I think it’s too early to tell whether they will fall apart or succeed and grow. I am not allowing myself to believe that the latter is a given at this point in time. One can certainly hope though—perhaps we will finally have a dedicated adult community again in the future.

Back in the HSD proper, later at night we began having a conversation about which fanventures were “the best”. This is obviously a meme topic, to be treated with no degree of seriousness. Despite this, Minish was engaging and to all appearances having a nice time. Compared with the events of the morning this was rather nice to witness. All of the people involved, especially Sora, were giving him a hard time for his tastes I believe, but Minish took it in good stride. It may be that my hope for him to adjust are not misplaced. It’s too early to make a prediction, but situations like this are always a rather positive sign.

In a more general sense, I’ve mentioned it recently but I feel it’s worth stating again that I really enjoy these kinds of silly conversations. We try to discuss things in a serious manner often enough, but too much of a good thing is a bad thing. It’s best to strive for a balance of entertaining with substantive, and it is always good to try and increase the sense of camaraderie between people in the community. Sometimes I’ve considered trying to purposefully steer discussion in a way that people will do this more, but if I’m being honest I don’t see the value in engineering such an environment. A self sustaining and healthy community is better off having formed organically, rather than through any sort of higher orchestration.

In a general capacity, I am more than pleased to be able to say that it feels like our group of people has become only closer in the last two months. My earlier fears seem to have been misplaced, which is always something I will be happy to say. I hope in complete earnestness that we continue on this path for as long as possible.

Nothing more for today.

---

19^th of December 2017

Not much of importance happened today, honestly. Interesting conversation involved a topic that Tensei has been interested in for the last couple of days, namely a Rapture scenario where everyone on earth disappears except for you, and what you would do in the face of such circumstances. I think that today’s version of this was a branch of that idea, specifically concerning repopulation of the world even without a partner. This turned into a huge talk on genetics, which is a twisty knot for its own reasons. Suffice to say that the conversation was a very interesting one.

I will actually be completely absent tomorrow, and so I’ve asked people to keep an eye on events in the server and tell me about them if they are important or otherwise remarkable. It might make for an interesting entry depending on what happens and what people tell me exactly. As it is, nothing more for today.

---

21^st of December 2017

Nothing of importance seems to have happened yesterday, as those who agreed to watch (MrNostalgic, Neth, Lord of Stupid, and virtuNAT) told me. They seemed rather disappointed; I think they were looking forward to having something to report. Alas, not all of watching the HSD is exciting. I still appreciate their efforts though—it does make me laugh a little bit to consider them sitting and watching the place for 8 hours straight, not that I think that’s what actually happened. I’ll have to find a way to express my appreciation to them.

Today, however, the altgen conundrum has arisen once more. The night has been a veritable whirlwind so some of the details are fuzzy to me, but at one point Toast brought up altgen. We proceeded to have a discussion about the changes they’ve gone through over the last several months, which led inexorably to the conclusion that it has become a hugbox of sorts. This thought process was less than pleasant, and at one point I decided to go into altgen to play witness to it myself.

The channel was only being used by about three or four people at the time, and the discussion was a sort of ingratiating whining about what we were discussing over in mspa-lit, namely the gradual paradigm shift in altgen. They took this as a personal affront, and were trashing on those of us lamenting the current state of affairs.

Their response may have been understandable but it was aggravating to the maximum degree, and I felt it was time to initiate war. I conferred with other mods who were altgen regulars, and then the janitors: I think aside from Molly, everyone’s sentiments matched my own, in that altgen’s current form was an aberration and needed to be rectified post haste. Of course, we’ve been through this song and dance before recently, so I wanted to try and approach this from an angle that would satisfy both parties.

I feel I’ve succeeded, at least somewhat. Forcibly moving the altgen community is not adviseable or even possible without banning everyone involved, so I tried to meet them in the middle. Shitposting has gradually fallen away as the focus of the channel in favor of the altgen community, which is not really something I can fault them for exactly; it is natural and positive for a community to arise. However, altgen is first and foremost a designated shitpost palace. I began an ill-advised bout of spamming with “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA”, with everyone else in the channel following suit (technically against the rules, but undeniably cathartic). After this I updated the channel description to more accurately reflect what the channel’s purpose is, which is when the complaints really began to flow.

I tried to establish the fact that the altgen community is not being forced to relocate, but that shitposting would be encouraged more greatly since that’s what the channel is for, and especially in light of the fact that #altgen is just a clone of #general and #social at this point. People were not happy with this change, namely Pigeon Jude and SmolMuffin, the only two prominent regulars around at the time. They both began this pattern of bemoaning their fate while saying they would accept it, which struck me as disingenuous and only served to agitate me further.

I will be the first to admit that my responses were less than charitable, although at no point did I enter “tyrannical” territory. Nonetheless I started to fuck things up; we initiated a mini-purge, with all manner of spam happening and successfully crashing peoples Discord clients in certain channels. Nostalgic, Toast, and a few others around for this were having a great time, expressing their amusement consistently; others were not so pleased. Phantos mentioned his client crashed, as well as a few others. I forcibly stopped the purge after a minute or two because it was just too chaotic; I might try and find out what is causing this problem at a later time.

Aside from clients crashing, Cait and a few others expressed displeasure at the idea that we were upsetting the natural community there. This brought me some grief, as my intent and stated goal was not to oust anyone during this process. I’ve taken some time to talk to individuals there, especially Pigeon Jude, to try and figure out if there’s anything that can be done to facilitate merging the community and more intense shitposting.

It is a complicated process and is going to no doubt require a lot of time to sort out, if indeed it can be done at all. The idea some are giving voice to is that shitposting heavily will eventually force the altgen community to relocate to a more appropriate spot, such as #social (where light shitposting of the variety found in altgen is allowed). The source of reluctance for moving is also agitating to me, amounting largely (from what I could see) to, “We don’t feel like moving.” It’s hard to say what the appropriate action is here, or if I’m simply being M I S G U I D E D. I’ll have to see how others respond tomorrow, or what input others may have.

In other news, Discord released a new feature: custom emotes now have 50 additional slots for animated gifs. This is a boon not to be understated: our community engages in a lot of nonsense that relies explicitly on the presence of emotes, and much of our culture is founded on being able to trot one out at any given opportunity. There were already 50 at our disposal, and what images end up being used was something of a battle at times. I’ve mentioned this before, but Wheals used to be able to change emotes around at will, but then once we started encountering a shortage of slots Makin removed the ability for mods to be able to change emotes. Ever since then it has been something of a trial to get him to change anything by common opinion.

The animated gif slots have broken this deadlock, more or less. Makin even reopened the emote slots for any mod to change, a privilege that Ngame seized upon with what can only be described as an unbelievable frenzy (in a matter of hours, over 40 of the 50 new slots were taken up by his submissions alone). This appears to be a good study in the way the emotes worked originally: the list of static emotes we have now are a pretty stable assortment of images that have served us well for some months; it used to be a tad more hectic this time last year and especially before, when we were still optimizing the list and coming up with the cadre of images that we have now. It is a rare day when emotes get switched around at all anymore.

All of this is to say that the list of animated emotes we have now is probably less than ideal. After a cursory perusal of what we have at the end of the day, it actually seems rather lackluster if I may say so. Far from a slight towards Ngame, this is honestly to be expected—at the beginning, the idea is to have as many emotes available and then to prune or improve them as time goes by. In the coming months I expect that many of the animated emotes he added will be removed and replaced with something of higher quality. I’m honestly a little astonished that he managed to find so much content, and he deserves credit for it. I wonder how many that Ngame added which will still be around after a few months.

Nothing more for today.

---

22^nd of December 2017

I’m beginning to feel some regret for what I’ve done to altgen. You would think I learned my lesson the first time I tried to shake things up in there, and yet here we are. There is some improvement over the last time, in that some people have received my reasoning well enough. $trider seems amenable as well as a few other altgen regulars, and some old regulars who had since stopped coming, like ConstitutionCoin and Lord Jerry, have been very pleased at the change of policy. Unfortunately, there is still a distinct cabal of people who are not happy with the current arrangement, viewing the mandate on shitposting as an unnecessary and especially unwelcome intrusion.

I’m trying to consider where it is I’ve gone wrong with this. I felt as if the “compromise” I reached last night was sufficient, but now I’m starting to wonder if any such arrangement could ever actually be seen as satisfactory to all parties. I’ve fallen prey to the idea that a true compromise is possible between all people no matter the situation—perhaps this is truly a zero-sum game, where someone is fated to lose out. Despite recognizing the validity of this possibility, it strikes me to the core of my being as unsavory. I’m not ruthless like Makin or WoC are, I’m not sure that I’m able to make these sorts of decisions where some will definitively be dealt the short end of the stick.

On the other hand, it may be that this scenario in particular strikes me as unjust in nature—Tensei mentioned earlier that shitposting isn’t really something that this server needs. Assuming this is true, then my marauding is not only pointless but actually quite despicable. Is my goal a sham? Is attempting to reestablish a central shitposting refuge futile? I’m not sure what exactly to do at this point.

I think the part that has played the greatest part in breaking my confidence is the apparent disapproval of people like Cait or Tensei. Neither of them have outright stated my intended goal is bad, but Tensei has expressed a lack of need for what I’m trying to accomplish and Cait especially has lamented the fact that it is costing the happiness of others. This latter point is what gives me the most pause by far out of all complaints; I don’t think I have it in me to intentionally do things that physically upset other people, certainly not when the benefits are dubious and the people in question are undeserving.

Perhaps I will have to rethink this business again. If I rescind my word once more on this matter then I will not allow myself to pursue it again; the more I consider it, the more I believe that this isn’t really an option. Altgen’s current course is untenable, and despite the lack of a need for a shitposting channel, having one on hand is indisputably desirable for its own reasons. It may be that altgen is a lost cause in this regard, and that attempting to return it to its original purpose is a M I S G U I D E D effort in its entirety.

It has been suggested that we attempt to make a new shitposting channel entirely, or rebrand #botspam-radio into the new designated shitpost channel. Making new channels is kind of a gross option at this point considering how many we already have—server bloat is a real problem right now. With this in mind, repurposing #botspam-radio seems like a pretty decent option. It’s not like the channel sees much activity as it is now; it’s relegated purely to bot functions and the occasional spammer. It could honestly benefit from strict heavy shitposting. Maybe this will be a good course of action to look into.

Aside from this, there were a couple of other things I’d like to comment on. I’ve described Wade briefly in the past as a figure of some infamy in the Homestuck subreddit and Discord communities. After a falling out with Makin, he left for the HVSD and then eventually left them too. I have no idea what he was doing for the duration of time between then and now, but today he came back onto the HSD to shill some nonsense he’s writing, a lengthy dissertation about a dog character Dookie from a bad cartoon called Johnny Test.

This dissertation isn’t even written yet, he was simply gauging interest for when he finishes it and seeing who might want to read it. This was hilarious to us, and because of how easily people recognize his name, a lengthy and rather entertaining discussion easily followed. It was quite fascinating to watch; I have no prior experience with Wade and I’m not terribly familiar with him, so seeing everyone interact with him was like stumbling onto a font of history new to me.

He made various comments alluding to mass hate between himself and others in the past; I’m not sure how genuine these comments were, I get the impression that he’s kind of a jokester in his own way. As it is, I think that he may have resolved to come back onto the HSD more often to talk to people. Perhaps we will see more of him in the future—I get the impression that he would definitely be a welcome addition to the fold. It will be interesting to see what the future holds for his involvement, if any.

Speaking of people possibly returning, I had a lengthy discussion with WoC today about the nature of his estrangement. He has made some rather agitating assumptions that factored into his decision to leave the HSD, chief among them being his perception of Makin’s position towards him and the #gaming channel. This, coupled with an intense revulsion towards people beating so many dead horses in regard to the stories WoC has told in the past, have been the deciding factors of his self-imposed exile.

With this in mind, I’ve been talking to him on and off about Makin’s attitude. WoC has been under the impression that Makin hates him, and has it out for both him and #gaming. I have always maintained that this was not only inaccurate, but rather boneheaded. Nonetheless, WoC is of that particular brand of stubbornness where nothing may change his mind once he has set it to whatever he feels is appropriate. I was only barely able to affect his stance on this today, by comparing him to the very person he has been perceiving inaccurately for the last so many months.

WoC’s complaints were primarily that Makin never steps foot in #gaming and that he is often insulting, both of which he takes personally. I had to explain that Makin almost never leaves mspa-lit, and indeed he insults everyone, often just for fun or as a way to keep things impersonal. After describing exactly what it is Makin does (or at least how I see it), WoC had this moment of clarity where he realized he and Makin do the same exact nonsense with other people, and that it is truly not a targeted or malicious slight towards WoC in particular. After this, he seemed to be processing the idea and decided to rest on it.

This realization is amusing to me for various reasons, but in the end I’m just glad I was able to shed some light on the matter. It’s not often that you can get through to people like WoC, not because they’re dumb but because they are steadfast in their beliefs. It is fortunate that I was able to affect some change for once, which is all I can really ask for. I’m not allowing myself to hope for this, but perhaps this newfound knowledge will influence him to finally come and take his spot back in the HSD. He seemed ambivalent towards this idea when I departed, but who can say what the future holds? This is an exciting development even if nothing more comes out of it.

Nothing more for today.

---

23^rd of December 2017

Today the dam seems to have completely burst, although in a far more amusing manner than I would have expected. I would like it to be on record that I was fine with peacefully and cautiously moving forward on the altgen situation, but then Makin stepped in. That last part should be all you need to predict what happened, really. It was quite a flurry of nonsense even for our standards.

I’m honestly a little embarrassed to say that I didn’t see it coming. At one point earlier today I mentioned that the journal is approaching another release soon, which is usually enough to invite comments on it or suggestions. However, Makin asked: “drew what are you even writing about anymore / this is a boring time of peace / maybe I should target someone way above our weight class”. Somehow this did not trip any alarms in my mind; I considered it a more or less innocent joke, and described some of the recent events we’ve experienced in brief, in particular altgen. Makin’s tone was light and unassuming, and the conversation proceeded rather amicably from this point on.

After a certain point I had to leave—the holiday season is a busy one for me and my family. I spent a few hours flitting around, unable to even check up on the HSD. I’m not even sure that I thought of it even once in the intervening period; it was rather blissful in a way. Eventually, I gained a spare moment to myself and decided to see what was going on there. The altgen situation was weighing a bit on my mind and I wanted to see if the mood had improved at all since yesterday.

How foolish I was; I returned to nothing short of utter pandemonium. The scene at play in altgen was so profoundly outrageous that I failed even to be shocked, instead I was simply confused. People were screaming in fear, women called loudly for their lost children—I felt like I was witnessing the end of days. In seriousness, the first thing I saw was multiple calls for people to leave and form their own server; it seemed as if the members of the altgen community had finally had enough. After wondering what could have facilitated this, I noticed a completely new channel: #altaltgen.

The ramifications of this were initially lost on me, and to be honest I still don’t understand how exactly people reacted to it, given that I wasn’t around for the channels creation. After some review, it may be that some people left simply because of us reinstating shitpost status to altgen, which is more what I expected. Perhaps the combination of these factors was the proverbial straw, but in any case my confusion gave way to slight annoyance and amusement (a very interesting combination of emotions, I might add).

It seemed as if, true to the original spirit of altgen, people were simply fucking around as thoroughly as possible, which was very nice to see. I’ve noticed that Makin’s presence tends to foment this, through whatever curious forces surround him. It may be that his personality is more conducive to that sort of atmosphere, or that his position as creator of the server leads to more spirited japery than usual. Perhaps it is both; whatever the case, altgen had successfully been whipped into nothing short of a frenzy, and I will be the first to admit that it was a welcome change in routine.

At this point, some weird twist of fate led to a development that I don’t think was even remotely possible to foresee: an individual I have described before, Maxmikester, started a little tit for tat with Makin and it led to one of the most elegant smackdowns I have ever seen in an online chatroom. I exaggerate of course, but given the state of contrition that altgen was experiencing it was actually quite satisfying to witness in real time.

Maxmikester is an exceedingly strange individual, both awkward and existing in an oxymoronic state of confrontational and non-confrontational. He is infamous for an especially pronounced and apparently genuine attraction to one of the characters in Homestuck, which is a level of eccentricity that strains belief even for us. This habit is one of many that people have come to recognize from Max—it would be less worthy of note, I think, except for the fact that they claim to be of a relatively high age on the server, the same as my own. This discrepancy between their claimed age and their level of maturity leads to some interesting confrontations, and I’ve spent a few occasions trying to speak with him about some judgments or opinions that frankly disturb me. I’ve actually grown to suspect that he is outright lying about his age to improve the appearance of his validity.

But, I digress. Today, Max began an attempt to criticize Makin while the latter was performing his song and dance; Makin subsequently shut Max down in short form, saying: “don't you have a fictional 16 year old as a waifu? just saying”. Altgen collectively lost its fucking mind with this response—Max was totally and completely destroyed, and as his loosely scattered molecules attempted to rebut he was picked apart even further by the rest of altgen. It was nothing short of a bloodbath; if I were a better Samaritan I would have felt compelled to report this murder to the police.

But then, the magnificent turned into the strange: for some absolutely unknown reason, people began to side with Max. It may be there was some catalyst and I simply missed it, but the conversation seemed to flip instantaneously from everyone trashing on Max to everyone proclaiming him their “new king”, their “savior”, among other lofty terms. It was honestly one of the more bizarre things I’ve witnessed just from how sudden the turnaround was.

Max, for his part, kept trying to insist that he had the ability to “bring Makin to justice”. Everything else aside this did pique my curiosity at least somewhat, so I tried to inquire as to what method he had at his disposal that would swiftly topple our current power structure. Upon further questioning it was revealed to me that Max’s threat manifested in the form of him tweeting at Discord devs, saying that Makin was acting out of line and being a bully.

After laughing raucously at this for a while I took my leave. Believe it or not this is actually the second (or perhaps third!) time that such a threat has been issued, although I don’t recall if it took this exact form. Whatever the case it has never been a substantial or useful method for getting results out of Makin, and I’m honestly a little surprised that Max wasn’t banned for it. Such is the life of an unwitting fool I suppose, if one may pardon the use of the expression. (Edit as of 2/16/18: Maxmikester posted this image in altgen earlier today. Max on the left, Makin on the right, and I’m poking in halfway for some reason.)

Outside of this, the existence of #altaltgen has quickly quieted down. I don’t see it lasting much longer than a few days, if even that—once Makin comes back online and notices it’s dead, I imagine it’ll get the axe in short order. Of course, there is undoubtedly a great amount of potential that has yet to be tapped in this new channel. Ironic that I was speaking about the possibility of adding a new channel and I considered it the least likely option to see implementation, even as a meme. Maybe there is some mileage we will get out of it yet.

A final note for today: Minish’s imp-like behavior has only seemed to increase in intensity lately. I’m not sure what’s going on with him, and it’s gotten bad enough that it’s elicited comment from others; this is typically how I recognize that a problem has truly grown into something that must be handled. His behavior puzzles me: it feels as if he’s attempting to channel Makin’s style of banter, but unfortunately it has been less amusing and more abrasive. In a phrase, it seems as if he’s more than willing to toss shit but is unwilling to take any in turn.

At this point I’m not sure if there’s anything that can even be done aside from talking to him about it. He did mention recently that one of the rules he tries to abide by is to never be upset at people criticizing him in earnest, an assertion that will bring me great comfort if true. Ultimately, I would just like what is best for all involved; perhaps I act out of line with this, but sometimes it feels like I’m one of the few who is both able and willing to handle this sort of thing, time and time again. It is a tiring business, but if at the end of the day I can be said to have helped even one person then I consider it a worthwhile endeavor. Hopefully I can affect some positive change in the future.

Nothing more for today.

---

25^th of December 2017

Christmas has arrived, and among the plethora of different faiths and nationalities that may situate themselves here the spirit of the holidays has entered just about everyone. There are plenty of forms of merriment that have steadfastly made their way into our affairs here, and it seems as if no one is failing to engage in at least a vaguely more positive mood today.

Minish for his part has actually been very charitable. He put out a survey a couple days ago asking if people wanted to receive games, to which myself and three others (Toast, Tori, and Nixlex) responded to. I’m not sure if more responded and it was first come first serve, or if no one else submitted a response. Whatever the case, he gave the four of us four games each, an unprecedented boon. He apparently did this last year as well, although I may be mistaken; whatever the case, his generosity has been extremely heartwarming.

Some channels appear to be untouched by such charades, especially the less active ones, which is to be expected. Instead I see the people typically active in those channels celebrating the holidays in other, more appropriate places; perhaps they wish to maintain a separation between their typical habitat and the more unusual, festive atmosphere. This kind of distinct compartmentalization would definitely be in keeping with what Makin wants in each channel.

Speaking of, even Makin partook in the Christmas spirit a little bit: in #announcements he gave us the gift of silence, promising not to ping everyone for the day—such magnanimity it was. He followed this up by posting a series of keys for Steam games, many of which were memes but some of which were actually good. I think this may have been intended as a reward for people who check announcements even without pings, which if true is amusing to me. Whether as a reward or as an undirected, general display of good cheer, it is a nice sight to see.

Of note, WoC and Nights both came back today. The former had been planning to do so for ages, even without any input from me regarding Makin’s behavior or the nature of peoples interaction with him. He likes to make an event of getting people gifts for Christmas, much like Minish does. In this way he came back, and even after his own bout of merriment he remained to make fun of or talk with people at his leisure. I suspected this might happen, especially in light of our recent conversations, but it manages to make me feel somewhat optimistic nonetheless. Perhaps he’ll decide to stick around, at least until the next foolish thing happens and he decides to leave over that. We’ll see how the cycle plays out this time.

Nights coming back is somewhat more of an event, for reasons that I’m not sure I understand. It may simply be that the “campaign” to get him back has been in the running longer (or in fact exists at all), or maybe it’s that his personality is more appealing to people in general; whatever the case, people seem to be really concerned with having him come back to the HSD. Thus it is that, when he did come back, the chat did nothing but talk with him for a while. It was honestly a very fun conversation, replete with fat huskies and all manner of assorted chubby animals or other silly nonsense.

It may only be temporary, but the mood has been nothing less than infectious. I hope that the good will of the holidays manages to persist for some time; it’s good to see everyone closer together like this, even if only for a little while. Nothing more for today.

---

28^th of December 2017

A few days after Christmas, it seems as if things have more or less returned to normal. After a quick perusal of each channel it seems as if everyone has resumed their typical posting tendencies, which is fine. There is some residual kindness that shows if you look at the right times, which is nice to see. I’m quite pleased with the lack of destruction or chaos—the end of the year is a calm and gentle time, and we need a rest before we enter 2018 with the manic fury that it undoubtedly deserves.

I’ve noted that WoC remains, and peeks his head in commonly enough that it seems he intends to stay. I think he has finally recognized the truth of what I’ve been saying to him, and he appears more at ease with everything that happens here. It helps that people have been refraining from heckling him excessively about his past like I asked them to; he was very agitated with the idea of dealing with all such comments again. He has no intention of hiding new occurrences, which is good to know as well—the stories are unfailingly funny, and it can lighten the mood no matter how dull a night has been. Here’s to hoping he stays indefinitely.

Nights, however, has indeed left once more. I’m not sure why, but I find myself completely unsurprised. If anything, I’m mildly annoyed that people have made and continue to make such a fuss about it; the reasons for him leaving are mundane and especially uninteresting, and he has spent more time away from the server than on it. At this point, outside of Oceanfalls, I’m not sure why it is that people are so obsessed (a term I use lightly) with getting him back. I felt the need to voice my agitation with this, although no one really responded in an adequate fashion.

It’s worth saying at this point that I feel Nights is a great individual, worthy of respect and consideration. It’s just that I don’t feel as if this borderline deification is appropriate, and people foisting more attention on him after basically nothing has happened with him in HSD for months feels very strange to me. I imagine that it feels weird to him too, but I couldn’t say for sure. I consider Nights a good friend and his creativity is inspiring, but it seems clear that he either cannot or is not willing to come back to the HSD on a permanent basis. The sooner that people accept this, the easier it will be for everyone; regardless, I continue to be disgruntled about how people are behaving over this matter.

Also of note, Makin changed #altaltgen to #shitpost. I suppose this feels like the most diplomatic way to resolve the issue of where shitposting goes, which is fine. Channel bloat continues to grow in severity, but I guess there isn’t much to be done about that for now. For reasons I can’t really explain or don’t even understand, I feel kind of upset by this decision. It’s honestly a very irrational feeling, and I’m going to have to do some thinking to understand why it is exactly that I feel this way. More on this later when I feel I understand it better.

As a tie in to this topic, TS has decided to quit being a janitor and indeed has left the server entirely. This felt quite sudden to me, and it concerned me enough that I tried to ask if anything was amiss. TS assured me that everything was fine and that they were simply tired of the HSD, which is something that I can sympathize with. I thus decided to leave it alone, although circumstances have played out in such a way that I can’t help but feel that there’s more to this, although I’m not really at liberty to explain those things here. I can’t personally do anything more, so I’m forced to remain hands-off, and indeed there may be nothing I can ever do about it. It is truly frustrating to be unable to help at all, but sometimes you have to recognize that you’re helpless to do anything and move on. Such is the case here unfortunately.

On another note entirely, Makin was analyzing the activity of the HSD a bit today. According to him, it seems that the HSD in its entirety sees about 14,000 messages generated on a daily basis, mspa-lit and altgen each producing 4,000. I feel kind of surprised by the message spread, but at the same time it’s not surprising at all somehow; altgen especially is an absolutely ridiculous source of activity, and then mspa-lit is where most “regulars” are localized. The rest of the messages appear to be spread piecemeal among the other channels, but especially in #general and #social. Places like #coding-tech receive far less messages per day, less than a hundred if any at all most of the time.

When you think about it, 14,000 messages per day is an incredible amount of activity. I can’t say that I know much about the statistics involved with communities of our size, but it definitely sounds impressive to a layman. For us it’s about 1.5 messages per user per day, but of course all of that activity is coming from a select group of individuals who talk every day. I wonder what it would be like if all nearly 10,000 people talked as much as we do. It would surely be chaos—the thought fills me with some slight anxiety, but also a distinct excitement.

Nothing more for today.

---

31^st of December 2017

It is quiet tonight. I’m barely here myself, and I imagine that it’s much the same for everyone else. The new year is coming, and it is time for family or to reflect on ourselves. There are still some people here, chatting occasionally. Many times people stop in to say “Happy New Year!”, especially at the point that is appropriate for their timezone. It’s not a sad or upsetting quiet, but a peaceful one.

The world turns and we along with it. The year has gone by, and we prepare for a new one. Time marches on as always, and it’s our job to march with it. With the friends we’ve made and the place we’re building together, who knows what the HSD will look like another year from now? How will we appear? Stronger than ever, I hope. I am beyond happy with all the people I’ve met and become acquainted with—people I am proud to call friends. They give me life and motivation to keep going forward.

I owe more than I could possibly say to the kindness and patience of everyone I’ve talked to in the HSD for the last year. I look forward to seeing where we go from here, and I hope that those of you reading this—and even those unable to read it—feel the same. Here’s to the future: Happy New Year.

---

2018

1^st of January 2018

The first day of the year comes with a somewhat expected but no less important occurrence: #shitpost is officially gone, reabsorbed into #altgen. #shitpost wasn’t even being used properly so the decision is more pragmatic than anything else, but the effect that its mere presence had was pronounced. In the week since it was initially put up, #altgen regulars who fiercely opposed the return to shitposting behavior all left and formed their own splinter server. This server, and the people who use it, are called nu-altgen.

Nu-altgen is an extremely good example of the end-fate for all groups of people that begin to prize themselves over the intended purpose of a channel. This may seem hypocritical of us as denizens of mspa-lit, where we tend to take over the conversation no matter what, but I explain the difference in that mspa-lit doesn’t really have a specific purpose except for whatever Makin says it is. He has full license to kick us out when he wants to talk about something, but otherwise it’s anyone’s group. Altgen, however, had a distinct purpose that was being slowly but surely subverted as time went by, much to everyone else’s displeasure.

After nu-altgen left, there was a distinct and significant uptick in the amount of shitposting in #altgen. This suggests to me that there was in fact a demand for shitposting, but it was being effectively blocked by the people attempting to form a social circle. As such it seems as if this shift in policy, while tumultuous, was in fact the appropriate course of action. I’m biased and thus probably self-serving with this, but a win is a win, isn’t it? I’m sure any backblast from this will find its way to me eventually.

Nothing more for today.

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2^nd of January 2018

Already some small level of activity is returning to us; a decent number of people were around and talking about all manner of things, and hb actually began anew this old topic that was once so prevalent that it warranted banning: Hunger Games posting.

Hunger Games posting is much what it sounds like; for those unfamiliar, The Hunger Games is a young adult fiction series. I’ll avoid describing it in any real detail because of a profound unfamiliarity with the actual story, but suffice to say that the plot involves a Battle Royale-type situation, with a group of children and teenagers all forced to battle each other to the death. Hunger Games posting involves the use of an external website or program to automatically sort people and have them go through a random series of events that would plausibly happen in The Hunger Games narrative.

For our purposes, this program takes names and profile pictures, and then randomly goes through everything else. For a while this was an immensely popular thing to do, given the nature of it involving numerous people of your choosing. This made it conducive as a group activity, where mods and regulars of a given place were typically put in, and rapid updates from the person who initiated the game are displayed. This can be great fun, but unfortunately it tends to get very spammy and then especially old when it’s been going on for too long.

These two factors led to it being abused heavily as a conversational topic, and then subsequently relegated to #altgen. This continued for some weeks without issue, but then it finally became spammed so frequently and so heavily that Tori felt it necessary to ban all Hunger Game posting, which effectively killed it months ago now.

Today, as I said, it appears to have made a return of sorts. Hb began posting a screenshot with mods and mspa-lit regulars all listed, and I expected it to be shut down in short order by Makin, who was present and active at the time. Instead, it gathered steam and soon nary a person was present who wasn’t involved in the Hunger Games. Every death and event was colored with a pronounced degree of response from us, some events eliciting fake outrage and genuine laughter. Even Makin was participating in his own way, a sign that something has picked up a significant amount of natural energy.

As these things go, the round ended and at that point there was a split in what people wanted to do next. Of course, there were a number of people who wanted to start a new round, but then the rest of us—mostly regulars, those who are familiar with the power that the Hunger Games has, said “no”; it’s pretty evident to us that allowing them to continue unchecked is a firm recipe for disaster, and it was fairly clear that hb was not going to be allowed to continue his Hunger Games in mspa-lit. Thus came to an end the brief return to an activity that satisfied many in the past.

Despite this burst of activity, there seems to be a significant lull in activity; this can even be seen in Makin’s shilling, inasmuch as the things he likes to shill are being slow with their updating schedules. It is admittedly a strange time of year—as it’s January, I imagine most people are getting ready to go back to school or have already commenced the new semester. I predict that as the month goes on and especially once we’re into February, activity will pick up more. I imagine it’ll hit a kind of peak near the end of February, which is when our server was created and thus is due for a good celebration.

As it is, I think part of the lull in activity is because of a lack of stuff to talk about. With content being slow to release, there is less material for us to actually discuss. With this in mind I feel as if the time for another Reckoning is approaching. I have absolutely no way to know this, and it may even just be wishful thinking on my part, but I earnestly feel as if another shake up of the entire server would lend itself well to some increased activity, at least for a few months. It would depend a lot on the exact nature of the disturbance, so I guess it’s premature to give that kind of prediction.

A side-note: I’ve decided to start going through and removing more personally oriented remarks, such as locations at the beginning of the journal, for privacy purposes. This may serve as an attempt to make the journal more acceptable to be released to people who ask instead of having it restricted. Time will tell.

Nothing more for today.

---

3^rd of January 2018

Not much to describe today. Actually wanted to briefly bring up something that happened yesterday: Makin has been stifling conversation again, which is a tactic that I have never agreed with. Between that and some real life stress, I think I lost my composure yesterday. Reviewing what happened and my responses to him make me feel at least a little shame for my actions recently. When things like this happen it brings me some significant disquiet: my unrest is affecting my ability to act objectively and responsibly in the course of my duties here, which only serves to add to my displeasure over the matter. I’m going to have to do some thinking over the next few days to see if I can bring myself back to stability.

Nothing more for today.

---

4^th of January 2018

There wasn’t much that happened today on the HSD in particular, but on the subreddit I was contacted by a user named yunojoy. They had described a project at the end of last year where they would be cataloging and describing the memetic trends of the subreddit throughout all of 2017, and today is when they decided to release their work as a video.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m very fond of such efforts, since they serve as a kind of reinforcement to attempts at archival; it’s just another way of preserving information. The video itself is interesting, and has a greater emphasis on trying to be funny than I would have put into it, but it still manages to be informative and the editing is fairly clean. In all, I think it’s a valuable addition to the knowledge being accumulated and have included it in appendix B under “Subreddit Memetic History”, subentry “2017”.

There’s been some positive reception towards it, and I hope that yunojoy will continue their endeavors in the future. Perhaps it can be an effort in installments, so that each month will be reviewed instead of the year in its totality. It’s hard to say what form the project may take for now, but I am very excited to see what it looks like in the future.

Nothing more for today.

---

5^th of January 2018

After securing final approval from Gankro, I released the article on the subreddit today. There’s been a pretty positive response to it so far; there are a startling number of people who claim they either know very little about Gankro already or in fact knew nothing about him at all. In light of this, I’m even happier that I decided to interview him.

It also reestablishes my sense of purpose for all of this—I would be lying if I said I hadn’t been suffering from some fatigue regarding these interviews, with how many I’ve been conducting and how many there are to sift through. However, with people saying they enjoy the material and being able to get out some decent exposure on these topics, it makes it feel worthwhile to pursue.

I hope that the Music Team interviews can be just as insightful for people. I wonder if there’s anything truly important or groundbreaking that I can help get out for people; my knowledge about Homestuck’s fandom and its history is far less complete than I would like it to be, but I hope that with time I can contribute to the overall information available in a significant way.

We’ll just have to see. Nothing more for today.

---

6^th of January 2018

Not much to talk about for today. Circumstances prevented me from keeping an eye on the server, although I did manage to find some time to think about how I’ve been feeling and acting on the HSD for the last few days. This is more affirmation for myself than any sort of concrete statement on the HSD, but I feel like I’m approaching some more solid inner peace regarding my position there.

It’s been almost a year since I started moderating on the HSD and it’s been a very strange time, all things considered. It feels impossible to recount all of the things that I’ve experienced and learned, although I have to laugh: the truth of the matter is that I don’t have to recount them, as I already did in this journal for the most part.

I began the year as someone with no influence or perspective on the Homestuck fandom. My exposure to it was purely through the HSD and even that experience was exceptionally limited, with only a couple months spent on the Discord before my modding. I knew basically nothing about the history of the fandom or anything in depth outside of the HSD, and I would definitely not call myself confident at the time.

Now, a year later, everything feels very different. I feel immeasurably more confident in my handling of most situations, and even circumstances I’m unfamiliar with are able to be dealt with in short order. My appreciation for the storied history of the fandom is, while still far from complete, certainly more in depth than it was a year ago now. I’ve had the most incredible opportunity to talk to and ask questions of people who I never expected I would be given the chance to talk to. The process is slow and ongoing, but I’m getting information out to people who otherwise would never have known about these things either.

I’m excited about all of this! I wonder what changes 2018 will bring, and if my efforts will continue to yield such results. I’m also excited to improve my writing for future articles, of which it appears the Music Team are first in order. There are so many people who, after the Gankro article, it is clear have no idea about the people who helped make Homestuck what it is; I’m eager to get the word out and see what comes of it.

In all, I think that I’ve successfully reinvigorated my sense of purpose with all of this. I need to work on maintaining a distinction between my personal problems and what I do for the HSD⁴³, as well as this journal, but occasionally I guess it will be impossible to keep some leak over from happening. I’m only human, after all. But I can still take pride in what I’ve done, and prepare for what it is I want to do in the future. I want to keep improving things.

As for an ultimate goal with all of this, “why I’m bothering at all” so to speak, the idea of reestablishing ties with What Pumpkin is an unbelievably tantalizing idea. Is it feasible or even possible at this point? Who knows. There is a lot of research and talking with people that must occur before such a thing is even able to be assessed.

Further, would it even be to the ultimate benefit of the community? I’ve largely been working on the idea that it would be good to have ties with WP or even Hussie once more—what kind of community thrives off of divesting itself from the person responsible for its existence? Yet, without further insight on the matter it is impossible to say one way or the other. It may be that the best course of action is to remain out of contact with them, or at least not initiate official ties of any sort; I can imagine that tying oneself to a company would have deep and serious problems.

As I said, without more information it’s impossible to say for sure. I would like deeply to be able to help heal this incredible wound that many claim has been festering for years now. Assessing the root of the issue and whether it’s something that could or should be fixed are things that will take a long time.

I worry that it’s an inherently unsolvable problem, less because there are no solutions and more because the solutions are impractical. A large number of people close to the heart of the issue describe Makin as the problem, and that as long as he’s in charge of the HSD, no such reconciliation or healing may occur; I consider this to be a garbage answer, and the notion that Makin’s mere presence/behavior is the root cause of all of this disharmony is almost offensive. Yet, I can’t say whether they’re wrong or right⁴⁰ at this point.

I’ll chase myself into circles all night with this line of thinking. Better to leave off here and consider the matter further. The point I’m trying to get across with this is: my determination to move forward and effect positive change has never been stronger, and I will do all in my power to make things improve if possible. Nothing more for today.

---

7^th of January 2018

Today was actually pretty decently active all throughout. Shortly after I woke up and checked in, Tipsy came to the chat with a personal issue affecting them in real life, which appears to be rather serious. I’ll avoid going into details for reasons of privacy, but I was half-afraid that the conversation would be thrown out by Makin due to “#social”.

My expectations were pleasantly subverted when Makin joined the rest of us in asking after Tipsy’s well-being, and trying better to understand the situation. It was, I believe, a tacit confirmation of an accusation I’ve tossed his way in the past, namely that he cares more about us than he pretends. After the many discouraging and even deprecating comments I’ve heard about him, both in the past and more recently, it is profoundly satisfying and touching to see him engaged this way.

If that wasn’t good enough, the actual discussion itself was both reassuring and constructive; Tipsy got some feedback from all of us on what can be done to improve the situation, and while Makin’s advice could almost certainly be construed to be harsh or unforgiving based on what lens you view it through, it was distinctly honest—probably the most direct and actually helpful advice that could have been offered. I feel that the ability of both Makin and Tipsy to discuss the issue back and forth without any issue is indicative of a level of maturity and respect that can be extrapolated to the rest of the chat, in a way. It is representative of the potential of the group that such a conversation can even occur, and the fact that I was able to witness it today gives me a lot of hope for the future of our group.

On the other hand, there was some drama today that was entirely pointless and dispiriting. It began innocently enough, and was actually quite fascinating: it was a repeat of the event that solidified my presence on the HSD over a year ago, where we had a number of regulars like CynicallyCritical and AradiaMegido come out of the woodwork and start talking here again. They tend to hang out in their own servers, but occasionally conditions may be just right (or they may even conspire) such that they all end up here once more, which leads to something humorously entitled “oldfag hour”. It should be noted that “oldfag” is another term from 4chan, much like “tripfagging” (I think a pattern is obvious here), and refers to people who were around in “the old days” of a given place, where the term old is dubious and fairly arbitrary in most cases.

Oldfag hour, while often lasting far longer than just one hour, is a time where people who used to be on the server come back and reminisce. This occurrence is typically fascinating to me, because it’s blunt-force exposure to all of the elements of something I’m not familiar with. It’s extremely effective at demonstrating the history of a place, and for some reason motivates me to get involved if it manages to display a pronounced sense of community.

At any rate, oldfag hour commenced and progressed much as I expected for a while, but then the old began to clash with the more recent. At one point, Aradia and Red were in mspa-lit and the former insulted the latter for no apparent reason. I assume that there is tainted history between the two, which would be understandable; I don’t know much about Aradia but Red has unfortunately conducted herself in less than amicable ways in the past. However, this kind of brazen nonsense is rather distasteful to me.

The conversation continued in this way for some time. I didn’t think it was too bad, personally speaking, but a lot of people (including hb) seemed fairly put off by it all. At some point Makin poked his head in and, predictably, decided it was time for a Za Warudo. While I’m typically not fond of freezing a channel, I think I was in agreeance on this occasion. It was fairly disappointing to witness the casual mudslinging.

The channel was frozen for somewhere around 20-30 minutes, Makin having tasked me with unfreezing it after that point. I utilized the opportunity to get on my own soapbox and express my dismay that people I respected had chosen to carry themselves in this way. In retrospect I’m sure that the speech was nothing more than a cheesy and ineffective diatribe, and indeed people were poking fun with emotes the entire time, but I still felt it was important to say. I really have come to expect better from the people who frequent mspa-lit, and it’s usually a sad day when the channel must be frozen. Petty squabbles are not what the channel is for, and I think after today I will be harder on people attempting to perpetrate that sort of crap.

In light of my optimistic comments yesterday, this sort of occurrence is kind of frustrating. Yet, it’s to be expected—not everything can be sunshine and daisies. I’ll just have to try harder and do better. And it wasn’t all bad, considering the discussion with Tipsy earlier. Today was a rather interesting run of the full gamut of expression we have here. If anything, it was a good reminder of what I need to look out for here. Hopefully with this knowledge I can move forward in a more constructive fashion.

Nothing more for today.

---

8^th of January 2018

Now in the second week of the new year, it feels as if things have returned to a level of “normal” that is difficult to explain. There’s an intuitive level of activity that feels correct or suitable for the channel, although there have been some interesting developments today that change the dynamic a little bit.

There seem to be a higher number of new people than usual who are dropping by. It’s not uncommon to see one or two people who are not regulars in mspa-lit—referred to as randos, short for “randoms”—but today I think I counted no less than five. It may just be that today is an outlier for this sort of activity, but maybe there is some development I’m unaware of that led to this. Whatever the case, I hope that some will stay. Having fresh blood in the mix is always good, as a group with no new people in it will begin to stagnate after a while. Difficult to say at this point what will come out of it though, if anything.

On the other hand, we have had the opposite happening today. In keeping with yesterday’s oldfag hour, we had another old-time regular come out of the woodwork and start talking again, named simply Meow. After some unspecified changes in the serve, she’s been trying to pop her head in every so often and get involved again.

I figured this was all a bit before my time, but she claims to recognize me from back near the end of 2016. I felt bad because I don’t recognize her at all⁴¹, but I guess that’s not strictly anything I can do about—I’ve always claimed my memory is terrible, as may be evidenced by the fact that I started writing this journal to begin with! Whatever the case, I hope that she finds herself welcome here and comes back more often. By all means she seems like an accepting and engaging individual to speak with.

The conversation of today was predominantly about the gradual decline of quality in Hussie’s writing. We spent a rather large amount of time talking about what “decline of quality” even meant in this context, and I’m not sure we ever actually came to a consensus on the matter. The reason for the decline happening, however, was fairly evident: Hiveswap, originally called the “Homestuck Adventure Game” back before the name Hiveswap was even a thing.

It was at the point when Hussie began trying to make the game that the comic started to decline. The evidence is incontrovertible: the introduction of the game is directly correlated to and explains the sharp decline of public activity from Hussie, and is more than likely the deciding factor in Homestuck’s essential decay.

Personally, I’m kind of amused and fascinated by the fact that we can talk about these same topics over and over again without tiring. We must have exhausted this conversation about “why Homestuck turned out badly” an incredible amount of times by now, and yet despite the literal months spent discussing it we are as fresh as ever. I wonder how long it can go on, and I find myself hoping that it may go on forever. There is a certain magic to it that is captivating to me, although I’m sure to many both inside and outside of our community it’s an aggravating phenomenon. Despite how often we’ve talked about it, there seems to be some new angle or nuance to the discussion that wasn’t present before. I wonder if it’s possible to approach an intimate understanding on this matter simply by dragging it through the dirt ad nauseum.

As it is, I think that there are two sides: those who are more or less comfortable with how Homestuck turned out, and those who are not. I side myself with the latter group of individuals, and Niklink provided an astute comment earlier that perfectly encapsulates how we feel about the developments of the last few years: “kinda pissed off that hussie gave so much for hiveswap only to essentially reduce his involvement with the final product as much as possible”. Hiveswap detracted from Homestuck in such a way that both products eventually deteriorated. There is hope that they may both be rescued, but in the meantime it is impossible to tell what will happen.

Despite the seemingly overwhelming negativity, I’m actually quite excited to see what happens to both properties. Hussie has been known to rescue seemingly ruined projects from the graveyard of Promising Stories That Were Spontaneously Ruined, based on a sample size of (as far as I know) exactly one: Problem Sleuth. Hiveswap has three more acts and then a companion set of acts for Hauntswitch, and then Homestuck definitively has some sort of epilogue coming out. Who’s to say that these things will not vindicate him? Edit from 1/17/18: this paragraph is apparently completely wrong, in that people around for the end of Problem Sleuth were pretty consistently happy with it across the board; the epilogue did not necessarily save it as it was still quality the entire time, and the insinuation that people were unhappy with it may in fact be an artifact of people who believe Hussie will save Homestuck at the last minute. Go figure.

Some may opt for cynicism but I like to err on the side of cautious optimism. Time will tell, of course. Nothing more for today.

---

9^th of January 2018

Tonight there was a rather tense moment that I may have involved myself with needlessly. The exact details are not important: suffice to say that Minish and WoC had a vicious but brief spat which mostly resolved itself, but through my pointless interference I think I may have had a small realization about the nature of my job here.

After the initial encounter, I tried to get both to apologize for their involvement. Minish, for his part, was willing to own up to his part in the development, which I was satisfied with. WoC naturally proved to be truculent to the nth degree, which was nothing short of aggravating. After trying and failing to get him to apologize for his part in exacerbating the situation, I decided to approach in a different manner. When I encounter someone who is completely unyielding, I often find it’s useful to simply talk with them for a while. This usually serves one or two purposes: it helps whoever I’m talking with understand where I’m coming from more, it helps me understand where they’re coming from, or sometimes both. In any of these cases, it is typically pretty helpful to create that bridge—I either help a person to realize they’ve been acting inappropriately and/or I learn something useful.

Talking with WoC accomplished the latter. Often with moderating the HSD it’s easy to fall into a pattern where not much is done over a large period of time, simply because there isn’t much to do; raids and problem users aren’t anywhere near as frequent as they used to be, by any means. When they do appear, it’s usually handled in an extremely short period of time since at least one of us is on and paying attention at any given time. This pattern lends itself to a sort of flippancy; one becomes used to handling issues without any sort of deep thought on the matter. Unfortunately this can bleed over into situations where a greater degree of consideration is required, should one desire the most ideal outcome (ideal in this case meaning “everyone benefits as much as possible”).

All of this is to say that it’s not hard to become stuck in a mental rut, and believe that we already have all the answers we need. We become complacent in our position of power, which is anathema to improving ourselves. Sometimes I feel like people wonder why I bother with this rigamarole, and honestly I’m not so sure myself on occasion.

It feels worthwhile mostly; there is a real sense of gratification with understanding and helping others. I try my best to accomplish these things because it feels like the right thing to do. Even after a rigorous and often grueling time helping others, it feels personally worthwhile to see their day improved, and to see them happier. In other cases where this cannot occur, instead there is usually some kind of lesson to be learned. Such was the case with WoC today.

It bears repeating that WoC is an extremely stubborn individual. He possesses characteristics that are personally annoying or even repugnant to me, but it is important to note that he is not immovable or deaf to reason; when given sufficient reason or cause to change, he will. For this I respect him greatly, and despite his qualities that bother me I enjoy speaking to him. Shitting around with him never fails to be a fun experience, but the other, more unfortunate side to this is that confronting him is enormously difficult.

After his spat with Minish, I felt compelled to talk with him about the matter in PMs. I knew right from the start that it would be difficult, and the ensuing discussion only served to make me feel that “difficult” was an understatement. Despite initial statements being rather heated and shitty on both sides, the tone of the conversation soon shifted into something more mellow. WoC has the interesting quality of being more or less cognizant of his biases. The exact extent of his awareness is difficult to gauge but it is certainly something to be considered; he has casually identified the tendencies he has that bother me the most, and just as casually dismissed them as part of his being. It speaks to a particular kind of mindfulness that he has, and which permeates his entire existence to some extent.

WoC’s philosophy is explicitly oriented towards the present. Disregarding the past and uncaring for the future, he states that his foremost goal is to perceive and act in the now. For him, it is only right and natural to see things as they immediately are and then respond appropriately. He does this to the best of his ability, and from what I can see it has served him well. I question whether such a philosophy would benefit him in the face of insurmountable odds, especially when failure has real and potentially terrible consequences, but that’s not really my place to speculate on. As it is, this mindset has—I believe—contributed heavily both to the positive and negative aspects of interacting with him.

As for the negative aspects, his “one-size-fits-all” policy for handling things has yielded a brutal directness. WoC recognizes his shortcomings, and he has no qualms in loudly identifying them in others. At this point, my appreciation for his method breaks down somewhat: he seems to fail to make a distinction between tasteful, constructive commentary and excessive force. Perhaps for him the latter is constructive, as he feels that people won’t listen without extreme intervention. Whatever the reason for his behavior, it has earned him the ire of many. Whether the complaints of others are legitimate or not undoubtedly depends on the exact scenario in question—I’m sure that some cases are deserved and others less so.

The nature of my discussion with him on this occasion was fairly predictable; he proved unyielding, and so instead of trying to convince him of anything I simply tried to understand. The reason that I have bothered to go on at length about this is because he helped me to remember that I can’t always win. I strive to help people as much as I possibly can, and in most situations I feel I can approach at least some kind of solution. However, there will always be people who, for one reason or another, are unapproachable or unable to be won over. Perhaps this means that I shouldn’t win in those cases. I feel this last point is particularly true with WoC—I mentioned that he is not completely immovable, and is amenable to changing his viewpoint if given sufficient reason. If he feels it unnecessary to change, does that mean that I lack sufficient cause to change him?

His incredible mindfulness appears to be a valuable trait, and it has reminded me that I must keep myself open to anything, even the idea of failure. I dislike the idea of being in a position that is unmanageable, but the truth of the matter is that sometimes two forces cannot be reconciled with each other. One of the primary takeaways that WoC and I left the conversation on was a rather suitable expression: “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life.” Thanks Picard.

Nothing more for today.

---

10^th of January 2018

Some rather interesting news came out today: What Pumpkin announced a contest. Every week with the release of new characters for Hiveswap, they will also take submissions for fancomics concerning characters that have already been released. They will select winners, wherein 3^rd place is $25 for WP merchandise, 2^nd place is $50, and 1^st is $75. In addition, 1st prize winners will be automatically entered into a raffle⁴² for a chance to win putting their own fan character in the game.

Naturally, people are in a frenzy about this. For clarity’s sake, this is not an entirely unique event: Homestuck also had an opportunity for people to insert their own fan characters in the comic. The Kickstarter for Hiveswap included a $10,000 tier where you would be able to insert a character of your choice. The reward was carried out to completion for exactly one page, and then on the next the fan characters were killed off in a spectacular fashion.

Despite this harsh treatment, it set a sort of precedent: the general consensus is that having your fan character canonically appear in the comic carries an unofficial price tag of $10,000. Of course, Hiveswap is by no means on the same scale of popularity as Homestuck, so the inherent worth of this fan character being put in is drastically less. However, it’s still a very enticing reward; there is no shortage of people already planning on comics they want to make and maximize their chances of snagging the grand prize.

A couple of our own are notably pursuing this, being Tipsy and Griever. I’m quite excited for both of them: Tipsy’s art is famous throughout the fandom for it’s chalk-like impressions and her renderings of the characters is pretty enjoyable. She also used to enjoy (or perhaps still enjoys?) relatively great popularity on Tumblr, although I have no real basis for understanding the metric behind her popularity; Griever on the other hand is new blood, and while the popularity of his work is dubious at this point there is no doubt that the quality of it has increased in every measurable way—the writing and the art have both approached a level that it can firmly be said Griever sports his own recognizable style.

These two will of course be entering into the competition, as well as countless others within the HSD itself, amongst the subreddit and across the remaining vestiges of the fandom. There is a base line of excitement hovering in the air which will undoubtedly only grow as the weeks go by. And if one of our number should win, especially the grand prize, it will surely launch us to heights we have never seen before. I’m extremely excited to see what will come of this, and I wish everyone the best of luck with their work.

On a far more sober note, there was a petty disturbance in oc-hell today. It was literally unworthy of comment or complaint, but for one user contacting me saying that Nat was “being an asshole again”. It’s a running joke that I’m a father-figure for the HSD, especially in contexts where I have to actually act fatherly for whatever horrible reason. This matter was particularly egregious, in my opinion—it was just childish nonsense that shouldn’t have been complained about in the first place.

As it is, I didn’t want to let it go without talking to both of the people involved. I’m glad I didn’t realize they were acting out of line at any point. Crisis averted I suppose. Still, it’s immensely tiresome to be faced with incidents like this one, which by all means are completely unworthy of any attention. This is something that could have been resolved by itself but for someone not being able to handle the interactions of other people. Sometimes people are also very receptive and thankful when you help them, which is enough of an encouragement for me to find this worthwhile. After the fact I think both people were amenable enough to not repeat this idiotic mistake, but time will tell. My job is a lot nicer when it doesn’t also entail being a babysitter.

Nothing more for today.

---

12^th of January 2018

I wonder if I’ll ever get to talk to Hussie someday. I bet he’s really fucking weird to talk to—the only footage I’ve ever seen of him in public was kind of quiet, but it was at some sort of convention so I have no idea if that’s how he actually is. The only other video I’ve seen of him involves him trying to very badly impersonate Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders (edit as of 2/13/18, this video can be found here). The man wears pants with fucking Pepe the Frog all over them in public. Is this part of some persona or is that what he’s actually like?

There are a lot of people at WhatPumpkin that I have close to no awareness about, and I get kind of pissed at the idea that I don’t know anything about this subject. It’s irrational to feel this way and have these thoughts, but I can’t help but blame myself for the lack of knowledge. Was there more I could have done to involve myself? Why did I wait so long to get started talking to others in the community? How different would things be if I had tried to do all this earlier, even just a year or two? Would this journal even fucking exist, through whatever strange contrivances that the universe allows to happen and make things occur?

Does Hussie do all of this weird shit on purpose just to demonstrate how weird he is? Or is he genuinely that strange of a person? He has a ton of Star Trek: The New Generation edits on Youtube from years ago, which are all genuinely hilarious, but he doesn’t do things like that anymore. I wonder if he still creates things like art in his spare time, without letting anyone else know. If he does, does he enjoy it? Is he having an alright time with his life?

Is what I’m doing with all of this worth it? Who on earth is going to read this journal a year from now, and especially past that? Is it worth trying to preserve all of this esoteric nonsense? Why can’t I stop asking myself these idiotic questions? I guess I’m just stricken with an annoying case of existential angst tonight. I can’t stop being frustrated at nothing in particular, and everything about what it is I’m doing or feeling.

It’s inappropriate to put this here if I’m striving to create a document about the HSD or the Homestuck fandom in general, but my thoughts are important too. I also recognize that it may be weird for those who read this later, but what else am I to do? I feel as if this mood is strangely set upon me by the HSD itself, as something that I work too hard at. I’m driving myself nuts with this nonsense. I should take a break from the HSD tonight and clear my head; I’ve been trying too hard to stay on top of it, and—when it enters these conversational doldrums—forsaking the chance to relax by being too vigilant.

This entry is a fucking mess, I should probably just delete it. Yet, I also don’t think that I should. I’ll look back on this in the future and probably be upset that I bothered to write down all my thoughts in this way, but at this point in time they are an extension of my job here and I’m not willing to compromise the transparency of this record just so I can avoid the feeling of awkwardness later. This is a warning to myself and perhaps to others against investing too much thought in an online community that probably won’t matter in the future. I need rest, I can feel myself spiraling into madness at this rate. Too much thinking, not enough relaxing.

I’m sorry for this utterly crap entry, not everyone can be a winner I guess. Forget about it.

---

14^th of January 2018

The last few days have gone by rather peacefully. There has been plenty of activity, but none of it really worthy of note. It’s actually quite interesting; to have a period of relative peace is kind of strange when it’s the exception rather than the rule. Unfortunately, this doesn’t translate well into the journal—with nothing of note happening, there is nothing to write. I guess I can personally count that as a mixed blessing. As Olki remarked, “maybe it’s better that the hsd isn’t just a constant shithive of drama”. From a pragmatic perspective I agree, yet my fickle human heart wants stuff to write about. Perhaps I have imbued this journal with too much of my sense of purpose.

Ironically, my bringing this up today launched its own set of discourse, which was both a tad dismaying and satisfying in a perverse way. I have remarked often that I’m not comfortable or pleased with the journal being controlled in its distribution. The ultimate power to give it away still rests with me, and if I so chose I could publically release it. However, that would be neither respectable nor favorable: I would probably be demodded over it, which would restrict my ability to learn things and—most importantly—gut my ability to help others or improve things at all.

I was also reminded that some of the information in this journal is sensitive, perhaps more than I bargained for. I recently went through and removed as much information as I could that might prove invasive, but there is the non-zero chance that I may have missed something. It’s an aggravating reality that there are things in here that people may not want released.

This is especially true of S, who has greatly protested their inclusion in any form. However, I don’t know if I feel obligated to remove each and every inclusion of them in this document. To my awareness as of writing this, there is no information in this document that is not publically available already; their unwillingness to be included is because of the nature of the spin I can put on things, which is simultaneously an understandable position to take and also incredibly frustrating to hear.

The last thing I want to do is inconvenience or put off anyone with this document, but I strive already to make it as neutral an account as possible. Granted, there are many times within that I have taken the time to elaborate on my own personal feelings, but typically not against any one person in particular unless they are particularly deserving of praise or scorn. My appraisements are generalized and not extraordinarily specific except for a rare few occasions.

I guess all of this is to say that I have become confused as to the nature of this journal once more. I don’t wish to linger on this topic; as has been the case before, I’m sure some introspection and a night or two will make it seem like less of a big deal. I only feel it’s important to stress my desire to remain faithful in my representation of the HSD and the people there, without causing more stress than might be needed in any situation; while I may be describing things that are not inherently connected to us, the journal is still largely about how we are behaving and how these things affect us, or in some cases the fandom at large.

If I were a more arrogant individual I might say that we basically are the fandom at this point⁴⁴, but I have never explicitly agreed with that sentiment (at the very least, not its wording). This is more my musing than anything else, but I have to wonder exactly how many people are out there who would still count themselves as explicit fans, and where those people are located so to speak. How many float nebulously on Tumblr, with no real organization or consensus among them? How many exist primarily on /co/, for all purposes now defunct as a medium for discussing the webcomic? How many don’t really belong to any one “faction” at all, much as I was for all those years? Conducting a census on this topic would be nothing short of impossible, but I would definitely be interested to see the numbers if at all possible.

Somewhat related to this, the nature of the discourse itself was at least vaguely centered around the nature of the HSD itself, and how it’s viewed by people in general. There are a few different camps, whose positions should be relatively easy to derive: there are some people—including some rather important figures from What Pumpkin and the Hiveswap development team—who absolutely loathe the HSD, a few of whom I was recently graced with the opportunity to meet in person and discuss the issue with (this is a complex issue that I may or may not be at liberty to elaborate on later); others are ambivalent or decidedly positive about the HSD; and then the last group are those who simply don’t care.

Tipsy comes to mind as particularly vocal about this last viewpoint: the exact context of the argument is a little difficult to describe, but she made the comment “nobody cares who is in the hsd” in reference to us talking about how people on the outside of our community view it. It has been known for some time now that What Pumpkin and others are generally very negative towards the HSD, specifically because of two things: Makin’s influence for some, and then in general how the HSD used to be during its initial few months of existence.

An aside, I just got done have a fairly protracted discussion with MrCheeze about whether it’s appropriate to go into extensive detail about these past events, because there is a huge amount of controversy surrounding them and the people involved do not want the conflict revisited for their own reasons. I have described my own philosophy on information seeking as “I want to know things unless they endanger people”, which I’ve always thought was a modestly reasonable definition. The conversation I had with MrCheeze tonight illustrated a vagueness to it though: what counts as “endangerment”? What is the extent of damage or distress that I’m willing to put someone through in order to gain information?

I don’t know much about the legal ramifications of a term like “endangerment” but the answer to that second question is almost certainly “none”, unless there is an extremely good reason for my interference. I have no idea what could constitute such a reason, but simply wanting to pry into matters of the past for no reason almost certainly does not count as one. I was going to describe the incident that coined the term “gremlining”, which I have defined previously, but after the discussion with MrCheeze I have elected not to; ironically it would be similarly invasive for me to go into any detail about it, and I don’t want to cause needless problems in the name of information seeking.

With all this in mind, suffice it to say that the early history of the HSD is mired in controversy. If other less sensitive examples crop up I will certainly explain them, but the overall point is that the HSD does not have a good reputation for a significant number of people. This has obviously led to an incredible degree of difficulty in trying to manage things when it comes to events that are not contained wholly in the HSD, among other things. Returning to the original point, because of all this there are people who actively despise the HSD, or at least the people who frequent it.

As far as I’m aware there is no one who is fiercely positive about the HSD’s existence. It may be self-serving to say so but I think I may be the most outspoken in this regard, which is fine if true; it may be perfectly valid to say that my enthusiasm and affection for it is out of the ordinary or even strange. Instead, a lot of people seem to have taken a lukewarm stance on the server, with many of them saying that it could use improvement in various areas.

These suggested improvements are often reduced to a number of things: a large variety of the suggestions are fairly frivolous in nature, such as the idea of including a #rules channel. The most substantive and dramatic one is typically “get rid of Makin”, which has become the focus of a lot of conversations centered on improving the server. There are people both inside the server who want him gone and then people outside of it who claim they would join and participate if he was no longer in charge. Hearing these sorts of sentiments actually bring me quite a bit of distress, because I mostly trust him and his ability to lead. I don’t trust in him without reservation of course, but the frequency of and detail that these complaints go into are pretty disconcerting. It forces me to wonder if there are patterns I’ve been missing, especially seeing as I have missed out on a lot of history or context that might prove helpful in understanding better.

No matter the accuracy of these comments, it also fails to account for something very important: Makin’s fairly responsible for the HSD’s relative success. Even if Makin himself is plagued with controversy, the fact of the matter is that his general efforts between it and the subreddit are what have led it to having the member count it boasts now (although I fully admit that I don’t know the exact extent to which his direct handling aided this, as opposed to a natural accumulation of people over time). Even if sufficient evidence was found to suggest that he should not be in charge, I wouldn’t in good conscience be able to call for his removal because it would probably hinder the server’s development in a significant way.

This is all extremely perplexing to consider. There is a fair amount of nuance to all of this, which I may not be qualified or even willing to handle. It’s more than likely that nothing will come out of any sort of insinuation or claim anyway, unless it is particularly earth-shattering/has a mountain of evidence to support it. Even then, would Makin respond to valid demands to step down at all?⁴⁵ I don’t like considering this even as a hypothetical, it feels somewhat mutinous. I actually feel profoundly unhappy considering this outcome, so I don’t think I will discuss it any further in this entry.

Instead, I will say that I spent more time than usual hanging out in other servers today. The only one that strikes me as being particularly noteworthy is Nights’ personal server, by dint of having a large group of people who are also active in it. It should be noted that it is specifically not a splinter server, because it was not founded in opposition to any sort of policy shift on the HSD or any such nonsense; it is purely a server for personal amusement and for friends to commingle on.

At any rate, the experience was a fairly pleasant one. The HSD and especially mspa-lit is a fairly fast paced and open thing, as a public server with nearly 10,000 people on it. At any given time there’s a conversation going on somewhere, and it can start to feel a bit impersonal with all of the random people floating between channels and asserting themselves without preamble. In Nights’ server it’s a different experience, one that I think is a little more representative of the experience I had become familiar with in the Sydlexia IRC chatroom.

Back then, the size had been orders of magnitude smaller with about a dozen to two dozen people online at any given time at its heyday. Nights’ server is similar, and the reigning attitude is distinctly comfier since people are allowed to socialize over anything and everything. The HSD often feels stuffy because of what I’ve come to think of as conversational rigor mortis: namely that the topic being discussed is beaten into the ground until it begins to stiffen and die, until someone can think of something new to discuss and then the cycle begins anew. This is compounded with the fact that not every topic is encouraged; if Makin wants he can keep conversation from shifting to something else naturally, which artificially lengthens discussion time of a given topic and makes it feel unnatural.

All of this is to say that the HSD is a more rigid environment, and after taking the time to fraternize with people in Nights’ server I can see why people might prefer it there. Makin’s way of handling a room may be advantageous in some respects but the aims or goals of Nights’ chat are not necessarily the same. This is not even to speak of the behavioral differences between Nights and Makin, which no doubt contribute heavily to the way they moderate (being that Makin is controlling and Nights is fluid or unconcerned).

Ah well. I’ve never cared too much about the other servers available, but perhaps I will have to spend a little more time on them to destress from the overall situation that is the HSD, at least occasionally. Despite the lack of immediate concerns and drama, or perhaps because of it, I’ve been finding myself growing a little weary of the place. I’ve probably just been spending too much time there doing nothing of importance; even I have my limits of how much nothing I can do.

I was describing my desire to release the journal to more people, and brought up the idea to Makin that he could go through and strike out elements that he doesn’t want released to anyone in particular, which I felt was a decent compromise. He countered with something that was strikingly apropos: “you are thinking of putting me in charge of deciding which personal information should be publicly available and which should not / how dumb can you be”. I do take issue with some of this, in that only a very small portion of what I write is actually of a seriously personal nature, but even so Makin should probably not be the person I defer to on this matter.

Honestly, it feels as if there will be no way to solve this dilemma easily. I don’t want to resign myself to refusing people access, but unless I can hold the journal to a higher standard of privacy there really isn’t a tactful way to release it to people. At some point in the near future I will take more painstaking effort to go through and delete all information that (to me) appears overly sensitive, such as the general area people live in, their age, or any interpersonal relationships I may have commented on. Hopefully this doesn’t reduce the total length by much, but we’ll just have to see.

Speaking more generally on the server, I’m pleased to say that virtuNat was promoted to janitor of oc-hell. I was technically supposed to hand off ownership to them a while ago, but the place has been pretty self-regulating since its inception. It is good to have someone more official to point to when I look at the channel or problems happen there, and virtuNat has presented themselves as a fairly stable and reliable individual. I look forward to seeing how they handle themselves in the position.

Some conjecture, but something may be happening with MSPA⁴⁶. The text in the last news post has disappeared, and although it’s not a clear indication of any upcoming potential events it is still exciting whenever something happens there. There is some chance that messing with the text means an update is forthcoming, which would be great to inject some energy into the community right now.

Because the chance is unclear at this point, there was a small bet made between Sora and Makin. Sora is ruthlessly optimistic about Hiveswap (moreand indeed, Homestuck as well), going so far as to say some pretty outlandish things in favor of it, such as promoting brand identity to a ridiculous level. As such, Sora expects some kind of newspost to come out in the next day or so, and has actually entered a bet with Makin to see if this will occur. Makin believes no such thing will happen, and the winner of the bet will receive $5 from the loser to go towards a charity of their choice.

Or, that would have been the bet, except that Makin said he “believes charity is a waste of money”, and so is unwilling to accept the terms. This assertion stunned me for a second, which felt far too broad: I understand many charities are simple fronts for scam artists, but have always maintained that many others are in fact reputable. Upon pressing him about this, Makin clarified that, rather than concerns about reputability, his distaste for the concept arises simply because he believes only one cause is worthy of charity: achieving the technological singularity⁴⁷.

Such is Makin. Nothing more for today.

---

15^th of January 2018

Today was kind of unusual in a pleasant way. There were no major occurrences, but I’d like to point out an extremely in depth conversation we started having at one point about biology. It began with a flippant question from Makin about whether I could design a prion that would destroy the world, and then it somehow morphed into something that was actually conceptually significant.

We were joined by a variety of other people who all chimed in at various points, but I was relieved of the responsibility of explaining things to Makin by a user named Khauvinkh. Khau as I call him has been hanging around in the server for months now and is usually fairly quiet, but today he perked up at the sight of a topic about cellular and molecular biology. He asked if he could lead the conversation, itself an amusing request, but I yielded and let him have the floor. He then stunned me with an incredible command over the subject area of protein folding and complexity, something that I would only expect to see from someone who has either freshly taken a course on the material or who has attained a graduate degree in the field.

I guess I shouldn’t really be surprised, I have no reason to be: it’s not like Khau sold himself as someone with no specialized training, he simply doesn’t speak that often. Whatever the case, what ensued was a particularly satisfying conversation about a wide variety of scientific principles, and was kind of a breath of fresh air from the typical content of the channel (usually being more entertainment oriented). I was really pleased with the extent of it, although I think towards the end people were itching to get onto other topics that were less in depth (or less boring I guess). It’s understandably a far more esoteric set of discussions than the channel is used to, so it’s only fair that it gets brought up less than other topics.

The bet between Sora and Makin, if it can still be called that, is approaching zero-hour. It has been suggested by MrCheeze that in the interest of fairness the bet be extended by a day or two—I’m inclined to agree with this, as the chances that any newspost would come out were extremely low from the start. Sora never had a chance, so I think it’s admissible to give them some more time just to see what happens.

Despite the extremely low odds of it becoming a thing to begin with and my awareness of that probability, I find myself disappointed with the lack of news. I hate to admit it but any inkling that we may receive news manages to excite me, and I imagine others share this sentiment even if they claim not to It’s such a tantalizing prospect, and the complete lack of news for the majority of the time lends itself to a kind of deprivation. We are hungry for word of development, and unfortunately the slow drip of the Troll Call each week is not really enough to satisfy our cravings.

In a similar vein, there was an incident I failed to recount the other day. At one point James Roach tweeted something about Homestuck, a simple post that was a joke response to a post someone else had already made. I think people failed to check the context of the message, so it appeared exceedingly vague and mysterious to people looking at the time. This would be fine and is honestly not outside the normal range of experience with James, but Sora went and tweeted at James asking for clarification.

After the incident with Minish back before Hiveswap was released this was almost enough to send some of us into a panic: interacting with James Roach on twitter has been nothing short of disastrous, and with how Sora can behave at times I was very nervous about what I might find. However, I’m pleased to say that Sora was fairly tactful in their approach. James in turn was pretty amicable about explaining the context of his original post, so it feels as if the entire incident went swimmingly.

On the other hand, you wouldn’t know it based on the reaction of some of the people in the HSD. By all means this encounter was a positive one, but there were some pretty clear comments trying to push back on the tweet James made as being “irresponsible” or some such nonsense. I have to admit that I don’t really care too much about this conversation other than that it was an annoying set of circumstances and that some of the comments were themselves frustratingly cynical. I guess that’s just the nature of this place—being fickle is hardly an unusual circumstance here.

At the same time, it’s at least somewhat understandable: we’re so starved for news that there is an underlying tension because of how little we have to go off of. There isn’t even a lack of concrete information, we already know when Hiveswap: Act 2 is (supposed to be) coming out. However, there’s a significant lack of communication between us and WP or the Hiveswap team that the Troll Call is not really satisfying. I’ve gone on at length about this topic in the past, so I don’t feel the need to rehash it beyond this point.

This is a more unusual note, but I tried to do something today that I feel is a genuinely nice idea that I’ve had some limited success with in the past. I had never attempted to do this with the HSD before: occasionally I’ll be taken by a certain mood where I feel like making art. However, I don’t consider myself very good at art and I’m not particularly concerned with being good at it, but rather just want to involve myself in something creative or relaxing.

To this end I was inspired some time ago by a steamer on Vinesauce named Joel, who decided to emulate the Super Nintendo game Mario Paint and use it to follow along with a Bob Ross video, making the painting on display (note: Joel might not be the first person to do this, but he is the one I first witnessed doing it). In the past I have done this alone or tried to involve my real-life friends in the same activity, with varying levels of effectiveness.

I was taken by said mood earlier today and decided I would try involving people from the HSD and some related servers. I went around and posted an invite, and I was actually pleased with how many people joined. It wasn’t exactly a bonanza but about five people participated; after we were done we shared our art, and with the wide variety of art programs, skill levels, and even seriousness involved, there was a fascinating range of art that came about from one video. It only took about half an hour, and I think everyone had a very nice time.

I think it’s important to stress that this activity isn’t really intended to showcase talent; it’s not about being “good at art”, it’s more just celebrating art and enjoying the process of making something. I myself tend to make really crappy paintings with this (my brief foray into real oil painting with Bob Ross being utterly disastrous if one were to review it objectively), but I’m not really concerned with making good art; like I said earlier, it’s about enjoying the experience. I’m delighted that the spirit of this activity was sustained not only for myself, but for all the people who participated.

I’m going to float this idea again in the future, and if people are still receptive towards it or especially if more people decide to join in, I might have to do it more frequently. It would be very nice to have an engaging, therapeutic group activity where people come together just to enjoy themselves with no real pressure.

The last thing I’ll discuss for today is this conversation I had with Sea Hitler a short while ago. I’ve been keeping an eye on #general for a while (as is my job, I suppose), but it has been utterly boring. I typically don’t question this, but tonight it struck me as rather off. Sea Hitler asked me about the journal at some point, and I took the opportunity to open a dialog about him as to why #general has been so unremittingly slow or inactive lately⁴⁸.

Sea Hitler echoed my concerns, but like me is unsure of the true cause for it. He surmised—probably correctly—that it’s due to a multitude of things, most probably that the regulars who sustained its activity have either moved on from the server or have gone to #altgen instead. Toast also states that it may have to do with it being the beginning of the spring semester, which would of course make sense.

Whatever the reason for it, I find it kind of disquieting. I may not use #general to the greatest extent, but it’s one of the first things that people see when they come into this community. If it’s dead, then I imagine there’s a much greater chance that they will abandon the place as dead and unworthy of trying to participate in. It does an enormous disservice to the server as a whole that its arguably front-line channel is inactive. Sea Hitler and I resolved to try and reinvigorate it.

To this end, Sea Hitler and I sent out a couple of feelers. There are still a few people talking in there regularly, most prominently in my mind being Erieolae and Angel. We confronted them and asked how long the chat has been dead like this, to which we received no real enticing answers. However, after posing this question people seemed to start coming out of the woodwork to talk a little bit more. Grape, an altgen regular named DasSad, and then even Anervaria started talking more, and then some rando I have no awareness of named Chasca joined in recently. Some time later, the discussion is still moving along at a more or less healthy place.

I’d be interested to see if this kind of easy galvanization is reproducible in the future. It may be that #general has a lot of potential energy that simply needs to be tapped into, and in the future we simply need to suggest topics which people will then sieze upon with little issue. This outcome is something I can stomach but is still unfortunate for a couple reasons, the greatest of which being that it requires a hands-on approach to the problem. It is little trouble to go and shitpost lightly in #general until people start talking, but being forced to do that on a regular basis would get kind of tiresome.

I can hope that the server in general (ha ha) will reenergize once the semester is in swing, or perhaps during the summer. I’m trying to pick up on the seasonal habits of this place, but with so little experience in the longterm sense it’s hard to really analyze these tendencies statistically. The Carbon bot we were going to use for that purpose has some technical problems that make it harder to use, but I’ll have to spend some time and analyze the trends when I have an opportunity.

Sometimes I really do wish for The Reckoning 2.0: Judgment Day⁴⁹. It may be foolish of me to say, but I have little doubt that the intense chaos following it would shake up the server very nicely. It would at least be memorable, but Sea Hitler was expressing doubt that it may happen. The mods are—in my opinion—responsible and channel layout at this point are all fairly well-organized, such that there is no real need to perpetrate such an event again.

I maintain that it would be valuable as a way to inject some energy into the system, but perhaps the risk would be too great compared to the potential benefits. Now that I think about it, it’s entirely likely that I’m making some inappropriate assumptions of what may happen if another Reckoning were to occur: I’m sure it would piss off at least some people and lead to an exodus of sorts. Who am I to say, really? I wasn’t even around for the first one; until the second happens and I can witness the effects for myself, it is irresponsible of me to assume what the outcome could be.

The future seems murky, although not necessarily dangerous at this point. Stability being what it is, the event we have to look forward to next is the anniversary of the server. I wonder how it will be celebrated this year; last time there was some extremely nice art that Nights provided, and a couple of old traditions or channels were reinstated (as well as Daddy being temporarily unbanned for the day). Should be interesting to see what happens this year.

Nothing more for today.

---

16^th of January 2018

In light of the recent slowdown, I’ve decided to pursue some of the other research projects that have been mentioned to me in the past. Makin is most vocal about the forums, claiming that they are in most danger of being lost forever: “the forums are the only thing we may genuinely not get back / memories are all we have / get them before they fade”. While this sort of commentary does serve to make me a little more anxious, I don’t feel anymore inclined to really go after it in the meantime. I’ve already covered the subject extensively in a previous entry, and if I decide to revisit the topic it will be after I’ve covered a whole host of other things that I’ve been interested in.

To that end, I decided to ask around about a couple of branches of the Homestuck fandom that would be considered important: Pesterchum and Tumblr. The latter needs no preamble or explanation, except perhaps briefly once I actually begin to write about it. Pesterchum is by far the more esoteric set of communities, by dint of the fact that it is something that was featured in the actual comic before becoming a real thing.

Pesterchum in-comic is a chat platform much like IRC, where one can communicate individually with people or in group settings called memos. Every user’s handle in-comic is stylized in the manner of “firstnameSecondname”, and then abbreviated with the first letter of each name such that it would be “fS”. For a while this only existed in Homestuck, but then someone named ghostDunk actually went and created a program that utilized IRC nodes and faithfully recreated the chat program for people to use in real life.

I’m hesitant to go into much more detail on this for now; Olki has served as my primary source on it so far, but he pointed me in the direction of some people who might be able to give me more information, including ghostDunk himself. There appear to be a couple other influential figures named Midna and Zemedelphos, who both used the program a lot and were apparently fairly recognizable for anyone who used the program a lot. I’ve sent them requests for interviews, and hopefully I will hear back about them soon. If I don’t hear back from them I’ll go ahead and write a small article based on what Olki has provided me with, but it would really be optimal to have some more references on this topic. It could be extremely illuminating to hear what they have to say on the topic!

In a similar vein, I mentioned Tumblr. My point of reference for this in the HSD is Tipsy, who has graciously provided me a pretty in depth response. Makin casts some (joking) doubt about the veracity of her information, although all jokes aside there were definite points of contention between her information and that of others present.

At one point Tipsy tried to downplay the importance that Tumblr had on What Pumpkin and by extension Andrew Hussie, but Makin himself and Griever were both quick to set the record straight on this matter. The former commented: "WP checks tumblr, especially the tags for their [entire] fandom interaction", and the latter further remarked that “tumblr absolutely has the biggest influence on andrew and homestuck compared to like, reddit or the mspa forums.” There seems to be an overwhelming amount of evidence to support this viewpoint, but I’ll go into more detail with this when I get the chance to write a proper article on the subject.

I dislike relying on single points of reference, so I asked Tipsy to point me in the direction of others who may be able to provide more information or corroborate what she’s already told me. Another user named Brooke pointed in the direction of a person named “Kylee Henkee”, apparently a massive influence on the Tumblr portion of the Homestuck fandom and who has been around for a long time. I have no idea if I’ll be able to get in contact with them, but there is another person who gave me the same advice. It’s worth a shot, if nothing else.

If worse comes to worst and I’m able to secure responses from none of the people I’ve mentioned, it will certainly be dispiriting, and I don’t know that I would be at liberty to try and write anything comprehensive on the subject. Certainly not anything resembling an article, but perhaps it would still be worthwhile to comment on the subject at length. If nothing else, I could write a combined article where I discuss each platform in brief. There is still a lot of potential here for information that people may be unaware of at this point.

I wonder if it’s worth writing a more formal article about the forums at this point. Given that they are actually gone in a sense, or otherwise obscured, it may certainly be that very few people who are typically “around” in the Homestuck fandom now are relatively uninformed on the matter. There is also a huge amount of desire to get them back, as they served as a centralized hub and easy point of access for fans to try and contact WP or get issues resolved.

Getting the forums restored may actually mitigate a large variety of issues; it serves as a great way for people to communicate and hype each other up over Homestuck and its affiliated projects. This would serve both the fans’ purposes and WP’s, as the latter would almost certainly see increased popularity and sales as a result. Perhaps it would behoove me to write about the forums if only for the goal of getting more people to talk about them, or to reinvigorate interest in them.

I was actually having a conversation with the same person who provided me responses about Tumblr besides Tipsy, a fellow named curiousTerminal, or Turbro. Turbro was markedly vehement about their displeasure with WP for failing to secure the forums’ existence; this vitriol was both surprising to me and then somewhat expected, as I’ve seen people echo the sentiment before (if in a decidedly less pointed fashion). This is a particular area of blindness for me, as I was never around to experience the forums for myself aside from one or two exceedingly brief forays into the system.

The amount of attachment that people display for it continues to catch me off guard, and with each conversation I have on the topic the true extent of the damage becomes more and more clear. While MSPFA arose as a hosting option for people wanting to make fanventures, there were already an incredible wealth of projects that were in progress on the forums that were suddenly wiped out when they were taken down. By some peoples estimates, there were potentially hundreds⁵⁰ of fanventures that were lost when this occurred. I have no way of knowing how accurate that number is, but it honestly wouldn’t surprise me given the number of people and especially the stretch of time involved.

It seems as if having the forums come back would be a mutually beneficial situation, so the fact that they have been left to rot is an extremely puzzling scenario. Makin comments on this in particular:

why wouldn't they bring them back
it makes no sense
they desperately need more money
and mspaf brings ad revenue, helps keep the obsessive merchandise-buying fans alive
it's no coincidence the fanbase dropped down a cliff after the forums exploded

The more I hear about it, the more I’m convinced that something should be done about it if at all possible. I guess it’s time to make an executive decision: it’s time to revisit the topic and interview more people if possible. I have no idea how effective it will be but it would be irresponsible of me not to at least try to bring some awareness of the issue to people.

On a similar note, I guess I wonder if it’s worthy of speaking about the subreddit. I don’t get the impression that it has a particularly noteworthy history, but I’m reminded of a discussion I had with MrCheeze some time back. He has been extremely vocal about the state of the subreddit as something that has more or less declined over time; this has been cited before but anyone who is interested in his general sentiments on the topic would do well to check the entry entitled “Subreddit Nostalgia/Reminiscing” in appendix B, by reddit user frig_darn. It’s difficult for me to say whether there is much to comment on because, again, I wasn’t around for it in the first place.

This sort of problem is becoming an increasingly annoying trend for me, where I’m strictly out of the loop on things simply because I wasn’t around for the event in question. Realistically I understand there’s nothing I can do about this because I’m not fucking omniscient, but nonetheless the frustration is almost palpable. Sometimes this knowledge gap is by design, where there is information that people don’t want to get spread around. In this case, I completely understand: the nature of some information is sensitive enough that it could adversely affect people, and I don’t want to be responsible for impacting anyone in a negative fashion.

The sort of information I mean when I describe my agitation is more along the lines of stuff that is mundane, but esoteric enough that no one really knows where to begin looking. It’s like trying to initiate a treasure hunt when no one really knows what the treasure looks like, despite everyone knowing it exists. However, I hope that as time goes by I can continue assimilating more knowledge and making it available to people.

This is a significant part of my sense of ethics: I feel as if the availability of information and especially transparency should always be emphasized when possible. I find it obtuse and destructive when people choose to keep secrets for whatever reason, and I feel as if the apparent need for secrecy in some areas would be mitigated by people simply being open and honest in the first place. Obviously there are exceptions to this, and I guess pragmatically there’s nothing that can really be done to overcome the need for discretion.

It’s times like these where I really begin to consider the nature of my position in the community. The release of the Gankro article kind of cemented the idea of my potential for me: no one else is really bothering to engage in this activity, and so barring any attempts I may not be familiar with I’m the only chance for preservation that this community really has in the long run. The forums being gone is a terrifying example of what could happen to the rest of us: without warning we may be forced to scatter and disappear someday.

Of course, the idea that this may happen to the HSD is a very sobering thought indeed, but there’s not much use in worrying about it until it happens (although I might start putting thought towards some kind of contingency). Rather, I guess it’s more important to focus on the here and now, and perhaps the bigger picture. The HSD is one small part of a greater whole, and achieving certain things like bringing the forums back would be like introducing layers of redundancy to try and mitigate the damage from sudden community destruction for any given reason.

In a broad sense, I guess this goal is clear: having as many points of attack as possible will ensure the survival of the community in some form even if something disastrous occurs. This is sort of the same principle as colonizing other worlds: even if Earth were destroyed by some cataclysmic event, having humanity in more than one place would massively increase the chances of our survival even in such dire conditions. So too would it be if we our community were able to be decentralized somehow.

Looking back at all that I’ve written, it makes me seem a bit paranoid I think. Hell, it makes me feel paranoid. I’m mostly calm in the last several weeks, but there is still an underlying tension in me that is terrified by the idea of the HSD breaking or otherwise failing in some horrid fashion. The experiences I’ve had and continue to have here shape me in a substantial fashion, and I’m happy beyond words that I’ve been able to settle into the role of someone who is influential, but most importantly actually helpful. I’ve spent a lot of time and effort here trying to improve things for people.

I guess I can be satisfied in the knowledge that, even should the HSD cease to exist someday, I will still have helped others throughout my tenure here. The physical evidence may disappear but it is still satisfactory that I will have done such things at all, at least in my own mind. I guess that seems conflicting with my desire—perhaps even compulsion—to document things totally and completely, but even I don’t have to remember something for it to have happened.

I guess I’ve entered into a contemplative state of mind with all of this. Usually this would run the risk of opening me up to some melancholic thinking, but tonight I believe I’m simply feeling reflective. In three days it will have been one year since I was modded. I guess I didn’t have any real expectations of myself at that point other than “help out”, in whatever form that help may have taken. This leads to a number of questions for myself, even ones that I just answered for myself. Did I succeed in my goal? Am I doing well enough as I am? Is there more that I could be doing? What is the ultimate purpose that I have in doing all of this shit?

This is getting dangerously close to that entry on the 12th. I both regret and don’t regret including that trash: as embarrassing as it may be, it is definitely helpful in reminding myself that I need to maintain some distance so that I don’t basically lose my mind over nothing. Maybe it’ll continue to serve as such, so that I avoid making the mistake in the future. Better than hiding your problems is confronting them and learning from them—I’m sure Toast and others would agree.

I guess I should try and leave it on a more positive note. I’ve noticed myself doing this every 50 pages, automatically gearing the language so that it’s more positive. While it may be cliché at this point to do so, I feel it’s also important. Just as the entry on the 12th of this month serves as a reminder to myself not to be too invested, I consider the last portion of each 50 pages as a treat to myself to remember why it is I’m bothering to do this in the first place.

It’s gratifying to think about all of the positive experiences I’ve had here; I may drive myself a little mad worrying about the fine details, but when I’m in more stable frames of mind 99% of the time, I think it’s very evident to myself that it’s worth pursuing all of this. It doesn’t come up often, but others echo my sentiments in this regard; that we can participate with each other and have such a nice time as a group is a very special thing, and it deserves a certain level of protection. Even the days where nothing of importance happen are valuable in their own way—they are a sign that we can enjoy each other just for the sake of enjoying each other, which may be the purest form of simple friendship I can imagine.

And on the more complex side, the deep friendships that have formed here are wonderful to witness. I speak not only of my own, but of the relationships I’ve seen pop up between people in other channels, other regulars, other servers that largely exist because of the HSD. It’s not even a unique occurrence for a community to have these derivations occur, but there is still a kind of magic to it. Much how every person I help is worth it on an individual level, every single positive outcome that is due to this server validates its existence, and makes me proud to have had the opportunity to participate in it and contribute to that outcome.

Even now I can feel that danger of investment fading; in its place, a simple gratitude for what has arisen here is forming. The HSD has its fair share of problems that need to be addressed, as does anything; it is far from perfect, and I would laugh at anyone who suggests otherwise. Yet, every shortcoming somehow contributes to the overall fabric of the place and can even accentuate its positive aspects. In a way, I find myself enamored with even the more problematic elements of the HSD, as they too are a fundamental part of the overall whole. This combination of terrible and wonderful is funny to me: it’s an effective microcosm of the human experience.⁵¹

I need to stop writing entries late at night, I’m starting to sound insane even to myself. Rather than being imminently concerned this time though, I guess I’m just amused. This is where my efforts have led me for whatever reason—life is strange and funny that way. I’m sure after a night’s rest I’ll be right as rain again, and the tone of these entries can resume something approaching normalcy. There are more interviews to be conducted, and information to be uncovered. Rather than scaling a mountain, this segment of 50 pages feels like organizing an expedition. The future has proven to be surmountable, but what will we find waiting for us there? Part of me dreads the process of finding out, but the other part is excited at the prospect of what might happen, and what we may see. The future is not necessarily bright as I have seen it before, but it is certainly full of potential.

Nothing more for today.

---

17^th of January 2018

As has been described previously, Makin is fond of trying to expose other people to various works of art and literature; this practice of advertising something to other people in a direct and purposeful fashion is called shilling. I’ve mentioned this practice often enough previously but never taken the time to rigidly define it. Furthermore, some time ago Makin created a page with a list of works that he has deemed essential: Makin’s List of Shills can be found in appendix B, under the entry of the same name.

Makin has been questioned about what sorts of works belong in the List of Shills, and while a comprehensive answer is yet to be provided, there are a couple running themes that have been identified. There is no single unifying theme that is true of every single work, but generally they are esoteric to the point of being unknown (given that his primary focus is fanfic, this is not exactly a difficult requirement to satisfy). Furthermore, there is commonly an element of “abusing the system”, where the characters involved find a way to manipulate the very rules or conditions they live under. Makin may choose to provide his own definitions, at which point I will update them here.

Makin’s latest shill includes a work that follows these principles, something called The Library Unpublished. I’ve yet to peruse this work myself, but Makin has become very taken with the work and wasted no time in introducing it to the rest of the group. As is customary, the current name of mspa-lit has been changed to #the-library-unpublished in order to raise further awareness of the story. As if that weren’t enough, however, Makin went a step further and managed to invite the author of this story onto the HSD for an impromptu AMA⁵².

These sorts of occasions are usually pretty exciting even if the person involved and their work are relatively unknown. I’m not sure what it is about an AMA that gets people interested when they don’t already care about the subject material. Perhaps there’s something alluring to subjecting someone else to tedious questions, like some kind of spectacle? Whatever the case, the creator of The Library Unpublished agreed to make an appearance and fielded questions from everyone in mspa-lit for an hour or so.

Vi_fi, as they’re called, was pretty amicable overall. Despite the no doubt overwhelming barrage of questions, many of which weren’t even related to their work at all, they seemed fairly collected and I think may have even enjoyed their time in the server. It’s always satisfying when such is the case; there is a distinct sort of energy that’s packed into events like these, and if all involved are able to harness it effectively then it becomes an absolute romp. There was also a healthy peppering of serious versus silly questions: too many serious questions and the AMA can get boring, but if it’s too silly then it can get kind of awkward or embarrassing.

In all, I would call the event a complete success, by whatever metric one may bestow upon such an occasion. Despite being a fan of Homestuck Vi_fi opted not to stick around in the HSD for any length of time, but I believe they left with the promise that future visits would almost certainly occur⁵³. I’m sure I speak for everyone when I say that we look forward to seeing them again.

After the AMA I was alerted to the presence of an archive that is almost certainly invaluable to anyone seeking information about Hussie’s developmental style. There is a website called Formspring that Hussie used from approximately February of 2010 to August of 2011, where users anonymously submitted questions from which Hussie chose some to answer publically.

These answers range in nature from utterly silly to extremely in-depth and informative. Some of Hussie’s responses offer immense insight into the developmental process he used in creating Homestuck, both explicitly and implicitly. I haven’t read through the archive yet so I can’t say definitively, but it’s worth stating that the Formspring answers provide an incredible amount of perspective into the mind of Hussie.

Due to this very fact, it has become a bible of sorts for Homestuck purists or zealots, either or both of which could apply to a large number of people from the HSD. I was loosely aware of the Formspring responses but had never taken it upon myself to look into the matter too much for whatever reason. It was by complete chance that the topic came up today, where Makin or someone else asked me if I had ever gone through the Formspring archives. It would make sense given that I’ve started assembling this absolutely bloated document, with all of its ancillary material.

After replying in the negative, I was immediately alerted to the existence of not one, but TWO archives of Hussie’s works, one kept by Wheals and the other by a fellow named MrCheeze. Links to both are located in appendix C under “Archive of Related Works by Andrew Hussie”, with Wheals’ under “Formspring and Blogs” and MrCheeze under “Previous Works”, for anyone who may be interested in gleaning some sort of insight into Hussie’s creative process and general online persona.

On a completely different note, the 400th page of this journal was associated of course with the customary 50 page set release. The last set, pages 350-400, have felt kind of strange to write for reasons that are difficult to describe. I think I’ve been allowing myself to give in to the pressure of a “timely release”, where instead of maintaining the quality of writing and ensuring that all of the entries have definite substance I’ve tried to cram as much nonsense into a given page as I can so I can get it out to people sooner.

This is not only a disservice to people who are genuinely interested in reading this journal in the present day, but compromises the integrity of the entire effort and probably will make it less palatable as a resource for people who simply want to learn more about the fandom or read about the history of the HSD. I always ask for feedback on the journal when I distribute it, and although many people don’t bother to offer their insights into what may be improved or simply don’t care, I can usually count on Makin to give some feedback, or especially Toast.

Toast has often describing his fondness for this journal in the past, which is something that I deeply appreciate. As such, after Makin has given his input on the matter I like to see what Toast has to hear on the subject. As it is, he echoed some of my concerns about the journal, and provided a fresh perspective that I feel has helped reorient myself a little bit.

I started this journal because I was afraid of the possibility that the community may one day fall apart or be destroyed somehow, a natural doom for any group. With this in mind I wanted to preserve as much of the culture I’ve witnessed as possible in order to keep it from fading away completely someday. I feel as if there are two aspects to this: preserving the mechanics of the community and then its spirit.

Recording the mechanics of our community, so to speak, is a relatively simple affair that usually entails just transcribing the daily events of the place. This by itself can be interesting, but can very quickly become monotonous or otherwise unremarkable. Preserving the spirit of the community is an infinitely harder and more important task.

By “spirit” I suppose I mean the nature of our interactions as people, and this is what makes the HSD—or indeed any online community—such a fascinating and wonderful place to be in. It’s easy to settle into a routine or become familiar with your environment. Once this happens, you begin to miss a lot of details laced into the fabric of your everyday experiences.

The mannerisms of various people, the historical context that can taint a conversation in various ways, and a whole host of other factors are all responsible for creating a certain atmosphere and flavor to the HSD. Understanding small things like how Olki talks to others about music and is a general hipster or Red facetiously flirts with people whilst in the HSD all contributes to an overall knowledge of the structure of our social group, and it foments an appreciation for the extremely fine details of our community.

I guess my point with saying all of this is that I haven’t been keeping very good record of these base, more human-oriented interactions lately. There was a noticeable shift at one point where I began focusing a lot on the various end goals and products of the fandom. This is still assuredly important to understanding what we do on a day to day basis, but without an appreciation for why we might care in the first place, what reason is there to describe the happenings of the community at large?

I recently took it upon myself to remove all instances of personal information within the journal to make it more suitable for distribution, and I think I will largely abide by that decision; however, it would behoove me to continue trying to document the personalities and interactions of people on the HSD in particular instead of extending my focus to the fandom as a whole all the time. This will hopefully provide greater insight into why things play out the way they do here, or maybe even provide a reason for people reading this to care? It probably depends on who you are that reads this, who knows exactly.

With this musing out of the way, the last thing I’ll say in this entry is that the final response I was waiting for from the Music Team has been received. Assuming real life scheduling allows for it, I will begin assembling the Music Team article at some point in the near future. It’s impossible to say when it’ll be ready, but hopefully within the next couple of weeks. I’m also considering the nature of this journal to some extent, but that is a topic I will cover in a future entry.

Nothing more for today.

---

18^th of January 2018

It has often been the nature of discussions in mspa-lit that we discuss the worth of a given piece of work in as objective terms as we can possibly allow. This has led to the creation of and/or adherence to various ways that we can try to gauge a given piece of media. One of the more popular models we use to examine something is this phrase that Makin and some others are fond of repeating, being “style versus substance”.

It’s very easy to forget that the nature of these conversations, despite striving for objectivity, are ultimately piss-takes of concepts that most of us probably aren’t even qualified to define in the first place. For all of this, I end up getting frustrated when people drag out conversational tactics that try to undermine other schools of thought by nature. “Style versus substance” achieves this pretty consistently, where a work that only has lots of “substance” is typically seen as superior to a work that only has lots of “style”.

I myself was confused as to the nature of these concepts, and so a brief explanation may be warranted. I’m not sure if there are academic connotations to what we were discussing and we’re thus throwing around nonsense terms that don’t actually mean anything, but substance and style refer to two main ways that media may be consumed or interpreted. They’re much what they sound like, with substance concerning what a work is “about” so to speak. More complex works are said to be more substantial because they have a more nuanced and therefore interesting idea to present.

On the other hand, style is about how a work is presented, and often is used to accentuate the substance by making it stronger or softer in certain contexts. Style is about conveying the message of your work in a compelling and interesting way and works with no style are usually extremely boring or dry. Conversely, works with no substance are often seen as pointless or mundane, with no reason offered to actually examine them at length.

A good way of looking at this is through the lens of conventional art, such as the history of painting. An actual example we used today was Pablo Picasso’s Guernica: a Cubist painting made in response to the Spanish Civil War, it depicts several people in anguish and suffering due to the violence and horror of war. This message is the substance of the piece, and is the concept that Picasso was trying to get across to others.

The style of Guernica is arguably what makes the painting so powerful to others, however: Cubist art makes use of heavily warped or angular imagery, with subjects appearing to be seen from multiple perspectives at once, among other things. These visual techniques afford a sense of surreality and other emotion to a given piece, adding weight to it and making it resonate more strongly with people. This is the power of style.

I would explain further but it’s neither the purpose of this journal or something that I can pretend to understand in depth. It’s highly likely that I’ve misunderstood some of the features of the discussion, but such is the message that I took away from it. I had begun the conversation by asking the question of whether style can count as a type of substance if it’s done well enough. For some time myself, Tensei, and Putnam all talked about the nature of the issue, but then it rapidly ballooned into something else with around ten people all trying to inject their various opinions into it.

At some point this bloated mess of a conversation imploded, and a few people got stuck repeating literally the same points ad nauseum. Null, Gitaxian, and a fellow I hadn’t properly met yet called Spiral were all debating some nonsense about how anything, including art, can be fully reduced to numbers in an equation. Gitaxian was a firm proponent for this idea but Spiral at certain points seemed to get angry to the point of being insensate over the concept. After literally an hour of that crap, I pleaded with them to let it go and allow the conversation to die, which to my gratitude they did.

Even though it ended on relatively poor terms, I think the style versus substance debate is a pretty good example of the kind of discussion that can be had in this server. There was a general attempt at informing other people who might be confused on the topic, and it was a stepping stone to other conversations that could be greatly improved by the knowledge presented today. It also encouraged people to think critically, and expose themselves to other lines of thinking. There are of course people who are immovable in their opinions and people who are moved too easily, but overall the exchange of information is extremely nice to witness and especially to engage in personally.

However, it’s important to keep a topic from droning on forever; it’s detrimental to bringing up the conversation in the future, as when people become fatigued over a particular discussion they’re far less receptive to talking about it again (this is honestly why I would prefer to let discussions run their course in mspa-lit, but with Makin interrupting them all the time people will never get their fill, so it’s doomed to crop up again in the future.

Then again, I think I may actually prefer that. I speak in terms of letting conversations die naturally, but it is all too frequent an occurrence where the discussion is not allowed to die for whatever reason. This often leads to that conversational rigor mortis I described recently, and the net effect is arguably worse than if the conversation were to be interrupted before people satisfied themselves. I guess in a perverse way I owe it to Makin for keeping us from getting tired of talking about Dragonball or Pokemon, or other stuff he doesn’t care about.

There’s one last thing I’ll comment on for today, being one of the most foul encounters I’ve ever had while using Discord. Some fellow named Bauser was hanging out in mspa-lit and chatting people up, to all appearances behaving perfectly normally and not disturbing the peace. Somehow the discussion got on about ethical business practices between Apple and other tech companies like Microsoft or Google; this was a pretty typical discussion on the concept, with people forming sides and being cheeky about poking fun at each other without actually getting too upset.

At one point, however, MrNostalgic made an errant comment about how a statement Bauser made was “dumb”. This unleashed some unholy sort of fury lurking underneath the surface, because Bauser immediately set off and aggressively insulted Nostalgic. It was honestly kind of bizarre, rather than being immediately put-off I just assumed the guy needed to chill out and told him not to do it again. This prompted Bauser to tell me to go fuck myself, at which point I ceased being surprised and started being annoyed.

Unfortunately, annoyed was the kindest emotion I felt towards this guy for the rest of the evening. I banned him from mspa-lit and assumed that was the end of it, but then he began messaging me in PMs. Rather than the unbridled rage I was expecting, he seemed perfectly amicable; this juxtaposition in his behavior was somewhat concerning, but my curiosity was piqued so I attempted to interface with him for a big longer.

This was a mistake. I’m still unsure if the fellow was being sincere or simply baiting me, but it was an exercise in pointlessness: Bauser behaved in the most ruthlessly self-aggrandizing I have ever seen, with every statement being an explicit or thinly-veiled attempt to prop himself up as the rational authority of the conversation. There were some hollow attempts to praise me for my “critical-thinking skills” and he even tried to congratulate me for dealing with him--which was fairly perverse in its own way--but any good will that might have possibly been generated by this was swiftly dashed as he used it to justify his views further.

I won’t go into any explicit details, suffice to say that it was an infuriating encounter. My job as a mod makes it inadviseable to block people I find distasteful, because I may need to deal with them at some point and I can’t do that if I’m unable to interact with them. I have broken this principle exactly two times now, the first being for that user Ggrey and then now for Bauser. I simply can’t put up with the insufferable smugness; I don’t know why, but where most forms of unpleasantness I’m able to handle fairly well this one incident managed to make me feel incredibly upset. Definitely a low in my time here as mod I guess.

But, that’s not exactly something to worry too much about. Not every person you meet can be pleasant, it’s just a fact of life. I’m glad I was able to handle it without abusing my power at all; if there was anyone I would have banned just because I disliked them enough, it would have been Ggrey or Bauser. Hopefully no one somehow more foul than them manage to pop up here.

Nothing more for today.

---

21^st of January 2018

There has been nothing but increasing success for the Bob Ross sessions lately. I’m trying not to engage in them too frequently, as I’m sure burning people out is a real danger with this sort of activity. However, people seem to be completely receptive; I think that at the least it can be a weekly activity, maybe two sessions a week sometimes if people are interested enough. This last painting we did had over a dozen participants! Needless to say I’m extremely pleased about all of this.

I think that, with people’s permission, I will take the artwork and host it somewhere that it can be seen by others. I could probably host it on Imgur and then include an entry in the appendixes for it, or pin it in art-music. This would probably serve to get more people interested as well. However, I’m unsure that we could handle anymore people in the current set up we have. The streaming website we use for this purpose is a bit finicky and gets kind of unwieldy with too many people in it. I might have to look into a more stable program for this purpose in the near future.

Even Makin has agreed to participate, on one contingency. People who complete his shill list are allowed to recommend things for him to do and he will earnestly attempt to complete them as a sign of respect, which to me is kind of a neat idea (if a little haughty in some ways). Thus, he has agreed to participate if I finish the shill list.

I mean, I was already planning to do that anyway, so I’m not really bothered by this proposition. I accepted it without hesitation, at which I think he balked a tiny bit—he described the arrangement as “a horrible deal”⁵⁴ for me, which made me laugh. Perhaps he was joking or didn’t expect me to say yes? Either way, I found the situation amusing. It will be interesting to see what he comes up with when the time comes; everyone who has participated so far has a different style, and it is fascinating to witness what vastly different results people can have for what is effectively the same painting.

The Bob Ross Painting Sessions, as I’ve come to call them, are not the only example of increasing group participation lately. It seems as if more people have been coming by and discussing things at length, which is always heartening. I’ve been trying to interface with more people and channels and get the ball rolling in places like #general, so that, instead of just having a high user count, we can have high rates of user participation as well. With every person who talks regularly comes more opportunities to grow as a community and learn something from each other. I’m quite happy with it so far.

I’ve also considered reviving Movie Night somehow, as people have been asking for it lately. If we can mete out movies more slowly and keep people from getting tired of them, then it might be another way to bring people closer together. WoC indirectly brought up the idea of doing MST3K movie nights—invariably one of the most superior programs for riffing on movies in a group setting—which would be very conducive to this idea.

This is not to say that I’m overly concerned with the notion; I’m trying to avoid investing too much of my time and energy into this, simply because it won’t always work out and I shouldn’t be bothered when it doesn’t. However, it does bring me great satisfaction to see so many people together. That having been said, something I am imminently concerned with is the recent disappearance of Carlarc. I’m not sure if he said something recently, but he hasn’t been around for a few days now and I’m beginning to grow worried about him. If he remains gone for a week then I think I’ll try to message him and see what’s up. Hopefully it’s nothing bad.

Nothing more for today.

---

22^nd of January 2018

Makin has been dropping some cryptic hints lately. Yesterday he made an errant comment: “as january dies, things are going to change”. Flippant or not, phrasing like that—especially coming from someone in an undeniable position of power—is going to draw some attention. It could mean potentially anything, given how unpredictable Makin is; I think he hinted at something like this before some months ago and it turned out to be completely innocuous, and he was cashing in on it for the meme.

On the other hand, it could be The Rapture. No way to tell at this point. It is worth noticing all of the things he drops that suggest something is coming though. For example, in #announcements he left an image of a quote by someone named Pascua, which says: “I may not be able to convince you that change is coming. But the thing about change is: it’s coming whether you are ready for it not.” Again, there is no telling if this is THE REAL DEAL or another meme⁵⁵, and I’m going to err on the side of caution with my predictions.

That having been said, I do feel some stirrings of excitement at these hints. If Makin is playing another joke, then I have to give him props for making it as enjoyable as he does. Despite all my effort to remain unmoved, my curiosity is piqued. I can’t say if others feel the same, although I am absolutely not the only one who has noticed. Whatever it may be, we apparently won’t have to wait longer than the end of January to find out.

Nothing more for today.

---

24^th of January 2018

Altgen’s gradual return to shittification seems to be approaching a zenith of sorts. Speaking frankly I think I’m fine with this (as would be expected, since making altgen objectively worse was my expressly stated goal). It’s been gratfifying, personally, to see it slowly but surely be converted back to the way the older regulars are used to seeing it. For months now, “Don’t go to #altgen” has been seen as nothing more than a hollow meme, with no substance behind the ominous words.

Today, it feels as if the barest scrap of that sentiment has returned. It lacks the sheer and brutal intensity of yesteryear, but it has crossed the line from being merely a nuisance to something with distinct weight behind it and a true potential for chaos or disruption. I suppose it’s worth stating at this point that I don’t actually wish for such destruction to occur, but simply that having the threat hanging over your head makes things the smallest amount more exciting.

Such statements, funnily enough, relate to how I feel about Makin. I can’t speak for anyone but myself in this regard, but there is a distinct satisfaction with knowing that he’s in charge. The consequences of his actions have been a major pain in my ass on occasion, but it’s far more gratifying to have these controversies and the energy derived from them than to have nothing at all. This is assuming that those controversies are worthwhile and in fact not manufactured garbage. Such drama that exists for the sake of being dramatic is far more unpleasant than a problem that arises from more genuine circumstances.

I’ve been looking more into Pesterchum and Tumblr. Unfortunately the one other person I’ve been directed to ask about the Tumblr side of the fandom has been unresponsive, and I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon. I might call off that particular explanation and give what I have; it may be that the Tumblr fandom is too decentralized to approach anything resembling a cohesive community. I’ll have to ask around and see if there’s even one or two more people I can ask about on the matter.

Pesterchum has been a completely different story. I’ve already completed interviews with one of the people Olki mentioned, and am currently in talks with the other, a person named Midna. The latter has been an unbelievable font of information, and by my reckoning we’re still not even halfway done with our discussions. I may have far more to write on this topic than I originally suspected, but I won’t go into further detail on that for now.

More concurrently with the server, Makin’s cryptic statements have only deepened over the last couple of days. With each instance of the behavior, the chance that this means the second reckoning is coming increases. For people who were around before, this has given itself to a sort of tense energy. Toast has personally commented on the matter: “hes doing the exact same patterns as he had been during the first one”. Perhaps the time really is nigh.

Toast has also mentioned being made nervous by this. I wasn’t around for the first reckoning so the conditions surrounding it are rather enigmatic to me, aside from the fact that it was incredibly tumultuous. It’s hard to imagine what it might turn out like now that things are—ostensibly—different from how they were before. I always assume that a reckoning will inject energy into the system, and this could be true. However, it’s impossible to divine the extent of what negative effects we may suffer because of it; that would depend on the exact nature of the disruptance.

Toast is, simply put, scared of losing his modship on the server, for some similar reasons that I would be: he’s fond of being helpful to people on the server, and he mentioned that he enjoys being a figure of prominence for others to look up to. These are both completely understandable to me, and I sympathize with his fear that by the time this is over that he will be left in the dust. Thinking about losing my modship and being unable to help at all does fill me with some dismay as well, but at the end of the day there isn’t much that can be done but to wait and see what happens.

I communicated that idea to Toast and I think it may have helped him? He seemed a little mollified afterwards if nothing else. I have no idea if anything I said to him was genuinely of use, but he says it was. If such is true, then I’m glad I was able to help him calm down about it. There really isn’t much we can do; even if we knew it was coming, Makin is essentially unstoppable in any of his designs or plans, so it wouldn’t do us much good to know about it anyway. The same could much be said about this entry, too; writing about it at length will do little good until something concrete has happened, so I will move on from here.

Nothing more for today.

---

25^th of January 2018

We had a discussion about Slate Star Codex today, which is a blog written by Scott Alexander. It’s largely concerned with a variety of scientific and social disciplines, especially viewed through the lens of rationality. It is an extremely common go-to in conversations with Makin, who has felt it appropriate to shill a post called “Meditations on Moloch”⁵⁶ at least a few times every week for the last several months.

It may be evident even from my brief description, but this has served as the locus for some considerable annoyance for me. The part that bothers me most though, is that my frustration isn’t even founded in anything concrete. I have reasons and justifications for it, foremost among them being a simple irritation with seeing Makin advertise SSC like a religious text, but upon closer examination there is no real substantial reason for me to be frustrated with it. The articles are well written and by all means interesting, so why do I feel so disgruntled when I see it?

I tried hashing this out with Makin and Putnam after I realized that my feelings were essentially baseless. We didn’t really get anywhere unfortunately, and in the process I started behaving in a way that I perceived as rude. I felt bad about this afterwards—I try very hard to not lose my temper, especially over frivolous bullshit⁵⁷ like Slate Star Codex. After my comments I wanted to apologize, especially to Putnam,⁵⁸ so I decided to PM him about it.

Funnily enough, Putnam hadn’t construed literally any of my remarks as anything worthy of concern; he is used to terse and sometimes emotionally charged conversations, and he considered the statements I was worried about as “completely harmless”. I wanted to laugh at the difference in perspective: sometimes it’s easy to forget how wrongly I may read people. For a while I’ve assumed Putnam was uncomfortable with confrontation, despite the fact that every single interaction I’ve had with him suggests the complete opposite. I need to reevaluate my feelings and judgments of people, it seems.

In a similar vein as my outburst (if it can be called that), there was another incident with Minish today wherein he felt like he was being treated too harshly by others. Red and WoC have a similar propensity to make fun of other people because they both feel that it’s not a big deal. When they do this in tandem, it can be annoying to deal with for even the most thick-skinned of people; Minish, on the other hand, classically is not very resistant to being made fun of. One may predict how this ended up: Minish left the server, so I went into damage control mode.

On the one hand, I was talking with Minish to try and calm him down. This isn’t the first time that Minish has left in response to being treated in a way he perceives as unjust, and I feel like I’ve gotten better at approaching him. Red and WoC are a different matter: not only do I not have as much experience “handling” them in any capacity, but their very nature makes trying to deal with them a monumental undertaking in and of itself. I fully expected my assertions to fall flat or, even worse, be subject to simple mockery from them. Instead, they seemed pretty receptive to what I had to say, if somewhat reluctant to own up to it.

I’m not sure to what extent this was due to my conviction on the matter or them simply deciding to go along with what I said, but it was gratifying to have them listen to me for once. WoC ended up apologizing for being out of line, as did Red; Minish came back in short order and things progressed as normal for the rest of the evening. I take this as a sign that my confidence in my decision making and conversational skills are improving, although I still find myself overwhelmed or confused at various situations. Perhaps thes will continue to improve as time goes by.

Nothing more for today.

---

26^th of January 2018

Carlarc has been missing for over a week now. Myself and Phantos took notice, and others are starting to comment on it as well. There is some genuine concern surrounding his disappearance, but unless he physically returns there’s no way to know what’s going on⁵⁹. It’s possible that he’s simply lost interest and decided to stop coming; if this is the case, then there really is nothing to be done. I hope that everything is alright.

We did end up discussing the topic for a while though; Tensei, LLF, Minish, and myself were all talking about it for a while, and despite the concern there were some jokes about it, which was all well and good. At some point LLF ended up making a joke about Carlarc being dead, which struck everyone present as pretty distasteful. Instead of escalating into a big deal like I thought it would, we were able to play off the comment and resume the discussion without too much of a disruptance. I was pretty heartened by this: all of the ribbing and the ability to avoid exacerbating arguments is a sign that we’re progressing as a group of friends, at least in my opinion. I feel it’s a good thing, sincerely.

Part of the ribbing is in talking about each others’ interests. Often enough people in our group will pursue various projects, and it’s fun to discuss what you’re doing with each other. This often leads to aforementioned ribbing, because the nature of someone’s work can be pretty silly to consider. This can sometimes lead to friction if people care very much about what they’re doing, but at the end of each discussion I think it ends well enough.

An example would be this very journal, which is admittedly a pretty eccentric venture. It’s elicited some comments from people who find it strange, which I think is perfectly valid (sometimes even funny). Then, there’s another project I’m working on that I’ve mentioned a few times recently in chat: it may be a bit esoteric to explain in full, so suffice to say I’m transcribing the videos of a Youtube comedy channel that I like. That project has definitely elicited comments from people remarking on how pointless and weird it is to be doing.

These comments don’t really bother me—rather, I find it pretty amusing to see peoples’ confusion with my efforts. Putnam did offer an alternative that I found particularly funny: he considers what I’m doing with the transcription project to be a complete waste of time, and instead says that he and I should stream playing video games together. This strikes me as an unconventional suggestion from him, and I was kind of taken back by it for no discernible reason. It’s honestly an interesting idea, one that I might have to take up with him one of these days.

On an unrelated note, for some reason we started having a discussion about the nature of 4chan and how it’s changed over the years. I reflected on the fact that, despite my attempt to explain it in a previous entry of this journal, I feel like I have utterly failed to properly convey the true spirit of the website and its community. The simple reality of the matter is that I’m not sure if that’s even possible, because so much of 4chan’s value or enjoyment comes from experiencing directly. No degree of explanation to an outsider can truly get the message across when it comes to certain principles or events. But then, isn’t that true of most things?

Instead of hashing this topic out again, I’ll comment instead on the idea that took up the brunt of our discussion on 4chan today. It is an important concept for the internet in general, known as The Eternal September. The Eternal September refers to a phenomenon predicated on the old-internet, from before it went public in the early 90’s. It’s honestly possible to write an entire paper on the subject (something that I literally did in my first year of college), but I’ll try to be brief in my descriptions.

Before 1993, internet was usually reserved for college students or academic and military organizations. At this point in time, there was a distinct brand of etiquette associated with using the internet: proper protocols were not only encouraged but expected. There were even designated classes for people to take so that they could become familiar with the culture and etiquette of the internet.

With this in mind, the “September” part of the phrase comes from the fact that every year in the fall, a new group of students would begin college and start using the internet, who were then completely unfamiliar with what to do or how to behave. This was usually seen as a difficult time for people who were already used to the internet, with new students usually acting out of line and generally mucking around.

Over the school year there was a consistent effort from everyone involved to try and indoctrinate new users and help them become acquainted to internet etiquette. This was typically successful, and by the end of the school year things would return to normal. In this way, while new problems and cultural elements would arise from the influx of students each September, the status quo was still largely maintained.

This all changed in 1993, when AOL sold internet access to the general public for the first time. There was absolutely no comparison between the introduction of new students versus the enormous swath of people who were then flooding the internet. There was absolutely no chance for the older users to try and stem the tide; in one fell swoop, their culture was destroyed and internet etiquette was changed forever. Thus, the term was coined by a fellow named Dave Fischer in 1994: “It's moot now. September 1993 will go down in net.history as the September that never ended.”

Outside of its origin, the term can be used to describe any instance where a massive influx of new users can destroy the existing structure and behavior of a given community. 4chan indeed underwent this process, the details of which I explained as thoroughly as I could for people who are unfamiliar with 4chan or its history. Makin chimed in at this point to say that he’s taken steps to prevent something similar from happening to mspa-lit, using #general as a kind of filter for new people so that only the good, quality users get through to us.

He also poked fun at me for all of this, saying I was young enough that I was part of the Eternal September, despite the way I was explaining the concept. All I can say is that he’s correct; whatever culture I didn’t miss, I’ve typically arrived too late to do anything besides distort the existing culture. This has gradually been less the case as I get older, and instead I’m able to witness those events in real time instead of causing them myself.

This brought up another point, being my role in the HSD and then more generally. I have missed a lot of history, something that I always feel regret over. However, people have begun to see me as a sort of “internet historian”, where not only am I exhaustively documenting the HSD—this extremely specific subset of an already niche community—but I’m trying to broaden the scope of knowledge at my disposal. Being able to speak authoritatively on the history of 4chan and the origin of an event like Eternal September are examples of this behavior.

It may be self-aggrandizing to say, but I kind of like the idea of building that sort of reputation for myself. I enjoy having as complete and refined a knowledge for myself as I can on all manner of things, and being able to transmit that knowledge to other people is really gratifying. This actually led me to consider my options with writing all of this, and whether I might restructure this journal.

The subject of this journal began with the HSD in particular and has slowly evolved in its scope and consideration of material, especially with the Homestuck fandom as a whole. It may be more appropriate to reorganize this document sometime. I’m not sure what form it may take, if this were to happen at all—it would depend on a lot of factors. More to consider for the future I guess.

Nothing more for today.

---

27^th of January 2018

There’s been a lot of business over the last few days, and in the confusion I’ve neglected to mention some pretty important developments. First is that Makin announced a Hiveswap: Act 2 giveaway, and on Sunday the 28th there will be a community stream. More details on that to follow. Of more immediate importance is that, at the time of writing, we’re less than 50 people from 10,000 members.

There is a very distinct degree of tension surrounding this fact, with people (including myself) making overt references to the overall user count. It would be this way even if it was only the usercount; 10,000 is an absolutely incredible number, when you consider the nature of this place and how old the material of interest is. There is a palpable degree of excitement around the idea that we have grown this large, and about 2,000 of those people are online at any given time.

However, this isn’t even the only thing in our minds. There is Makin’s event looming. He has not named it, only referring to it as “the main event” before the stream tomorrow. The way he has timed it suggests to me that he was specifically waiting for 10,000 users before doing either, yet another bizarre masterstroke in his administration. The exact nature of “the main event” has not been elaborated on, but there is little doubt in most people’s minds that it is the reckoning we have been waiting for.

Starting here I’m trying to write this in a more live sense, seeing as it has the possibility to be quite a tumultuous event. I don’t want to miss any important details by forgetting them afterwards. It’s currently 9:36 PM EST, and we’re hovering within ten users of 10,000. There are people talking excitedly, waiting for the final person to join.

At 9:49 PM EST, we’ve been told of a #general viewing party of sorts so that we can celebrate the 10,000th person. We’ve been hovering at 9,998 and 9,999, fluctuating steadily for a few minutes. And here, at exactly the turn of the hour, they’ve joined! The 10,000th person is a new account named “ayylmao”, and the very second they joined everyone present began spamming various memes to celebrate.

Another account joined putting us at 10,001, but it too is very new. These are likely alt accounts that were made for the purpose, and now shortly after they’ve both left, so we’re technically at 9,999 members again. I expect that the excitement and momentous occasion will draw more people so that it’s not really a big deal. Everyone is having a good time; the channel is a massive ball of frenetic chaos.

Shortly before the end of today, the only important thing left to say is that Nights rejoined and ended up being our new 10,000th person, which was hilarious and a very welcome development. I’m very pleased to see the community get this far, almost twice the size of what it was when I joined. There is the lingering doubt in my mind of how it will turn out now, with Makin initiating this main event he was speaking of. He’s not online right now as it’s too late, so he’ll likely initiate it when he wakes up. There’s no way to know what will happen, but I hope it turns out well enough. I’m worried for the mods, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

Nothing more for today.

---

28^th of January 2018 – The Rapture

Today was more trying than I could have possibly imagined. I actually stayed up last night until about 5:30 AM EST, because I knew Makin would be back sometime in the early morning and I didn’t want to miss the beginning of whatever happened. True to form, Makin came on and—without saying a word—began changing things. He shortly made an announcement stating that The Rapture had officially begun.

At this point, things started to happen very quickly. I initially wanted to stay up as long as possible, but I have real life obligations to handle and I couldn’t afford it. I took some notes—eventually annotating with minutes when I remembered to do so—until I fell asleep, at which point Nights started taking notes for me (for which I am extremely grateful). I’ve included both of these sets of notes in appendix D under “The Rapture Notes”, with entries organized by author for anyone interested in a slightly more indepth examination of what happened, although I can’t promise that the details are too thorough or explanatory; it was a fairly hectic process, after all.

It began with Makin creating four channels: #general-alpha, #general-aleph, #general-a, and #general-1. After this he removed the mod and pseudo-mod roles from all current staff, so that the mod-related and archived channels were hidden away from us. Then, he began hiding the regular channels too. Finally, all that were left were the four general channels, where literally everyone in the server was now localized.

Once this had been accomplished, Makin began rearranging the channels seemingly at random. It was kind of amusing: at this point, no one was explicitly freaking out. There were a lot of people who were kind of annoyed at the disruption, but no one was in a panic or calling for alarm. Ifnar I think spoke for many people who were around the first time: “Drew, just so you know, this is pathetic and boring compared to the chaos of the first reckoning.” This shuffling of channels kept up for some time, and then he began altering them in various other ways as well.

Sometimes the number of channels would decrease from four to three, then to two, and then increase back to four, even five. Names were switched around a bit at various points, until finally we ended up with four #general channels that were identical in every way. It was at this point that I noticed each channel had spontaneously given rise to its own microculture of sorts. People were generally sticking to one channel, which each had a healthy smattering of regulars from all the various channels. The exception to this was one channel that seemed to have collected all of the altgen regulars, who would occasionally venture out into other channels to harass other users or see what was going on.

The exact reason that Makin was doing this was completely unknown to us, until about fifteen minutes to half an hour after he began he put up an announcement that said to “nominate a new #general pseudo in the right general channel!”. This meant that the order of the channels was important because our suggestions would only matter if they were made in the “correct channel”, although to my recollection there was no actual way to know which channel was “the right one”. It was easy enough to keep track of which channel was which using their ID numbers, but the actual nature of the channel, whether it was “the one we needed”, was impossible to determine.

After a bit of this, Makin created a poll between the candidates suggested in “the right channel”, whichever it may have been, asking people to choose between ost and the nominated virtuNat. In the end, people voted for virtuNat; ost left the server in frustration, and thus began another issue that I’ll comment on later. At this point, every channel was basically in pandemonium. One user named IQuick commented, “Everything is altgen right now”.

The other channel nominations proceeded in much the same fashion: people suggested mods, Makin refined the candidates and then let people vote between them. Sometimes he would automatically reinstate certain mods: I think this was done with myself and Wheals, and then he promoted Tensei to full mod based on the fact that he often can be found doing the job of other pseudos in their channels. Sea Hitler also retained his position, although that was decided by popular vote.

Rather than go into details, the changes in their entirety are as follows: ost, medixum, and LRS are fully demodded; Ngame is demoted to pseudo of the newly created “media channels” (#western-media, #eastern-media), which have replaced #anime and #cartoon-tv, and Anervaria has been demoted to voicechat janitor; Tensei and Nights are promoted to full mods of the server; those promoted to pseudos are Spiral (Homestuck/Hiveswap), deusAscendant (altgen), virtuNat (general and oc-hell), olki (hangout, which has replaced social); Wizard of Chaos (gaming of course), and a fellow named Rar.exe (art-music); those who retained their positions are myself, Wheals, Sea Hitler, Toast, Dingus, Difarem, and Ifnar; and finally there is a strange switch with Ceru, who is no longer a mod but has been given a completely unique position called Botmaster for his work on Aradiabot and the other bots on the server.

A couple of these changes are worthy of note. First, all of the demoddings are sad⁶⁰, and while I knew it was coming it didn’t quite soften the fact that some of those people are no longer in a position to do things anymore. They are still prominent in my mind, but no longer have any actual power. Second, some of the choices for new pseudos are EXTREMELY questionable, the one that strikes me as off the most being Rar.exe (who I’ve mentally flagged for numerous reasons, most compelling of which including their inexperience, how little the entire mod team seems to know about them, and most importantly how nervous they seem to be about this whole affair). The pseudos that share a channel with already-existing pseudos, specifically Toast/spiral and Dingus/deusAscendant, are serving as understudies for those who already govern the channel.

Third, the reappearance of WoC as gaming pseudo is extremely heartening: he carried the position to the greatest extent possible, and I can think of no one quite so deserving as he. Last, Nights’ sudden modding took people completely by surprise, and despite my delight at finding him in such a position I also confess that I find the conditions surrounding this to be somewhat suspicious. Nights has been largely absent from the server for two months, so this move has been seen by a number of people as rather unfortunate or even outright negative. Makin’s own stated reason for modding Nights is nothing more than typical wacky zany behavior.

Now that these decisions have been made, dealing with the fallout from this restructuring has been absolutely disastrous and taken up an unbelievable amount of my time. I think I actually spent close to twelve hours talking with people to try and figure out what was going on and how they feel. The most prominent thing I dealt with today, which I mentioned earlier, was ost’s demodding.

Ost takes a large amount of pride in their work, and they were actually one of the mods that I had automatically decided I would defend and try to get reinstated during this process. I figured they were a shoe-in based on the work I’ve seen them do, and that the largest point against them was pronounced inactivity in their channel. Yet, I felt this was a non-issue⁶¹ in light of the fact that they kept a very tight eye on the proceedings of #general and ensured it was basically devoid of troublemaking. However, this did not prove enough for Makin, who apparently cited their relative inactivity as a reason for favoring virtuNat.

Thus began a long series of discussions over the course of the entire day wherein I alternated between talking with ost, talking with other people to figure out what actually happened, and then talking with others to see how they felt about it. Ost’s value in the community as a whole is such that this feels like a rather dumb move to me: while they were not very talkative, they still did a great job and are also prominent for other reasons than being a mod in the HSD, such as organizing CANMT. After being demodded, ost seemed to disappear completely from almost every server they were a part of; based on this upset I decided to talk with them.

Upset is clearly the word of choice here, where there is a distinct sense of anxiety and hopelessness for them over these circumstances. The other ex-pseudos, especially Anervaria, appear to be more or less at peace with their new position (or lack thereof), but ost is particularly frustrated because they feel like they were doing a good job. I’m inclined to agree, and spent an absolutely laborious day talking to the other mods and even some pseudos to see how they felt about ost.

My efforts suggest to me that the overarching attitude seems to be one of disquiet, yet there are hints of capitulation. Most of the mods don’t feel that the demodding was carried out appropriately even if it was deserved, on which point even some disagree. Some are resigned to Makin’s viewpoint on the matter, but they are at least willing to express their displeasure at this turn of events. All but two of the people I asked, including all of the moderators and pseudos still around from before the Rapture, are firmly on the side of reinstating ost.

In the interest of fairness to ost, I will be bringing this up to Makin and discussing alternatives to full demodding. For instance, it should be more than possible for ost to be a co-pseudo alongside virtuNat. The former is not active but a fully competent mod while the latter is very active with no modding experience. I feel as if the pairs’ complimentary features would be effective, but there’s no way to tell if Makin will go for this. Even if I gain the support of every mod and pseudo, I have doubts that we’ll be able to change his mind.

The other person who is deeply troubled by all of this is Ceru. I initially thought that the Botmaster role, being unique, was honestly a pretty neat development. However, Ceru feels utterly devastated by the sudden shift in responsibility and categorization of his involvement. After all was said and done I tried talking with him for a while and determined how he was feeling. He described feeling underappreciated for all the work he does on Aradiabot and was even contemplating leaving the server outright, which I am obviously concerned with keeping from happening. He tried to demonstrate the depth of his anguish in a very painstaking fashion—I was honestly kind of shocked just how badly he was offended by his title change.

I spent a good hour or so talking with him to calm him down and help him understand that we DO appreciate him, and that he shouldn’t feel less valuable as a result of the apparent demotion. I’m not sure how effective my conversation with him was, but I talked him down from leaving the server and he seemed more amicable afterwards; it is my sincerest hope that he will feel better about his position here soon. Failing that, I promised I would try to talk with Makin to see what can be done to improve the matter. Goodness knows how that will go.

Makin mentioned to me over the last couple of weeks that I “may not like” the Rapture. I had assumed by this that he meant, should I be demodded, that I would be extremely upset about it. In retrospect, that conclusion was too obvious, not to mention way too unlikely—after talking with numerous people it was apparently obvious to everyone but me that my being remodded was a foregone conclusion.

But no: what he meant was that I would be displeased with the overall results of the Rapture. While this is mildly true, where I’m upset to see some people go, I am increasingly incensed by the way in which Makin carried out this entire ordeal. The restructuring is one thing, with the results of it being more or less fine to me; the way in which he released people was nothing short of callous and rude. I’m going to look into this more tomorrow.

Nothing more for today.

---

29^th of January 2018

The hectic pace of yesterday continues. The giveaway ended today at 10 AM EST, but for a few hours preceding this there was some confusion surrounding the results. Five winners are meant to be chosen randomly, and we were planning on using Aradiabot to randomize the people who participated and spit them out. However, there was a pronounced degree of strife involved as Ceru’s program was unable to provide a result that was randomized.

As the deadline grew closer and then actually passed us by, there was a confrontation where Makin shouted at Ceru when Aradiabot was unable to give the numbers as expected. Wheals interceded with an alternative method while Ceru tried to figure out what was going on, and when Ceru managed to provide a correct result Makin said “I don’t trust the bot anymore”. At this, Ceru left the server.

I spent a little bit of time talking with him immediately after this happened, try and settle him down. Even despite the upset from yesterday thankfully it didn’t take very long, and he came back to work through the issues with Aradiabot. I’m not sure whether him coming back was due to my efforts or not, but I’m glad he came back nonetheless. Immediately after returning he began working on the problem, while Makin, Wheals, and a couple of the pseudos tried working it out in a different way. I think that this dedication speaks to Ceru’s reliability: even if he is immensely frustrated, it isn’t hard to speak with him and get him to cooperate with you as long as you’re kind to him.

The details of the process are honestly pretty technical and a bit too involved for me, but the short story is that they were eventually successful. Hilariously, Minish was one of the people chosen in the batch of random numbers; there was some debate as to whether or not to exclude him based on the fact that he used to be a mod, or because he is an extremely recognizable regular from mspa-lit.

I objected to this, because the entire reason the team was trying so hard to resolve the randomness issue was because you could demonstrably prove you were in fact being random in your selection using their methods. Further selecting against people because it might seem suspicious would completely defeat the purpose of validating the methodology in the first place, and for this reason Minish was chosen as a winner.

Or so it seemed. The other half to this anecdote is that Minish actually failed to complete all of the conditions required to be eligible for the prize, so despite all of our efforts and consternations with it, he wasn’t even able to win in the first place. This was a much-needed laugh in the face of all the seriousness lately, and I think even Minish himself managed to get some amusement out of it (although it’s worth mentioning that he tried to wriggle his way into winning after the fact).

Unfortunately, the levity did not last nearly as long as we might have liked. After the giveaway nonsense had all settled down and things seemed stable, I decided to posit my argument concerning ost based on the perception that they were doing a good enough job and were deeply upset by the loss in position. I did my utmost to make the argument as respectful as possible, but in the end it proved to be a pointless endeavor. With a terse “I don’t care”, Makin shut down my attempt to have ost reinstated and it was over.

At this point I have to admit that I felt utterly hopeless; an entire day’s worth of effort was wasted, dashed in one short sentence with no room for further discussion. At this thought I rapidly began to change from despondent to indignant to positively fuming. The sheer disrespect on display was nothing short of offensive and I was (and still am) tired of accepting that sort of nonsense from him. Normally I would have left it at the negative response but today I decided that wasn’t acceptable, and thus began another long series of criticism.

This was where a large brunt of the day was spent. The ensuing discussion was very broad and deep in many ways, and for all of that it was incredibly frustrating. I didn’t feel like dancing around anything so I tried my best to lay bare my opinions on what was going on and how I think of Makin’s behavior. It’s impossible to say whether anything I said actually got through to him at this point, but I feel as if there were certain things that may have made it through the dialog. Nights even said something about the way Makin was behaving, which prompted him to apologize to me for “bullying”. I found it mildly annoying that Makin largely refused to acknowledge my arguments while almost immediately acquiescing to Nights’, but any progress is good progress I guess.

The discussion in its entirety gave me some of the most direct and maybe meaningful insight I’ve had into his thought process, and now in the wake of the discussion I think I actually understand him a little better^62/span> (edit as of 2/13/18: this is still false). The unfortunate flipside to this is that instead of being able to pretend all of his idiosyncrasies can be explained away as harmless jokes, there are now things that I know I cannot trust him with. Where before I was content to write off complaints as people being too serious or unable to handle themselves, it’s become clear that he is directly at fault for a signicant brand of unrest and anger among various people.

I don’t know that I want to go into many details about this, at least not right now. Besides the fact that it may be poor form to discuss in detail here, I’m honestly just insanely tired and don’t have the energy to write about it right now. Today was not as openly harsh as the Rapture itself, but the discussion I had with Makin lasted an absurd amount of time and I think I’m mostly burnt out for now.

The main conclusion I came to should suffice for this entry: during the conversation WoC made a point that, “youre disposable drew / in the end we are all disposable”, which Makin made no real attempt to refute. It’s a sobering realization in light of all the work and care that we put into the HSD: at the end of the day, he may do as he pleases and get rid of us at conceivably any time as he sees fit. This is functionally how the system is designed, but the ideal of it frustrates me to no end—it makes it feel like I can’t trust him or the things he says and does, and that at any time I might be gutted if I get in his way.

I don’t want to leave on such a terrible note, and so I will end on something that may warrant some positivity: Makin wasn’t completely impervious to criticism, as much as he may have dodged or ignored it. There were a couple of times where he said, “please do come to me if you have a problem with what I’m doing”, and he was at least willing to try and discuss things. It seemed as if it was hard for him to be serious, but I want to cling to at least some optimism that he can be reasoned with when it matters. To believe otherwise would be to abandon all hope for anything meaningful in this community’s future.

I’m exhausted and pretty drained over all of this. Nothing more for today.

---

30^th of January 2018

Ost has, at least for now, completely forsaken all Homestuck centric communities they were a part of before the Rapture. They have promised to stick around in a related server so they can still talk to people, but there is no desire from them to come back in the face of what they consider consummate disrespect. I’m keeping an eye on them to see how things work out in the future, but for now they are officially gone.

This loss has demonstrated to me that times are changing, and after looking around with some freshly opened eyes it’s apparent that the landscape is different from how it was half a year ago. In light of this I’ve decided it’s time to start examining some more regulars of the place, which I either have neglected to describe at length before now or recently joined us. It seems prudent to start with the new pseudo-moderators. Admittedly, I haven’t had much time to observe them and see what their posting habits are, but I can at least attempt to describe them in brief.

deusAscendant, or dA joined the server in early September of last year, just before the first act of Hiveswap was released. They almost immediately started talking in altgen (this was during the height of the NEO alt raids, so this behavior was highly suspicious at first). After getting past some initial tension, they became fairly well ensconced in the altgen community. After the Patreon was created, dA paid to have a channel about automotive engineering, entitled #mechanical. Their other interests include tabletop gaming, especially Dungeons and Dragons, and they’re interested in video games as well, although they barely ever speak in #gaming.

Personality wise they’re cut from a similar yet different cloth as the rest of the typical altgen folk. They of course delight in shitposting and is known for taking screenshots for all manner of humorous purposes, but they were also a member of the nu-altgen cabal that has since been ousted; rather than leave or dissociate like the rest of them, dA has stuck around and contributes just as much as he did before, trying to encourage and mess with others in equal measure. In all, they appear to be quite a dynamic fellow. As a reminder, they’re currently competing with Dingus to see who can be the better altgen pseudo, with the winner keeping the position.

Spiral is a long time lurker who only began talking in earnest a few months ago. Their own path throughout the last several years resembles my own, somewhat: they read Homestuck initially many years ago, although their involvement with the fandom was immediately more pronounced than my own. They ran a Tumblr blog for some time until taking a break for a couple of years. Then, after their interested was reinvigorated, they discovered the HSD through the subreddit about a year ago.

Spiral has a self-described tendency to become obsessed with particular topics and will ruthlessly assimilate as much information as they reasonably can once they have decided they are interested. In spite of this intense focus, Spiral appears to be a fairly relaxed and personable individual; after observing a number of their conversations with other people it seems Spiral, while being firm on topics where a definite right answer exists, is also perfectly understanding of others in less rigid contexts.

These are highly desirable qualities in a community leader, and I think it’s safe to say I’m optimistic to see how they carry out their duties here. Their passion for knowledge, especially of the webcomic itself, has greatly prepared them for modship over the #homestuck and #hiveswap channels alongside Toast (as with Dingus and dA, being a competition of sorts).

Spiral described the incident that inspired them to begin talking, mentioning that on a particularly terrible day they took the plunge and started to vent in #serious, a process they had personally witnessed numerous times before. Someone responded in kind, and Spiral describes that this positive encounter encouraged them to begin participating more often. They mention suffering from severe anxiety issues, among other things, and that being able to speak with other people in this community has been of great help to them. Stories like these reinforce my appreciation for what the HSD can be for others, and I’m glad that they’ve found a figurative home here like I did.

Rar.exe is, to my reckoning, probably the most unconventional of the new members of our team. Normally I wouldn’t focus on this detail, but Rar.exe has publically elaborated on a facet of personality that is important for clarity’s sake. Rar.exe is trans; this is hardly uncommon in our server. Common consensus in the LGBT community is that gender-neutral people are identified by the pronoun “they”, which is also true for many people on our server (it’s also acceptable if you’re simply unsure what someone’s gender is). However, Rar has very specifically expressed a preference for being called “it” or “its”.

I realize that it’s kind of unusual to begin its description with this particular detail, but it’s in keeping with a line of behavior that the mod team, including Makin, have been trying to pursue. The HSD has a reputation among some for being an inhospitable place, especially to more progressive mindsets. This particular belief has always struck me as nonsensical—by all meaningful assessments of the place we’re actually much closer to the more liberal side of the political spectrum than anything else. Concepts that are becoming more frequently discussed in the general public, like transgenderism, are not merely tolerated but fully accepted here by both the administration and the community at large.

The reason I bother to explain this at this point in time is that I feel Rar’s inclusion is an effective example of our leanings as a community. Trans people identifying by “them” or “they” is a concept that elicits absolutely no comment at this point, other than for clarification on what people prefer to be called. Rar is an extension of this principle, with “it” being far less common as a pronoun used by people to identify themselves. This was briefly the subject of attention because of how unconventional it is (“it” being typically considered a derogatory way of referring to people and especially trans people). However, Rar’s preferences are clear, and we’re content to acquiesce to what it wants. Many of us are still trying to grow used to the idea, but hopefully we can be as accommodating as possible.

As for Rar’s history, it joined almost exactly a year ago. It initially participated loosely in general and altgen for some time, as it “wanted to get a feel for the culture”. Eventually altgen proved to be too chaotic and offensive, so it moved to art-music in line with its own interests. Rar describes itself as being a stickler for rules, so it naturally began trying to mini-mod the channel, so much so that Anervaria and Rar joked about the latter usurping her position.

Upon the Rapture, Rar was completely blindsided by the idea of becoming a pseudo-mod. Tensei has apparently personally vouched for it becoming a mod, and it describes being incredibly flabbergasted by the sudden influx of people wishing congratulations or good luck upon receiving modship. There was apparently some pushback from various people, but despite this it accepted the position. It’s since become active in mspa-lit, switching between actively conversing and lurking on a regular basis, when it isn’t moderating #art-music. Rar seems nervous but not totally unprepared to accept its responsibility here, and especially after I confirmed with it that it wants to try the hardest it can to do a good job, I’m feeling a little better about the idea.

VirtuNat is the last person I’ll describe today. She has the advantage of actually being of some familiarity to me at this point, having been talking in mspa-lit regularly for some months now. She is decidedly impish, pursuing jokes that are strange in nature, although not unpleasant. Since before her modding, she has described herself as a “shrine maiden”⁶³ for oc-hell; I mentioned that they were given de facto leadership of that channel some months ago when the original purchaser left, and especially after Makin made oc-hell a permanent server fixture because of how useful it was. With this, Nat was basically a shoe in for oc-hell modship from day one.

In keeping with the “shrine maiden” shtick, Nat has renamed the channel to oc-shrine. There are some conflicting qualities in her personality that make me curious how she’ll perform as a mod; on a few occasions I’ve received complaints about her openly mocking other people or otherwise. Usually the events in question are low key enough that I’m free to ignore it without much more than a brief word of reprimanding, which she is typically receptive of. However, she ended up getting into a spat with Olki this morning after being particular abrasive for no good reason—if this sort of behavior continues then it will merit something more stern than a brief talk. I don’t know why it should come to that, especially given the fact that she is typically accepting of criticism and recognizes when she’s gone too far; my conversation with her over Olki suggested that she actually was remorseful for being too vicious, and that she wants to do better in the future. Time will tell I suppose.

Funnily enough, Olki and Nat know each other from outside the server: many years ago they met on Pesterchum, and by chance reencountered each other on the HSD. It’s not really a particularly noteworthy anecdote aside from that, I just find it amusing that it turned out this way for them. It’s neat to consider how unlikely their paths crossing again was, and yet both of them are now pseudos here. I wonder how many other encounters like this have happened in the HSD?

I might begin to describe a number of other regulars that I haven’t at this point. There’s a stable assortment of people who talk in mspa-lit almost every day, and I think it’d be worthwhile to take the time to describe more people at this point; it’s been long enough since my original descriptions. More to follow on that later, though.

As for events of today, nothing too serious happened. At one point we began discussing our lifestyles and health, at which point I described my decidedly bizarre lifestyle. Without going into too many details, people present for the conversation became extremely concerned. At this point I started getting dogpiled by everyone involved in the conversation, which was intensely frustrating in a way. Even further, I mentioned that I read a particular webcomic called “Questionable Content” which isn’t viewed very favorably by most people in the HSD⁶⁴, at which point they decided to dogpile me further.

A year ago I imagine I would be extremely put off by this behavior, but today it was just kind of amusing (although it was still a bit overwhelming at times). I think I’ve gotten a lot better at processing and handling the ribbing that comes with the territory of both moderating and this place in general. I’m pleased that so many of us here are willing to talk on such an open level; it really is quite a nice place we’ve got going on for ourselves here.

Nothing more for today.

---

31^st of January 2018

Nothing of terrible importance today: I’ll take the time to describe a couple of people, namely Goobatron and thunder413. Starting with the former, Goobatron or just Goob has been an interesting character. My interactions with them for the last several months have been nothing short of pleasant. However, a few weeks ago, Goob began acting in a way that I felt was uncharacteristically mean. I confronted them about this because I was worried they were upset by something, at which I was met only with confusion. Apparently Goob has literally always been a little crotchety in expressing themselves, so I’m not sure where I got the impression that they weren’t.

Goob’s disposition leans decidedly more negative, and to top it off they are extremely opinionated. There are a lot of things Goob has remarked on in a way that borders on the depressive, which I’m not sure if it’s a reflection of his underlying feelings or if he simply, wholly dislikes most things. Their tastes are also rather selective; we had a big discussion with him recently, more than once, about preferences between anime and manga for instance. Goob is the only person I’ve ever met to claim that they always prefer reading a manga to watching an anime. While not garnering any kind of ill will of course, this has definitely been branded “Unusual” and Goob has suffered plenty for his strangeness. There will undoubtedly be more of this in his future.

Thunder413 is in a completely different vein from Goob. Thunder ranks up there with some of the more unusual members of the server, with fairly obtuse posting patterns and being prone to a myriad of conversational difficulties or misunderstandings. This latter point is in no small part due to the fact that his primarily language is not English. We’ve had a few discussions about his language problems and how it may contribute to conversational difficulty, but it’s difficult to help him realize what he’s doing most of the time.

This tendency has actually caused him some extensive trouble; while he’s merely viewed as quirky on the HSD, thunder actually demonstrated this behavior in the server of another community member named luminantAegis (lumi), who also merits her own explanation.

Lumi became a figure of some prominence after performing an intense number of “song extensions”, meaning she took the original audio and made it sound longer for people who want to listen to it repeatedly. This feat doesn’t sound like very much, and in a way one would be correct to come to that conclusion. However, lumi’s performed so many of these extensions that the notion of “Homestuck music extended” is effectively synonymous with her. Aside from this she’s begun streaming Homestuck music as a kind of daily radio program, and as I mentioned has her own server (although I’m unsure if it’s a personally oriented server or if it holds a common theme).

I spoke with lumi for a while about thunder, and about her position in the fandom. She seems like a positively energetic person, with an abundance of dedication both to the source material and to the community at large. She feels as if the following is only continuing to grow somehow, and that emotionally—or speaking from a sense of maturity—the fandom is better than it’s ever been before, and she stated that she wants to create an organized environment to help keep new people feeling welcome.

Despite this reinforced optimism, she also isn’t too judgmental about people who feel negatively about the webcomic or the fandom: “if you're willing to nitpick details in story, it's obvious you're invested in it”. I was given the impression of a well-rounded person, although of course it’s impossible to understand someone after only one conversation. Yet, it was honestly refreshing to speak with lumi, and even if I never do so again I wish her the best in her endeavors.

That having all been said, my discussion with lumi focused a lot on thunder’s posting habits in her server. Thunder being the way he is, it’s very easy for him to fail to pick up on conversational nuance and subtext. He was actually banned from lumi’s server for repeated behavioral incidents, and knowing what I do about him I decided to ask lumi about it. The conversation, while not exactly leading to any new developments, was useful in helping me understand the situation.

I fear it will be impossible to reconcile lumi and thunder, but at the very least it served to improve their understanding of the situation and each other. The former is unwilling to undo the ban, but she understands that there is some difficulty in conveyance at play. Conversely, thunder made it explicitly clear that he accepts the ban and is deeply remorseful for any harm he might have caused. Sometimes it is difficult bordering on impossible to help him understand what’s going on or what he may be doing wrong, but he’s so servile that I almost can’t believe that he’s anything but sincere in his attempts.

I kind of hope that the situation may be revisited in the future, as it feels a bit unfortunate to leave it here. However, it will take time and perhaps a little more effort on thunder’s part in improving his communication skills. That having been said, I’m glad I’m getting the chance to continue my networking with various community members. In a way I hope that I can get the chance to talk with every important facet of the fandom and become familiar with the people involved. It’s a silly idea in its overall uselessness and difficulty, but it’s a concept that I enjoy immensely.

Nothing more for today.

1^st of February 2018

Today was devoid of all but one development, which I’ll describe shortly. In the meantime, some more descriptions of people are warranted: Neth is a nice fellow, with the HSD being the first online community they’ve ever actively participated in. They mention never having made “any significant contribution” to the community, which is something that I feel bothers them in at least a small way. They describe having joined the HSD with the initial intent of being a shitter, but only a couple of days after joining they changed their attitude and began participating in earnest.

Before #social was created, they hung out almost exclusively in #general with other regulars like Angel, Starkuss, and a few others. Then they became a socialite and started hanging out there instead. Eventually the drama concerning Twonks and Socialer happened, and Neth found themselves devoting a huge chunk of their time to the splinter server. For a few months they didn’t participate in the HSD at all, but grew concerned about this place and came back. At this point though, #general and #social were both somewhat barren and they decided to begin speaking in mspa-lit.

Neth enjoys art and music, and especially likes to sing. They seem fairly reserved, describing their singing ability as “mediocre”, and admitted to not being sure why I felt like including them in the journal. At this point I’m not strictly sure how they feel about their own position in the community; they participate a lot, having tens of thousands of messages, but the overall impression I’ve gotten is that they try to be unassuming and avoid drawing overt attention to themselves. Despite this perception (which I must disclaim may be inaccurate), they often have interesting or related tidbits to contribute to a whole range of conversational topics.

Null is another individual that fits this mold; they seem reserved about their contributions and their past. They’ve stated that they essentially burned through all of Homestuck and then found their way to the HSD a year ago, latching onto mspa-lit by whatever circumstance. After a glance at their posting history, it seems as if over half of their total messages are indeed in mspa-lit, but they have a healthy smattering of posts in other channels as well. Finally they appear to be largely non-serious, openly making fun of people like WoC when the opportunity arises

WHATISLOSTINTHEMINES, or simply Mines, is a very well-established member of our community, participating across a wide range of related servers for quite some time now. They’re especially known for their fanmusic on the LOFAM server, and I’ve already described their highly controversial and cursed Vore album and the in-progress Feet album. They’ve also been a participant in places like Movie Night. It’s honestly impressive to consider the breadth of their participation in our general community.

Mines is self-described as a “long suffering prequel fan”, Prequel being another webcomic. They’re a really lighthearted individual, joking along with other people and posting silly memes frequently. They of course have meaningful contributions to most conversations, but can often be seen submitting less than serious responses to things as well.

In fact, today when I was publically musing over writing about people, they joked about nagging me to put them in this journal as well (which, the joking inspired the other two people I’ve written about today to mock me about their being included; the joke is on you guys, I write about who I want). However, their inclusion was inevitable—I have always wanted to include them in the journal because their effect on the community at large is undeniable, and they’ve proven to be a good friend. Mines’ presence never fails to improve things.

The major event worthy of note today is that Revlar has come back to the community. Tipsy, Griever and I were talking in #eastern-media about Dragonball, as we are wont to do. Out of basically nowhere, Revlar began commenting on the topic as well, which caught me off guard. I almost had to laugh: it’s been a year since he left, but without another word Revlar saw fit to return and resume discussion like nothing happened. It seems almost fitting from what I remember of him.

He felt it necessary to assert that his return has nothing to do with a gradually increasing sense of humanity that compelled him to return, but rather that someone from here PM’d him and that somehow⁶⁵ precipitated into him coming back. From this, it seems his dry sense of humor seems to have remained as strong as it was before he left, and the conversation going on in mspa-lit with him even feels like it did so long ago. It’s remarkable how pronounced the effect on the channel mood is, how noticeable it can be. I’m interested to see if he’ll actually stay for a considerable length of time or not. With the parts of the server that aggravated him before now gone, perhaps he will.

Nothing more for today.

---

2^nd of February 2018

More descriptions for today. First is Interrobang, a decidedly modest member of the chat. They describe reading Homestuck initially as a bet back in 2014, after which they hung out on the subreddit for some time and mostly lurked. Apparently they joined CANMT first and then ended up joining the HSD. Apropos for someone who joined CANMT first, they have contributed a swath of fanmusic to both CANMT and then run some side projects on LOFAM as well.

Interrobang first joined the HSD in about July of 2016, making them more familiar with the lay of the land than I am. Despite having a clear bent towards music they admit to staying almost exclusively within mspa-lit, which is understandable in a way. Regardless, they do visit other channels on occasion and are fond of a wide variety of subjects, especially reading, math, physics, and even astronomy.

Personality-wise, they seem fairly personable; friendly but not overly so, they have a marked penchant for shitposting, actually succeeding in being banned from #general at least once. It’s not at all uncommon for Interro to step in with a joke to accompany any given conversation, although this does not preclude the chance of them contributing in a more meaningful or constructive fashion on occasion.

Next is Saeko. They began reading Homestuck at some point in September of 2015; they describe searching for a Homestuck related Discord server like ours, but were initially unable to find one, only finding out about us a bit after finishing reading the comic itself. Once they found their way here, they hung out primarily in the #nsfw channel when it was still around, although now that it’s gone and its culture is all but erased they’ve taken to hanging out in mspa-lit.

I’ve actually mentioned Saeko on a previous occasion, when they were banned for joking about being underaged in spite of new rules saying that all such jokes would be taken seriously. This whole debacle essentially mounted to a huge waste of time, and its origin should give the reader a not-insignificant idea of what Saeko is like. It is thus that Saeko conducts themselves on the server: at any given time they are almost certainly shitposting, the intensity of which will vary depending on the day. Counterintuitive to this, Saeko was fond of spending time in #serious for legitimate conversational use, at least, “before it turned into a drama channel”.

Of all of their interests, shitposting does indeed seem to be the most obvious even just from associating with him in passing. Their presence in a given conversation is typically erratic and festooned with a large quantity of verbal shittery, but it’s never so overt that it’s genuinely troublesome. In fact, I would go so far as to say the opposite; their cadence of speech lends itself to something particularly interesting. Their eagerness to contribute in serious conversations creates this extreme juxtaposition with their more pronounced japery, so that it’s never clear which Saeko you might be talking to in a given conversation.

Trickster, on the other hand, is a different beast. I don’t know where he came from or what his history with Homestuck is. All I do know is that he is a bizarre human being, if that is indeed what he is. He is less like a person and more like a hurricane, in that he is a force of nature. Inexorable in his machinations, Trickster lurks every conversation, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. There is never any doubt that such a moment will arise; his mere presence assures that destruction is sure to follow.

All of this is to say that Trickster is a fucking weirdo. I honestly don’t get what his deal is; he has always had a reputation for being this way, although it never really bothered any of us before. It was just a given that Trickster was a rather shitposty individual. However, at some point in the recent past Trickster read the book Principia Discordia, a “parody religious text” espousing principles of chaos and unreliability. After this, it seemed as if he kicked into overdrive.

Now Trickster is basically unstoppable. Every single conversation he’s around for, he manages to make a profoundly absurd comment that forces everyone present to stop and witness him. It’s stunning both in the capacity of the comments he makes and how frequently he manages to do it. However, it has also earned him a bit of infamy as well: now that people expect this kind of behavior from him, it has ceased being purely amusing and is now an object of some frustration.

His more bizarre comments more often elicit comments of agitation than anything else, and I’ve personally threatened to ban him on occasion when his behavior is especially egregious. I don’t know how much of what he does is a shtick he plays up for fun and how much of it is genuine. Regardless of the reason why he does it, the general idea is that it is maddening to see play out. This all contributes towards Trickster being one of the more bewildering people to associate with on the server.

Nothing more for today.

---

3^rd of February 2018

A few more descriptions today: beginning with Dap. Their involvement on mspa-lit is indisputable, but despite this it feels like I miss the various opportunities to talk to Dap extensively. They joined the HSD in about August of 2016, citing a lack of Homestuck content on Tumblr as the reason for them to seek out a Discord server. After joining here they lurked for about a month, started hanging out in #general, and then made their way down to mspa-lit with the rest of us goons.

With a wide variety of interests across gaming, reading, writing, art, and assuredly others, Dap joins the sizeable group of people who exhibit a pretty generalized knowledge of things that allows them to comment on just about anything with some degree of meaningfulness. Also in a similar vein as a lot of other users, they are fond of making jokes and shitposting. This sort of personality archetype seems to be pretty common in the kind of people who hang out in mspa-lit, by my reckoning. Not entirely sure why it’s such a typical mindset to have for people here, but it does lead to some pretty interesting conversational patterns.

Cloudaria is an interesting member, having been on the HSD longer than most other people. She joined very early in 2016, back when it was still based largely around the game Overseer; at this point she was briefly modded, but due to inactivity was subsequently unmodded when it was rebranded to focus specifically on Homestuck. She also mentions that she read Homestuck “at the request of people on a minecraft server and then promptly went to shitpost about it”, which makes me laugh; it’s interesting to consider all of the various ways in which people may be clued into the existence of the story.

Cloud seems to have their fingers in a number of different pies, community wise. While she spends plenty of time shitposting in mspa-lit and around the HSD in general, she also joined CANMT, where it says she contributes as a voice actor. In addition to this, on the occasions that I’ve been there I’ve seen her be very active in Austinado’s server dedicated to the Vast Error fanventure team. I’m not sure if she contributes to Vast Error, but usually by the time someone has entered that niche of a community it indicates a general level of involvement that exceeds the average casual reader anyway.

Wave, short for SQUAREWAVE, is another interesting character. They got into Homestuck around 2014, some time after it had hit its apparent climax and was on the decline. Not caring too much for the story itself, Wave got heavily into cosplay and began dressing as the characters for meetups. After experiencing some intense drama that I will neglect to write down here, Wave felt it necessary to take a break from the Homestuck fandom in an effort to regain their grasp on things, to put it lightly.

Sometime after Undertale came out, Wave decided to try again and posted some cosplay photos on the subreddit; these were received favorably. Shortly afterward CANMT began looking for people to make music for Cool and New Webcomic, to which Wave created a truly fitting, ungodly meme song. Since then they’ve been sporadic in their participation for CANMT, but then they joined the HSD.

Wave’s personality is not unlike Saeko’s; both are fond of shitposting, but just as commonly they can be found discussing things in earnest, at least in serious conversations. I think Wave is more predisposed to joking around and enjoying themselves at the expense of the conversation though. One particular anecdote that Wave is fond of telling involves being at a convention: to make a long story short, an encounter with another cosplayer ended in a blowjob. They’ve told this story a few times, and it never fails to catch at least one person off guard, although it no longer fazes me.

Wave is dedicated to being as wacky zany as possible, except in #serious. Even when they appear otherwise, there is an almost certain chance that they trying to steer conversations; they function as some sort of self-described shitposting mastermind, “dropping a topic in and letting the conversation run [its] course, dropping in jokes I've planned for like the Count Basie of shitposting”. Some time ago, he played the piano in voice chat on occasion.

Sometimes it strikes me just strange and diverse our community is in personalities alone. It truly makes for a chaotic and refreshing blend of discussion, with almost every day being something different. There are only a few more people to describe at this point, which I will do another time. For now, it is important to describe the main event of the day: Carlarc has officially come back.

This event was marked with a really heavy flurry of people expressing their gratitude that he returned. I was glad to see this and have the chance to participate myself; Carlarc is widely considered a shitposter in some ways, but their presence is valued pretty highly as someone who generates activity and is actually nice to speak with. Carlarc didn’t explain why they left besides something personal and “general disinterest” in the place, and I’m a bit concerned that this may happen in the future. Nonetheless, I am very glad that we got him back; everytime someone leaves it leads to a strange and wholly unpleasant feeling of missing something important, affecting the tone of conversation and the mood of the channel in very subtle, often imperceptible ways. Here’s to hoping that such will not be a problem again, at least not for as long as possible.

Looking back, it seems apparent that some of these descriptions have less in them than others, but I would like to point out that this is not indicative of overall value of each person involved: all of the people mentioned speak commonly enough in mspa-lit and other places on the server that they warrant some attention—it’s simply that some of them are more straightforward to explain than others. Or, more likely, I have missed some overall details that would contribute heavily to their descriptions. Whatever the case, I’m grateful to all of them for being around and participating as often as they do. I hope that my gratitude shows, and that they will feel warmly welcomed in the HSD for as long as they care to be there.

Nothing more for today.

---

7^th of February 2018

In the aftermath of yesterday, a sort of exhaustion has seeped in. It’s likely a combination of many factors, including some real life circumstances in play, but I think I may have overextended myself with the article. I’ve reread it a few times now and I keep getting this feeling of general displeasure without really being able to put my finger on why. Further, the response to it—while generally positive—has been pretty muted. It’s received less attention than the Gankro article did at the same point, so I’m worried that people just don’t care as much. I guess the information is out there if anyone so chooses to look at it, which was the main goal. Still wish that the visibility was higher so more people could read it. Is that a selfish desire or not? You be the judge.

In the face of writing and releasing the article yesterday, I neglected to mention a pretty neat event that occurred yesterday. SpaceX is a private company in the business of making rockets. To keep a long story short, the company tested new rocket engines called the Falcon Heavy yesterday, and were aiming to put a rather interesting payload into space.

I had to offer this explanation numerous times over the last few days so it’s fairly well practiced by now: new rocket engines are extremely prone to failure, so in order to simulate the weight of a payload it is standard procedure to launch an inexpensive item like a block of steel or concrete to mock the weight of a satellite. The owner of SpaceX, Elon Musk, decided to send up a car made by his automotive company Tesla. As if this weren’t enough, a mannequin wearing a SpaceX space suit—affectionally called Starman—is “driving”, and the car has a litany of science fiction or otherwise space-related pop culture elements packed into it, such as it being wired to play David Bowie music, as well as a copy of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and a towel in the glove compartment (I’m sure other references I’m not aware of are there).

In as simple of terms as I can manage, this launch was the wetdream of nerds⁶⁶ everywhere. It had a high chance for failure, and yet by the tone of my words I’m sure any reading this may surmise that the launch was a success. Makin set up a stream for people to watch the launch happen live, and about 30 to 40 of us all got together to see it in real time. There were a few memes I missed, but I was present for two main events: the booster rockets successfully detaching and landing back on Earth, and then the car being revealed in space.

It’s important to mention that a hefty number of us are really into space exploration. Some of us just find it cool, and others, like myself and Makin, think it’s an important tool going forward as a species. We think it’s genuinely important for the survival of humanity, and that if we are ever to ensure our success and proliferation that we must be able to colonize other places, for a huge variety of reasons. Because of this, a sizeable portion of our group becomes fairly excited over new developments in space technology.

With this in mind, it’s easy to understand that this stream was a pretty big deal. Not only is it a monumental step forward for SpaceX as a space-related company, but the plethora of nerdy bullshit associated with it is enough to tickle even the most modest of dorks. Also important was the boosters: SpaceX has made it a regular occurrence to land their boosters, a feat that had never been accomplished before 2016, but to my knowledge this was the first time they were attempting to land two boosters at the same time.

The test was, as I mentioned, a success: the test payload with the car was launched into space as planned, and the two side rockets landed back on their pads in a way that suggested effortlessness, despite the assuredly countless man-hours spent perfecting the systems involved as much as possible. Seeing both of them land simultaneously was nothing short of a spectator sport: all of us watching very literally cheered as it happened, to celebrate the monumental strides that have been achieved in rocket tech in the last few years alone.

The other half of all this, the car, was its own event. Once it was outside of the Earth’s atmosphere, the capsule containing the car split and revealed its payload. With Starman in all of his glory, the car was perched atop another rocket engine to take it out of orbit of the Earth; as it was revealed, the stream began playing David Bowie’s Life on Mars?, and everyone in the stream watched with awe as the camera revealed our entire planet, slowly spinning in and out of view beneath Starman. This was something to consider: by all means an absurdity, with a dummy riding a car into space, and yet it spoke to us at that moment. It’s difficult to describe perfectly, but it felt like the perfect encapsulation of the most distant hopes and dreams of everyone watching.

I could go on for quite some time about this, and arguably I have spent more time on it than I should already. It is enough to say that everyone present for this stream felt connected by a common thread: a desire to see humanity go as far as it possibly can, and be the best it can possibly be. Starman’s course will take him out to the approximate orbit of Mars, where he will enter a path around the sun for possibly millions of years. There is no real human in that spacesuit, and yet he looks comfortable out there careening into the infinite depths of space at thousands of kilometers per hour. I think I speak for all of us who were watching when I say that we wish him the greatest of journeys, and that we may all have the chance to join him within our lifetime. Goodbye for now, Starman.

Returning to the comparatively mundane affairs of the HSD, there is one thing that happened today worthy of note. A user named Mayyro had his account hacked and started spamming Google links with malware to random people. I was notified of this by $trider, and without too much thought banned Mayyro’s account so it could not send the links to anyone else.

Cut to later today, and Mayyro was asking about the ban on the subreddit. I promised I would look into it, and I did: I brought up the alleged hacking in the modchat. There were three main possibilities to be considered: the first is that Mayyro was lying about being hacked and sending malware to people for fun, which is distinctly unlikely; the second is that Mayyro was hacked through his own negligence, stupidly clicking on strange links and running programs that compromised his Discord account, which seems mostly likely; and the final idea, which is that Mayyro’s account was hacked through no fault of his own. This last seemed the most unlikely, as Discord is fairly security conscious.

Despite this, I felt obligated to respond to Mayyro’s request for help. I didn’t exactly have all the facts, and if he was able to demonstrably prove that the account was hacked through no real action on his part then he would be in the realm of plausible deniability. At that point I would have asked him to turn two-factor authentication on and call it a day.

As it is, he was unable to prove distinct proof that he was not directly at fault for his account being hacked. After discussing this with the other mods, the decision to ban him was sustained because his stupidity could endanger others on the server, and we were no longer able to trust him. There were also other circumstances that played into this decision—Mayyro being somewhat of a problem user at various points in the past—but the breach in trust was by far the biggest one.

Mayyro was not pleased to hear this, naturally. It was already far into the night when I began conversing with him, so more and more I found myself unwilling to deal with his diatribes at being treated less than perfectly. I think that I’m becoming more jaded the longer I do this, which is not what I want to happen at all; I tried my best to remain respectful, but sometimes you get a user like Mayyro and it makes you want to flog yourself raw with your brainstem from agitation alone.

I’m sure that responding negatively to him will have some sort of adverse impact in the future, but I’ll be damned if I can tell what it is right now. I was initially afraid that saying no would contribute to Mayyro becoming some kind of NEO clone, but Toast is less concerned: “mayyro isnt a neo type hes just an idiot”. With other mods Nat, WoC, Olki, and Rar all chiming in to say that they do not support him coming back, it seemed safe enough to dismiss Mayyro.

I don’t want to elaborate on the discussion further. It was fairly unpleasant, not really something I can look forward to. Banning people is always either disappointing or annoying as fuck. I still feel like it was important to pursue this even though Mayyro is no one special in our server by any means; Toast and WoC both felt right from the start that it was a pointless waste of time, but I like to think I’m more principled than them when it comes to stuff like this. This is perhaps to a fault, but what can I say? I want to do as great a job as I can.

Nothing more for today.

---

8^th of February 2018

Something else I failed to mention (my attentiveness is getting worse apparently) is that MSPFA has been down in varying degrees over the last few weeks. At first, the entire site was down and no one could even see fanventures, which is obviously alarming. Shortly this was fixed so that everyone could read them again, but then no one was able to update their stories. To my knowledge, this is where the website is for now, with all fanventures at a standstill. Some people are still unable to view the website even, which might be a geographical thing (or more likely browser related, but I’m not perfectly sure).

This has brought some additional attention to MSPFA, as people are suitably frustrated with being unable to edit their adventures. Griever and Nights I believe are both creating material even despite this setback, which could serve as a sort of backlog and give them some leeway once MSPFA is back online. Until then, I’m sure all the other authors involved are doing something similar. From this, it’s apparent that Miro is under a lot of pressure to get the website back up and running.

After doing some digging, it appears that the website is down due to a completely foreseeable problem involving the structuring of the website. I’ll forego any technical details, but Makin claims he talked with Miro about this in the past, and the latter claimed that there would be no problems. Cut to today, and clearly we can see this was not the case. General disappointment abounds, and as of today the website has been online but broken for 20 days.

Aside from this, interesting discussion today: I’ve mentioned previously that every Wednesday features something from What Pumpkin called the “Troll Call”, where they briefly introduce two new characters who will feature in the next act of Hiveswap. The character is shown and then three bullet points of their personality, often joking in some way, accompany the portrait. This has been a regular occurrence every week for a few months now.

In this way Wednesday passed as usual, with the new characters dropping as expected. However, this week in particular there was something that made it a little controversial. The new characters, of a species simply called “trolls”, have generally all been stereotypes of some kind, relatively unworthy of note. However, with this latest release, one character’s bullet points simply said that they were “troll jewish”.

This was initially met with only minor comment, some people calling the point tasteless on Wednesday, but otherwise leaving it alone. I thought that any backlash against WP for this would be immediate, but apparently I was wrong. Today there was a whole slew of comments calling WP out. Various members of WP, including Cohen himself, tried to variously downplay or ignore these comments, with limited success.

To be honest, I’m ambivalent on the matter. While it was almost certainly in poor taste, I don’t think the joke requires that much attention. Yet, there are posts on tumblr decrying the use of the term. I haven’t seen anyone say much on the topic that wasn’t immediately understood, but the fact that there is outcry at all is something to behold. As it is though, the nature of this incident is such that it’ll almost certainly be forgotten by next week’s Troll Call.

Finally, there was an entry recently after The Rapture where I mentioned I talked with Makin in the mod chat about his behavior, and he responded, “I don’t know” when I asked why he does the things he does. After reviewing that entry himself, he claimed⁶⁷ that he was only saying that to get me to leave him alone. While not exactly surprisingly, it is definitely just another layer of disappointment to stack onto the whole affair. I would call this behavior surreptitious and say that I’m not sure what must go through his mind when he says things like that, but I’m rapidly being pushed towards the conclusion that he doesn’t actually care that much. Perhaps that was obvious to everyone except me; regardless, it is still annoying to contemplate. Not much else to be said about it at this point in time.

Nothing more for today.

---

9^th of February 2018

No events of note happened today. Instead, more people descriptions.

I actually promised Gitaxian I would be writing about him some time ago, and then forgot to do so in the midst of the Rapture. Whoops! I swear it was unintentional, and that Gitaxian is not actually a forgettable person. They’re actually pretty cool, and he’s contributing to part of this journal. I mentioned this at some point in the past, but he’s responsible for the “What is a quest?” document in appendix A, which he updates every so often.

Gitaxian first heard of Homestuck back in 2013 and hung around on the forums for some time. Eventually the forums went down, at which point he stopped participating in the community. With the release of Hiveswap being chronically delayed at the time, Gitaxian eventually found his way onto the HSD in March of 2017.

He mentions witnessing “one of Makin’s bigger fuckups” here (which he didn’t elaborate on⁶⁸), giving him a negative impression right off the bat. This convinced him to stay away for a while, although he would peek back occasionally. Finally, he actually came back in full after hearing the Makin was advertising Worm to everybody on the server, which Gitaxian had already read. Following this he read through another of the works Makin was shilling and then began participating here in earnest. Gitaxian isn’t the most active user, but he seems to talk a little bit in almost every channel. While it seems as if he’s fond of casually shitposting when he can, he also submits pretty useful commentary alongside everyone else.

Dap is a fairly typical personality here. With about half of their total messages being sent in mspa-lit, they seem to be pretty much always present to discuss all manner of topics, and respond to new developments in real time. Despite this, I don’t actually know much about them, and they seem fairly reserved when talking about themselves in particular. They describe joining the server in August of 2016, hanging out in #general for a while and then slowly shifting down into mspa-lit as time went by. The only other thing they seemed willing to divulge was that they’re interested in art, reading, writing, and video games. Despite this, they do speak often enough in mspa-lit that I felt they were worthy of comment.

I’ve described Cookiefonster briefly in the past, as someone who left and then recently rejoined the HSD. Initially reading Homestuck in 2014, he started posting on the forums: he describes hanging out in threads dedicated to discussing the comic directly, and then later started posting music related to the comic. Later he started to peruse the subreddit, and then in June of 2016 Cookie joined CANMT. He started using the HSD regularly after Tensei did his AMAs.

As is no surprise for someone who’s a member of CANMT, Cookie’s interest largely involve “remixing/covering music and making videos about memes”. He mentions being uncomfortable with the idea of describing himself directly, which is both amusing to me and completely understandable. From the notable incidents I’ve witnessed that involve Cookie, I think it’s safe to say that he’s a passionate person who isn’t afraid to stand his ground in the face of opposition. This has led to a couple of issues in the past that I’ll be damned if I can remember accurately, but since he came back to the HSD he’s associated with people in a perfectly constructive capacity.

Nothing more for today.

---

10^th of February 2018

Khauvinkh joined fairly recently, all things considered: they joined at the very beginning of November last year, and as such have had very little time to establish any sort of reputation for themselves. It seems they feel a little self-conscious about this, very pointedly saying they “have not achieved anything noteworthy as a part of the fandom”. Despite this, they’ve demonstrated an aptitude for joining in conversations at just the right time and contributing invaluable input to certain topics. I mentioned recently that they were participating in a scientifically-oriented discussion with me and Makin; at this point it was revealed to us that they have a formal education in biochemistry. I know very little about Khau’s history in the general fandom is, but if their participation remains at the same consistency and quality it has been up to now, I could easily see them obtaining a mod position somewhere down the line.

Archiewhite is a figure of some infamy and interest to our community. I don’t actually know when they joined: if I recall, they were around even when I first joined the community back in 2016. It’s likely he was using the subreddit and discord server far before I was ever involved. As it is, he used to be more controversial: Archie has this acutely peculiar habit of responding to numerous situations in a way that ranges from simply edgy to intentionally inflammatory. No one is really sure why Archie speaks in this way, but it has become expected to the point that people predict it in advance. His behavior also landed him in some trouble on the subreddit some time ago, in an incident involving another user named Razor-Grazor. The details of this are fuzzy to me at this point, but Archie made some comments that warranted being banned from the subreddit for a while. He was allowed back on the provision that another similar fuck up would result in being permanently banned, and he has admittedly been more tame since then. His tendency towards generically weird comments can be bewildering to some, and sometimes it can cross the line from simply confusing to outlandish. More positively, Archie is fond of theorizing about Homestuck, and he claims to have various fan projects he’s working on. With all of this in mind, I think it’s hardly a surprise to anyone that conversations with Archie in them tend to be pretty interesting.

Tripheus is a pretty solid figure in the community. He heard of Homestuck at about the same time I did back in 2012, but he neglected to pursue it. Finally, he decided to look at it again back in May of 2016, and after finishing it decided to join the HSD in about August of the same year. His involvement here has been colorful, spending a lot of time in the splinter server Stargazing, which was one of the biggest splinters and ultimately began Makin’s feud against them.

Tripheus is also involved in CANMT making art for various tracks, and he was also around to see LOFAM 4 being worked on and produced—he was going to make art for that project as well, but he had to drop it. He hasn’t done art in a while, about a year or so, but it’s clear that feels strongly about being able to help out there when he gets the chance.

He also feels strongly about the community as a whole, like I do—he often mentions the fact that he cares more for the HSD and the people in it, and all of the servers or places associated with us in some way, than he does for Homestuck itself. I think that Trip’s sentiment proves to be more and more correct as time goes by; with waning interest in the material itself, people tend to stick around more because of the people involved here.

As far as the server itself is concerned today, not a lot happened. There was an extensive bout of discourse surrounding Makin again, which I’m a little hesitant to describe the contents of at length for the fact that the overall effect the discussion had was basically nothing. We talked in circles for about two or three hours, and by the end of it no progress or further understanding was achieved. All it did was make me reflect more on his behavior, which is always an exhausting practice.

The entire discussion only served to entrench the idea that Makin doesn’t take any of this seriously, honestly; whenever people brought up points against him he would ask for proof or specific occasions where he’s exhibited the behavior in question, and then after an example was provided he ignored it and would claim, “No one has presented anything compelling against me, so obviously I’ve done nothing wrong.” This was done many times: an example would be that he deflects or distracts from things in an effort to avoid talking about them, which he was doing even while we were bringing up this very criticism against him. It is some of the most overtly gross behavior I’ve seen from him in a while.

I brought up a point from when we were talking post-Rapture, wherein I gave an outline of how I feel Makin purposefully engages in conversations:

your mode of operation seems to be to refuse to acknowledge the opponent until they become mad and are unable to articulate themselves well anymore, then use the cracks introduced by you being facetious or downright disingenuous to invalidate their argument without actually addressing the premise.

He fully agreed with me at the time with no remorse, which was itself maddening. When I brought it up today, he rebutted with, “it wasn't correct / I just said that to make you mad⁶⁹”. As with other things he’s said lately it was not totally surprising, but it was infuriating.

Speaking purely to his mannerisms as a person, I’m not sure if he fully understands what it is he’s doing when he associates with other people. He seems content to antagonize others for no reason other than he can; I often believe that he must think that everything he does is a joke to be shared with other people, because if he understands what it is he’s doing then he would be deliberately sabotaging his own reputation even more than it already has been destroyed. This would be strange to me due to the fact that he claims there’s no reason other people could genuinely dislike him. The only other explanation is that he sincerely doesn’t believe people are angry when he does certain things; I find this unlikely because it would cast some serious doubt on how smart or observant he really is. He must know that his behavior actually aggravates other people, and he simply takes pleasure in the idea. Or perhaps he simply doesn’t care.

I guess the overarching problem is that it doesn’t matter why he does it: unless the true reason is that he is legitimately unaware of how his actions are perceived by others, then the fact is simply that Makin enjoys making other people upset, and he is an asshole. Even if he is truly unaware, then the fact also remains that he is largely unable or unwilling to take advice from other people on the matter, which is just as bad for its own reasons. As it is, the most likely interpretation seems to be that he enjoys making other people angry.

There is something to be said for trolling other people when they’re already acting in an outlandish fashion: it is indeed fun to joke at them, and especially to help them realize they’re too involved with something in a way that is almost silly. However, relying on trolling others as a modus operandi is untenable—foregoing all meaningful, sincere conversation in favor of taking nothing about yourself seriously is an effective way to make people hate you, or not care about you at all. Makin’s behavior solidly crosses the line from trolling to juvenile to being solidly unpleasant. If a jackass is the impression he wants other people to have of him then he’s doing a fine job, but I wonder how this will pan out for him in the future.

As he reads this I’m sure he’ll be amused by my analysis for various reasons. I imagine that he enjoys other people talking about him and foisting this much attention on his behavior. However, if he keeps all this up then my prediction is that eventually people will begin to simply ignore him outright, and no one will remember him outside of the unpleasant situations he creates. I’ve already found myself taking his nonsense for granted, and I’ve started taking the initiative to solve problems or make judgments with the other mods without involving him. There’s no use in paying attention to a jester if you want to actually get things done. ⁷⁰

Who am I kidding? He probably doesn’t care about any of this at all. Nothing more for today.

---

11^th of February 2018

Today was actually pretty different. Before explaining the main event of today, I’ll elaborate on an element of popular culture that pops up here and there in our server, namely a thing called the SCP Foundation.

SCP, standing for “Secure, Contain, and Protect”. The SCP Foundation refers to a collection of short stories written by people on the internet framed around the titular organization, which serves to collect and isolate all manner of supernatural or especially dangerous artifacts or beings (referred to as “SCPs”. Specific SCPs are designated as “SCP-#” with a number for reference). Each story is stylized as an entry in the Foundation’s “database”, and there is a loose canon that the entries can follow such as classifications for each object being written about, as well as potential interaction between each subject.

Completely fan driven, certain SCPs are interesting or horrifying enough to have elicited a strong response from people on the internet, with many projects dedicated to specific entries. One such example is SCP-087, which is an “unlit platform staircase” that proceeds to an unknown depth and is inhabited by an entity of unknown origins resembling a face with no mouth, pupils, or nostrils. A horror video game was created some years ago where the player descends this staircase and has a (I believe) random chance to encounter the being, which ends the game. Another horror video game was made for SCP-173, a sculpture “constructed from concrete and rebar with traces of Krylon brand spray paint” which can only move when it is not being looked at by anyone.

The reason I bring this up is because a game came out at the end of last year called SCP: Secret Laboratory, which is a multiplayer game utilizing many elements of the SCP Foundation. It’s really rough, at this point being not much better than a demo, but it is playable and for a while today Makin ran a server for it so people could play together.

It was honestly a really great time. Over a dozen people were participating at any given time, including a bunch of the mods and then people like Dap and Revlar. People were playing for over four hours by my reckoning, although I stopped after about two. The game itself needs an enormous amount of touch up, but it was still massively entertaining for everyone to come together and fool around. Reminded me a little bit of SS13 in that regard.

The other thing I want to comment on is that Makin is actually working with me to make the journal publically accessible. I had already edited it, and now he’s essentially proofreading it for any glaring errors or inaccuracies I may have missed. To add to this, he’s adding his own personal commentary in places. A lot of his comments are constructive and others are for fun, which I feel may add something to the journal. There will be some minor additions if appropriate, such as pictures to give people a better idea of what’s going on or to conceptualize something (an example being a description of “tenseiface” all the way at the beginning of this journal). I look forward to completing the revision and allowing even more people to get a chance to read this and offer their input on it. If people can get some use out of this document, then I will be satisfied.

Nothing more for today. ⁷¹

---

12^th of February 2018

The topic of interest today was MSPFA, which has continued to suffer for the last several days. In fact, today Miro put out an update as the status of the website claiming that it would continue to experience difficulties for possibly the next several months.

This has naturally set people off to find alternative hosting solutions. Many people, such as Nights, are considering hosting their fanventures on completely independent websites so they can assert full creative control over it. Others are looking towards places like MSPFA that already exist, such as Hiveworks (which I’ve described previously). The former option is difficult for people not familiar with web design and who can’t afford to pay for a website, and the latter option—particulary as it pertains to Hiveworks—appears to be unpalatable because websites like Hiveworks tend to be extremely shitty for one reason or the other.

This general panic and shift away from MSPFA could honestly signal the end of arguably one of the greatest sections of the fandom ever to exist. Having everyone’s fanventures in one spot (aside from the forums, which remains to this day the greatest loss of fandom culture by orders of magnitude) is invaluable and makes it so that everyone is more familiar with each other and their work. Decentralizing fanventures is going to fundamentally alter the state of the fandom from what it is now.

Makin is reportedly desperately attempting to stop this from happening, to the point that he is in contact with Miro to try and fix the problem, or failing that he is requesting that Miro give him the ability to edit the website in some fashion. Given Makin’s reputation I imagine the latter scenario is unlikely to occur, and I confess my doubts that it’s a good idea in the first place. Whatever happens, everyone hopes that Miro will be able to fix MSPFA and stop this mass exodus from occurring.

Nothing more for today.

---

13^th of February 2018

It turns out everything I wrote yesterday was completely pointless: Miro announced today that MSPFA is fixed and people are finally able to update their adventures again. Much rejoicing was had at this announcement, and creators like Griever have already moved to start updating their stories again, ending all of their unwilling hiatuses and restoring the fandom to a sense of normalcy (whatever passes for normal with us, anyway).

Makin finished commenting on the journal today, and I’ve made it so that all changes have been mirrored in both the key document that I have on Microsoft Word and then the Google docs page, which will be publicly accessible. Aside from a few grammatical changes, Makin’s own comments have added their own flair to the document and I’m sure will provide just a bit more depth to it in places. Additionally, a major change that was implanted is that all of the descriptions of people have been moved to more appropriate locations so that the journal flows better. As Makin said to me, having 15 people described in a row drags on considerably.

To celebrate the public release of the journal (and at Makin’s suggestion), I felt it was time to rename this document entirely. I was unable to think of anything really catchy or compelling, so I extended the question to mspa-lit. I got a lot of incredible—if sophomoric—answers from a whole range of people, but then as WoC was shouting out epithets as usual he unwittingly provided something great.

Discord has a feature where it shows you who’s typing in real time. This will work with up to three people, and when more than that are involved it will simply say at the bottom “Several people are typing…”, and this was his suggestion. The phrase has become somewhat of a meme with us because it usually accompanies discourse of some sort, and as soon as it pops up people will point it out to signify that the discussion has officially turned into a fucking mess. In this way, the phrase was so in keeping with the overall spirit of our place that I felt compelled to use it. The name of this document has thus been updated. It may change again in the future, but I think it will stick for a while at least.

With that, the journal is going to be released publicly, possibly tonight but more probably tomorrow. In the future, all entries I write here will be copied over into the Google document, which means updates will happen in real time; no more sets of 50 pages will be released. I have no idea if any others will care, as this seems to be a document whose interest is localized mostly within mspa-lit, but if even one more person is able to read this and find interesting or useful information as a result of all this effort then it will have all been worth it.

Amusingly, Hb started another document as a joke where anyone can edit it. I highly doubt that it will last longer than one or two nights, but it is still an incredible shitpost in and of itself. Nothing more for today.

---

15^th of February 2018

Yesterday was insanely busy. There was a lot of work done with restructuring this document, such as adding the Table of Contents (which has some formatting issues that need to be worked out). Of note is that a front and back “cover” were made for this, both by Makin. The first one is a less funny image, but the back cover is a total joke. I’m actually really happy with both of them.

After Makin added all of his commentary, it was found out that no one could see his comments unless I handed out commenting permissions to everyone viewing the journal. This is obviously untenable, so I took the time to add all of Makin’s commentary as footnotes in their respective locations. They’re not quite as obvious as they were and they feel a tad different now, but the overall idea is still intact. People have messaged me saying that they add a lot to this document in a way, which is great to hear.

After making all of these corrections I posted the journal on the subreddit. I can see people reading it even now, which is strange to consider for me. Not everyone is pleased about it though—an individual I wrote about for the initial discourse over the Patreon contacted me, wanting their name removed. I’ve obliged and relabeled their contributions as being from “Anonymous”, which may be confusing or weirdly set up with regards to the rest of those entries, but hopefully it’s a fair outcome. (Note: as of the 20th of August 2025, all censorship for the purposes of anonymizing people has been reversed in the interest of actual historical accuracy).

Aside from that, there hasn’t been any overtly negative comments about the journal being released, except by MrCheeze. They are extremely displeased by the decision to make it public, for reasons that I don’t necessarily agree with or understand. I’ve been trying not to worry about it too much except to change things that people want me to if I can. Other people have also commented saying they think the document is just fine—Cait was another person who wanted some particular details removed, but aside from that she said she feels this is an alright project to pursue.

Tipsy seems to enjoy it greatly as well, she’s been reading it nonstop since she got access apparently. I think part of that is owed to her affinity for gossip, but at least she’s reading it instead of just searching for the parts about her in particular (which she might also be doing, admittedly). I feel like I should clarify that I’m not actually upset when people do that, it just amuses me a bit.

Aside from this, I should mention something I’ve forgotten so far this week. At some point within the last few days, the ability to comment on a few Homestuck videos was removed. The last three flashes of the comic, called Collide, Act 7, and Credits, are all hosted on Youtube and up to this point, people were allowed to comment on them as normal. This ability being taken away is interesting; there is no obvious reason for it, but it comes in conjunction with another event that has definitely sparked some interest, involving the forums.

The forums have been unavailable for a long time now, and trying to access them brought you to a generic “the forums are down” page. This was recently changed for some reason, so that you are now redirected to http://mspaforums.com/<. However, that address only brings you to the first page of Homestuck right now. Every single page is there, except the images in each comic are broken. Certain flash pages are also broken, although I’ve haven’t looked deeply enough to find if there are any patterns to this. Makin says that, “it's just the mspaforums DNS record pointing to the MSPA server. Not really a reupload.”

More important than the what is the why, as they say. As it is, no one is exactly sure why this has been done, although Makin speculates that it’s because the forums are coming back. Even further, it may be that Viz is spearheading the effort to bring them back—this would certainly make sense, because having a native place within the community to discuss the works is undeniably beneficial to having people remain loyal fans. Bringing back the forums would fulfill the hopes of many, although one must ask what they’ll look like if Viz is in fact responsible for such a thing. As it is, though, this all remains simple speculation.

One response I just got about the journal is from one of the nu-altgen people, named Smolmuffin. They were one of the people who decided to leave after I and the other mods decided to shake up altgen and return it to its old ways. They now maintain a server where a number of altgen regulars went, numbering nearly 200 and with an active base of about 40 or 50 people apparently. I’m surprised to hear this, but I’m pleased that a lot of the people involved in nu-altgen were able to stick with each other.

Smolmuffin claims not to have any hard feelings on the matter, which I’m definitely happy to hear. They haven’t left the server completely but claim they’ll probably never be active here again, which would make sense. I’m as concerned as I usually am when it comes to matters of people leaving, especially in contexts where they feel ousted somehow or that they no longer belong. For all of that, now that I’ve heard the outcome to our thoroughly overturning altgen I think that the net result has been positive.

Nothing more for today.

---

16^th of February 2018

Today was exhausting. Makin officially announced the journal with a global ping, which set off an incredible rush. The vast majority of my day was spent fixing mistakes and correcting things and especially anonymizing people. I completely scrubbed all instances of no less than four peoples‘ names, which was extremely disappointing to do (not to mention exhausting), but I said I wanted to avoid grossly offending people with this document. Even if it sucks to do so, if I can accomplish it without compromising the integrity of this document then I want to do my best to reach a compromise. In this, I think I succeeded well enough today.

Looking back on all of my older writing, especially from before I decided to tell other people about this document in the first place, there is a clear difference in writing quality as time goes by. The first fifty pages or so are all very stilted and have this decidedly brutish or mean way of speaking. I guess I wasn’t that interested in the diplomatic ramifications of my writing, which is only natural considering I meant it to never be seen by other people. However, I think it’s safe to say that the gradual progression this document has gone through over the last several months has been nothing short of substantial—it’s hard to believe how far it’s come since I started in July.

The downside to all this is that I’m very tired now. I think I’m a little burnt out on writing for now, and so I think I may take it easy for the next few days. I’ll still write, but maybe not so much as normal. It depends on what happens exactly. It’s nice to note that a lot of people have come to me and said that they’re really happy this document is being written, and that they find it fascinating. This is extremely heartening to hear! I wasn’t expecting much of any kind of response, honestly. Knowing that people actively enjoy this document is very nice.

Of course, there are people who have been less than pleased about it. MrCheeze in particular spent a hefty portion of the day talking about their involvement, and after it all I’ve decided to stop writing about them. This is the last time they will ever be mentioned, barring something incredibly important happening that concerns them. Similarly, other people who were upset at their inclusion asked me to scrub their involvement, and after serious deliberation I acquiesced in various forms. Outside of those who were personally involved, there have been a handful of people who mentioned that they dislike this document or that it is poorly written.

It shouldn’t really bother me in light of all the people who have said they do enjoy it, but the negative opinions have a way of sticking out. I’ve heard of this before in other people who make content and distribute it, but it’s another to experience for yourself. I’m not allowing it to discourage me really, but I’m still vaguely put off by such responses.

Interestingly, after Makin pinged everyone about the journal we had some people come through afterwards and start talking about it. These are the people who called the endeavor fascinating, and it was quite refreshing speaking with them. One person in particular, Crystal, described something that made it feel extremely surreal to me. They were notified in an indirect way of the journal and then came in to talk about it, while Makin and I were talking with each other. “it's kinda strange reading the journal and then seeing you two interact". This seems pretty innocuous on the surface, but it was weirdly jarring to me. It wasn’t unpleasant or anything, it was just kind of startling—to people reading this document from the outside, we must sound like storybook characters instead of real people. I think it’s kind of hilarious honestly.

This all having been said, today with the server I’ve come to some realizations that I think are important. In light of Smolmuffin reaching out yesterday, Makin enquired more about the altgen disturbances I initiated at the end of December. He subsequently went about attempting to get back the people who had left, citing their natural activity as being important and jokingly threatening to demod me for losing those people. I largely ignored his bullshit for today.

Despite his jokes I did end up thinking about my overall demeanor lately though. I’m sure I’ve come to this conclusion before, but I’ve been going really hard on the idea that I need to be some sort of Protector for the server, which is not realistic or even necessary honestly. I’m still perfectly willing and happy to help other people but I’ve been going too far with involving myself and protesting things too fiercely. Starting today I think I’m going to try and relax a little bit more and play the part of the observer more than interfering. Trying too hard will just lead to upset if I’m not careful.

In part with staying less serious, I decided to let loose and have some fun with altgen. People know to expect something egregious when I show up in there, and not wanting to disappoint I let loose the floodgates shortly after arriving. Someone, Zoey I believe, referenced the "misguided" meme, so I simply started spamming "MISGUIDED" with the text-to-speech function, over and over again. This is usually enough to get people on board, and for a solid three minutes the chat was filled with nothing but the chaotic roar of MISGUIDED being shouted into the void by multiple people at once. It is always glorious to watch altgen spam for a little bit, it’s like a waterfall of shit. I couldn’t help but laugh at it; as much shit as I give them, I love those guys.

I’m excited to be able to keep writing this document for people, and I can’t wait to see if more people are willing to pop in and talk about it. I’m just glad it’s being seen and people enjoy it at all. It’s honestly launched its own set of memes in a way, with the title of this document being referenced in the event that so many people begin talking at once (among other such things). I’m sure the novelty of it will wear off, but for now I’m enjoying the attention and generation of energy associated with it all. Hopefully that energy and interest continues for a while, or catches on somehow (without causing any problems, of course).

Nothing more for today.

---

17^th of February 2018

It’s been a variously frustrating and interesting day. Makin was not pleased by my decision to continue editing information as I see fit, seeing it as capitulation and being taken advantage of by others. I’m not sure to what extent this was a joke and how much of it was serious, but regardless of which it truly was, it was genuinely agitating. My tolerance for his attitude is at an all time low, it seems. Yet, it doesn’t feel as if I’m growing that upset over it; it feels more like a muted acceptance than anything else. Perhaps I’ve finally spent enough time around him that I’m beginning to adjust appropriately (I’ve said this before and it’s never quite been true—I do not have high hopes that it’s any different this time). I don’t necessarily feel like harping on the matter for tonight as it is, no shortage of entries have already been dedicated to how I feel about his general behavior.

Instead, I’d like to describe an action he took that was fairly entertaining, if predictably ill-advised. I described that our band of people has been playing the SCP: Secret Laboratory game together for a bit now, and it’s been a fairly consistent experience for us as a group. I don’t have hard statistics obviously, but there’s a good number of people—perhaps around ten on average—who play the game regularly, and positive experiences manage to be had by all even though the game is really, really primitive and unpolished at this point. So far as I could tell for the recent past, the SCP game has been in a consistently good spot in terms of entertainment value for us.

I’m sure that there has been some gradual decrease in the number of people playing regularly, which is natural for both games that are not finished and indeed video games in general. In keeping with Makin’s habit of seeking more activity, he began considering ways to increase involvement of people with his SCP server. At this point I wasn’t paying very close attention, and I’m not sure what other options he may have considered. The end point of his deliberations was the idea of posting the IP address of the server publically on 4chan, in its video game board /v/.

I’m sure those familiar with 4chan or even just my previous writings on the website can understand the implications of this. "Surely not even Makin would do such a thing," some might say, to which I can assure you that he did in fact do such a thing. I’m not exactly sure what possessed him to think that this was a good idea, but whatever particular thoughts may have been running through his mind it culminated in exactly what one might expect. It did not take long for things to get decidedly unconventional for our standards.

It felt fairly innocuous at first, as there was no real sudden shift or flood that tipped us off that something was happening. I started to recognize less people playing the game, which was perfectly fine of course. Things eventually began to show through the cracks: a sharp divide appeared between people who were earnestly trying to play the game (many of who were actually quite decent at it) and those who were clearly cashing in on the server for memes. Decidedly stupid things started to happen more frequently, such as people purposefully sabotaging their teammates efforts for no apparent reason. The moment I consciously recognized that things had gone off the rails was when a random player got on the intercom system in-game and broadcast themselves server-wide, saying in the highest-pitched and silliest voice possible: "I hate niggers."

With all semblance of control lost, a number of players from the HSD left or were disconnected due to poor connection or coding—regardless of why, most of our people ended up leaving. By then, people from /v/ were basically lined up to get into the server, which meant that our spots were taken as soon as we left, whether by accident or on purpose. This led to Makin increasing the player capacity, and yet despite this we STILL couldn’t get in. It was at this point that it dawned on Makin what kind of beast he had invited into our collective home.

This is not to say that it was all terrible, necessarily. After I left, there were apparently encounters with an entertaining individual named Sarge⁷²—the details of these encounters are not known to me, but it was positive enough that Makin and others had attempted inviting Sarge to the HSD, a move I found bold but interesting. Sarge either didn’t understand or didn’t care to follow this request, and did not show up here afterwards.

Unfortunately, SCP underwent an update that seems to have broken the game such that Makin can’t set up another server, so it’s effectively a dead game for now. There were a number of us looking forward to playing again (not that we could have joined with all of the /v/ users trying to get in anyway), but it looks like we’ll have to wait some time before that happens.

More directly related to the HSD, people have been variously discussing this journal post-release in a way that is beginning to weird me out a little bit. I mentioned that I want to relax and not be such a tightass when it comes to monitoring the HSD, and the same would ostensibly be true about this document; I gain nothing by being too tight-fisted in the way I handle people, and I would like to better be able to go with the flow of things--not just regarding my moderation, but with server wide or even fandom wide events. I’ve been catching myself growing to be too invested in things that happen here or elsewhere in the Homestuck fandom (falling prey to the trap of being too harsh or judgmental about all manner of things involved with the server). If nothing else I could stand to be a little less rigid in how I interpret and respond to such things. Some more soul-searching is apparently necessary here.

As it is, it seems the conversation centering around this work cycles between sincerity and the deepest layers of meta-jokes I’ve seen in a long time. I’ve been approached by random people now who sincerely ask to be included in the journal, despite my never having talked to them extensively before. Rar asked a rather amusing question in regards to all this: "is tonights entry gonna be about how people are becoming self aware about the journal and changing their behavior in order to become more noteworthy to be included?" Rest assured that the answer is yes.

I’m perplexed by these requests, not because they’re confusing but because they’re somewhat presumptuous. It’s indicative of an attitude that I don’t appreciate with regards to this document: people seeking attention and being overly invested in their public image. Of course, not everyone actually wants to be included—there was a hefty amount of joking alongside the odd comment that was sincere, but it was still troublesome to me nonetheless. I think that it may be prudent to make a general disclaimer or announcement about this and nip the behavior in the bud, if possible. Or, it is possible that the behavior will naturally diminish as time goes by, and no further action would be necessary. I hope for this outcome, because the alternative is going to be repeated instances of my explaining the nature of the document and steadily growing more upset at the misunderstandings involved.

There have definitely been some discussions about the effect that this document is having on everyone, which is extremely irksome to me. The fact that my writing this can lead to people altering their behavior is possibly one of the most sobering or even upsetting things I can think of regarding this whole process. I don’t want to adversely affect the culture here in any way, and it seems my writing may do that if I’m not careful.

Nothing more for today.

---

18^th of February 2018

Today featured a rather heartfelt discussion: at one point, myself and several others got onto the topic of how they decided on their handles. I‘ve elaborated on the nature of my own handle in the foreword. For some, deciding their name was a relatively simple matter: Griever took their name from the game Final Fantasy VIII, and Tipsy’s name is mostly from Homestuck itself. Some are secretive about the origin of their names, or previous handles they might have used, Carlarc being one such person. Mines‘ name was a spur of the moment decision based on the unavailability of their preferred name.

This conversation prompted a deeper discussion about the nature of our internet usage, and how we came to be here. My own history has been laid out somewhat, and it is interesting to examine in retrospect the path my life has taken to bring me to the here and now. There are many things that might have happened where I would not have ended up in the HSD. Considering how many of us are here, it’s a little humbling to think about how their lives must have gone to bring them here as well.

More than that, it’s nice to think of how strong we are as a community, comparatively speaking. I think about this often, although I tend not to bring it up because it usually doesn’t fit with the current mood: what is it that drives us to interact with each other so frequently and heavily? There are many communities for projects or topics that are still ongoing, and yet it can be hard to find communities that thrive on those ideas. For us, our source material is all but dead—despite this, we find ourselves enmeshed with our cohorts in a profound and sometimes intimate manner. Why is this exactly?

I have no real answers to this question, but it’s something that sticks out in my mind. Perhaps I’m feeling too melancholic or sentimental tonight, but I feel heavily preoccupied with the idea of my friends here. In fact, my calling them "friends“ is something that I perhaps take for granted; when I get in these moods, I also begin to wonder how everyone here feels about me ⁷³, and how they feel about our community. I wonder if everyone else feels as strongly as I do about it.

I don’t want to speak for them, but I feel more than willing to speak for myself: I care more than I could effectively express about this place, and especially the people here. Every single person that I cross paths with here and converse with has a special place in my heart, and I mean it with complete sincerity that the loss of any of them would be greatly upsetting to me. I feel almost stricken with grief at the idea of any of our cabal going missing, or them feeling ousted!

We are physical strangers to each other, with most of us knowing nothing about how others look. We live in relative isolation from each other, hundreds to thousands of miles away from the nearest person in our group. Despite these facts, we have come together autonomously to associate over this thing that we all commonly enjoy, and have found a particular camaraderie that astounds me in its depth. Tipsy had some interesting words on the subject:

the homestuck community is somethin else entirely / there is just / this kinship between us / that is much deeper than the superficial crap of the other communities i know ... by all purposes, this place should be dead / but look at it / we are the community that grew to be so angry at our webcomic we forged an unbreakable union ⁷⁴

While this last point of hers was at least partially a joke, something about it strikes me. I value this place above most other things, and the people in it bring me immense joy every day. There is nothing else quite like it in my life, and I feel compelled to protect it. Time inexorably marches forward, and it is unavoidable that one day we will stop talking with each other for whatever reason. For now, however, I feel bound to them. They are my friends, and I know that I would do all in my power to help or to celebrate them in whatever way I can!

I shouldn’t muse on this too long; my more forlorn moods provoke really embarrassing thoughts, at least in retrospect. Instead, I’ll proceed to mention a couple of things we discussed today. It will be of no surprise to anyone familiar with this document that we discussed Dragon Ball again today. Most of the time this consists of Makin yelling at us to go to #eastern-media, and we will variously ignore him or acquiesce as needed. Many points of our discussions end up recycled, or will change depending on the latest episode to come out. Today, however, we went a step further in our conversation.

Often enough we will talk about the key points of the show that are of interest to us. Today, the main idea we debated was the quality of the animation. Usually we’re content to discuss this without too many examples, but after some disagreement between myself and Tipsy, we finally decided to take to a shared viewing platform and watch some of the key points of the show together and discuss them in real time. This was a big step for us: we’ve often talked about doing such a thing, but never put it into practice before.

For the HSD, the main Dragon Ball coterie—if I had to put names to it—would be myself, Tipsy, Griever, and Putnam. Many others will engage in the conversations as well, but very consistently it ends up being us who talk about it publicly. In keeping with this, we four were the ones who went to view the footage together and discuss it. It was honestly an invigorating experience—not unlike larger community streams, there was a sort of energy to us associating with each other over a common topic. It was easier to joke and enjoy ourselves in this way.

After we finished, we decided that we want to do this again, and soon. I’ve invited as many people who are interested to join us tomorrow and watch more Dragon Ball: Revlar, Cait, Roots, and Barry have all expressed interest as well, and maybe this will be the start of the viewing marathon that I’ve been describing for a while. The idea as it is, is simply to view important parts of the overall show and analyze it visually, which is what us four were doing tonight. Whatever happens, I and surely the others are greatly looking forward to it.

Aside from this, very late at night we began talking about video games together. This isn't a rare occurrence by any means, but I felt compelled to speak on it at least a little bit. Barry, Putnam and I all briefly discussed the Halo series, which somehow feels underrepresented in our discussions. The series has experienced an arguable decline in quality over the years, and it’s fallen somewhat out of favor—it’s hard to find people to talk with about it, certainly not in any real exploratory sense. Yet, Barry was eager enough to speak with me about it. He showed a great affinity for its lore, and I appreciated having the opportunity to mull over it with someone else for once.

Despite this great time with my friends tonight, I can feel myself becoming more and more distracted by the idea of our relationships with each other as a community. For some reason that I can’t completely decipher or shake, I feel some sort of great monachopsis. I’m not sure why my ruminations tonight have brought me to this mental state, but I hope that it’ll leave me soon. I’m sure with some rest I’ll be fine, but for now I’m stricken with this peculiar anxiety over the state of the people I’ve grown to care for deeply. I hope that nothing terrible will happen.

I should sleep. Nothing more for today.

---

19^th of February 2018

I’ve consistently forgotten to mention something that’s being actively worked on over the last few days. I don’t remember how exactly it began, but certain members of the HSD wanted to hold a writing contest. Revlar, Oda, and Spiral are all involved with it as the judges, and there has been great interesting from various people in participating, such as Toast, Makin, and Nights. This occasion reminds me of when National Novel Writing Month comes along, or NaNoWriMo: I was urged to participate in this last year, but seeing as I already write this ridiculous document I found it hard to participate (not to mention what little fictional writing I created was abysmal beyond compare).

It is self-labeled as a competition, yet I don’t see it as being much of a competition per se. It seems more to be a mutual effort between people to practice their writing more than anything else. Indeed, it says as much here: "The goal here is to practice creative writing. Don’t take the competition too seriously. Try to have fun writing. Don’t kill the judges." A proper contest or no, it’s extremely nice to see people coming together for a common interest. There is a particular enjoyment that comes from witnessing people work off of each other and continue to grow as people, or especially artists; their support for each other will lead to some interesting, perhaps great things in the future.

At one point in the day, we began talking about music. Classically I’m not very interested in music, to the point that I fully willingly refer to myself as sheltered on the topic. Given the proximity most people in our group have to music, many were very willing to engage with me on the topic—they were extremely supportive, providing links to various songs and advice on what to listen to. It was fairly fascinating seeing how each person’s tastes differ so widely from one another.

More than being simply helpful, everyone involved in the conversation saw fit to tease me about it the matter in various ways, which was honestly refreshing; there was genuine enjoyment in the process of telling people about my tastes (or lack thereof depending on who you ask) and seeing the various ways they would interact with that news. It also served as a small measure of personal validation to me as well, indicating to me the differences in my ability to handle such teasing comments before versus now. Everyday it becomes a little easier to handle the jokes that people make, and I’m happy that this place is helping me to move forward with my social awareness and understanding.

Speaking of music, however, it’s important to note at this point that Cait and Lambda have both sat me down for an ad hoc interview process concerning LOFAM’s history. It‘s different from what I was expecting, but is nonetheless interesting—they’ve spent a matter of some days treading through old LOFAM history and trying to paint as solid a history for me as they can. It will take a long time for me to understand the information they’ve provided me, but I have faith in their portrayal and explanation of things. As soon as I’m done studying their files, I will finally begin to write the LOFAM article.

As a minor note, for the journal today I was convinced to separate all of the ancillary, connected material and put the appendixes in their entirety into a separate document (which can be found by following the link attached to “Related Materials”). This accomplishes making the client on Google documents lag a little bit less, but it will also make it easier for people to find the latest entry in the journal while they’re perusing it. I’m looking into additional changes that might be introduced to make the journal more readable, but time will tell whether further modification is necessary or even advisable in certain areas. For now, I’m glad to make it more accessible through whatever means necessary.

Nothing more for today.

---

20^th of February 2018

Today I am sick with what I assume is food poisoning. I have no energy or focus to write a full length entry today, so enjoy some excerpts I asked other people to write for today. First is Putnam’s facetious yet succinct description of our Dragon Ball watching party: "Drew organized a Dragon Ball Kai watching party for the goddamn weeaboos around here. We watched the Goku vs Nappa, Goku vs Recoome, Goku vs Freeza and Tenshinhan vs cyborg Taopaipai fights. There was much commentary. I don't remember any of it." Thank you Putnam.

Next, a treat from WoC regarding the history of a fairly common meme on our server. It is far longer than Putnam’s input, so I will post the full text here unedited, enclosed in brackets. Also bear in mind that he is a decidedly more brash individual than I, so his writing style may take some off guard. Whatever you may feel about it, please enjoy.

{I have been asked -- or volunteered -- well, no, volun-told to write a few words regarding the origin and current status of one of my absolute favorite memes on the Homestuck Discord server, although I can’t really say it’s specific to that server. Buckle up, boys and boys next door, because we will be going for a regrettably brief ride into the pants of many fabulously muscular men. That’s right, I’m talking about gachi.

For future reference, the person writing this section is not Drew, but actually WoC. I’m currently the #gaming pseudo. It’s the best channel; anyone who claims otherwise has been brainwashed. I think I’ve been mentioned once or twice. Any and all description of me written by Drew is a damnable lie, and should be treated as such -- I’m not stubborn at all and I have absolutely no backbone, and I’ll fight anyone to the death about that. I’m also a performance artist gachi enthusiast. Surprisingly, as much as I love listening to grown men fuck each other to music, I’m not actually gay.

In case you don’t know exactly what gachi is, let me describe it very quickly since you can easily look it up for yourself with Google and I don’t want to waste your time. Gachimuchi, or gachi for short, is taking regular music and putting sound clips over it. The sound clips are all short little clips taken from gay porn and other homoerotic media. Really talented artists will mix them seamlessly into other music, and a lot of the time it can come as a complete surprise when a track you’re listening to turns into a bunch of gay porn noises. The clips are generally from specific actors -- usually Billy Herrington, Van Darkholme, and a couple others. Some of it’s actually extremely well done, leading me to wonder just what the hell compels someone to put that much of their time into putting gay porn clips into a Taylor Swift song (for an excellent example of what I’m talking about, look up Spank It Off on Youtube, which is Shake It Off, but homoerotic as all hell. If Youtube no longer exists by the time you are reading this journal, you are out of luck, but feel free to personally contact me for gachi tracks).

I feel it’s necessary to mention once again that none (or very few) of the gachi posters are actually gay. Seriously. Well, mostly, anyway.

What’s the appeal of it? To be honest I… I don’t know. It’s just there. Partly it’s listening to really high quality editing. Partly it’s absolutely fucking hilarious. And sometimes it actually just makes the song better by removing the shit tier lyrics. It’s kind of infective -- once you know the quotes you start listening for them and it becomes that much funnier through repeated exposure. Mostly, I think it’s funny, and that’s good enough for me.

The reason it’s relevant to the HSD is because the HSD has acquired a group of extremely enthusiastic gachi fans over the course of its general existence. I’m one of them, and I think it’d be fair to say that I bear a large part of the responsibility for the popularity and persistence of gachi on the server. It started out as one or two people (but, well, mostly me) posting gachimuchi edits every now and then. Eventually, it turned into three or four people. At the beginning, it was sort of a “gotcha!” thing -- you would ping someone with a gachi video and tell them to listen to this track, they would, and they’d be horrifically surprised by the presence of gay sex noises on the music, and we’d all laugh our heads off. Because of this, eventually people started to recognize that anything that was anywhere near a ♂ symbol was probably gachi (♂ being the symbol for male -- you get the idea) and they were prepared for it.

But, since people were prepared for it, that left pretty much nowhere to go in terms of baiting people. So we found more tracks, more clips, more gachi music, more burly men, and slowly people started actually listening to the things and enjoying them. It’s almost become a sort of contest to find new gachi edits. Nowadays people are actually listening to the thing for quality reasons more than anything else.

There’s one other side effect, though, and dear God is it a hellacious one. I can only phrase it in terms of Godwin’s law. Godwin’s law states that the longer an online argument goes, the more likely that someone or something will be compared to Hitler. I’m proposing an HSD specific version, which I will narcissistically name WoC’s law, which states that the longer any discussion about music goes on, the more likely that gachi will be posted. As soon as that first gachi is posted, though, it will be like a dam breaking. Every single god damn gachi poster on the server will become aware of the discussion and will swoop in to post their favorite edits. It happens extremely quickly -- it’s a bit like watching a lightning strike, if the lightning strike lasted for thirty minutes to an hour (if it lasts longer, call a doctor) and was composed entirely of buff men. It’s actually incredible to watch a channel completely and utterly devolve into gachi quotes, gachi remixes, and ♂ symbols.

The reason it’s worth mentioning is because gachi posting is probably one of the longest lasting memes on the server, having existed for most of its history thus far, outlasting tons of other retarded memes (We Are Number One springs immediately to mind). It’s probably going to outlast several flavors of the month, and I personally predict the practice of posting gachi in floods and torrents will last either until the server dies or a mod gets a bug up their ass and finally bans it once and for all. I think one of the art mods is close to yelling at me for posting it in #art-music a lot. I plan to claim it is homophobic to ban it, and thereby create a brand new shitstorm, hopefully allowing me and my compatriots to fill the unending void with grunts, moans, and leathermen forever. ⁷⁵ }

Many thanks are due to WoC and Putnam for their contributions. There may be more times in the future where I rely on others for input like this, it will depend on my need at the time. Nothing more for today.

---

22^nd of February 2018

Today was somewhat amusing: I’ll begin by characterizing Nights a tiny bit for background information. Nights has a tendency to adopt English phrases and words without actually learning the true meaning of them, which has historically led to a remarkable number of cases where he learns the true meaning of a word and then is promptly embarrassed by his usage of it. For whatever reason, this effect seems to surround itself around pretty explicit, sexually charged terminology on a regular basis.

A really good example of this behavior is with the phrase "bust a nut", which any American sophomore would be able to tell you means "to ejaculate". Nights had been using this phrase liberally for a period of some months to say that he had been working very hard: "id come home from a long day at school and go MAN I BUSTED A NUT". Then on one fateful day he serendipitously learned its true definition, and great mortification (for him) and hilarity (for everyone else) ensued.

A similar such incident occurred today. "Shag" is very common slang in British English which means "to have sex with". Nights has been using this word for a very long time, usually in contexts that make absolutely no sense, yet no one has really commented on it or questioned it before—these Nightisms are prevalent enough that people are simply used to them at this point. Somehow, it was revealed today that Nights believed shag meant "to stab", sort of like the word "shank". When people learned of this disparity, the chat erupted into nothing short of rib-tickled pandemonium.

As soon as people understood what Nights had actually been trying to say the entire time, it was like a million little jokes had suddenly clicked into place. The sudden rush of understanding yielded this incredible burst: people couldn’t stop laughing for several minutes, a period of time extended considerably by people dragging up old instances of the word being employed incorrectly.

It was honestly an amazing event; poor Nights of course got made fun of to no end, but I would be surprised if he took it to heart. I think his misunderstandings are as much of a joke to him as they are to the rest of us. I have to wonder how it is he even comes across these phrases, as far as I can tell he’s the only one who has ever used them so commonly. However they may come to be, Nights‘ misuses of various words are extremely amusing; I’m sure after this incident some will be keeping an eye out for more.

Less pleasantly, the only other noteworthy event of today has been a frustrating series of conversations in mspa-lit. The initial confrontation I can remember was prompted by an errant comment from WoC regarding long-distance relationships. He shares a tendency with Makin and some others to turn his opinions into more authoritative statements—I’ve always considered this a repugnant conversational tactic and actively discourage the use of such forms of rhetoric (I’ve always liked to say that an argument won is pointless if the premise is invalid). I and Putnam both voiced this complaint with what he was saying, and I suppose we could have expressed ourselves in a better way because it ended up launching some pretty undesirable discourse for the rest of the night.

The initial argument, I believe, started sometime before midnight EST. It is now 2:15 AM EST, and the conversation has gone through a series of topic changes that have all been equally socially charged. It has been a thoroughly exhausting process getting through them, and I think in the end, Barry described it succinctly as a battle between opposing ideals. This is typically not a good point for conversation to get to, because it’s often associated with a complete breakdown in formalities, and outward hostility.

On the other hand, I’m pleased to admit that this has largely not been the case so far tonight. While the conversational material has been nothing short of utterly controversial, everyone involved has been more or less respectful of each other. There are definite disconnects: predictably, people are unable to agree on the topic and it doesn’t seem likely that’ll change anytime soon. Despite this, no one has resorted to utter impishness or acted in a way that prompted my calling them out for being a despicable asshole. With this in mind, I would say that the conversation has gone far better than I expected.

This is something that I really appreciate about the HSD lately, or at least mspa-lit. There’s been a noticeable increase in the quality of discourse: long ago I knew it to devolve into shit-flinging, and nothing of substance would be achieved, if not outright harm. Nowadays, even if no one is able to agree there is still a mutual respect of each other's positions, and that warms my heart to see. I fear that some may have been made too uncomfortable by the exchange, but hopefully some common ground was reached and people understand each other a little better than before they started to speak with each other. If this continues long enough, maybe compromise will begin to happen.

Finally, Cait has finally gotten around to providing me with a description of LOFAM. She did this in conjunction with Lambda, and eventually Makin (who contributed heavily in his own way, naturally) .The contents of this discussion will be transferred tomorrow to appendix C, under "LOFAM History and Discussion". At some point soon I’ll begin writing about it in earnest.

Nothing more for today.

---

23^rd of February 2018

Today was an enormous disappointment, so much so that I felt it necessary to put off writing about until the next day so that I would have enough time to reflect on it and decide what I want to say. What should have been a relatively brief misunderstanding escalated into an absolute frenzy where no one seemed capable of respecting each other at even a bare minimum. I feel as if I have never seen such unbelieve amounts of public disgrace in our server, certainly not over such a minor issue.

In order to understand, it is necessary to explain a real life event in at least some detail. On the 14th of this month, there was a school shooting in Florida that became national news (for those who may be unaware or would like to know more, the event in question is being referred to as the Stoneman Douglas High School Shooting). Understandably gun control has been a hot button topic in the time since, and a litany of people have been more outspoken on the topic than usual. Among these individuals is Cohen himself.

Cohen is already pretty verbal regarding his position on various topics. He has referred to his writing being a "weapon" that he uses to fight for his beliefs with, and if I’m not mistaken he considers Hiveswap to be an important vehicle for expressing his thoughts on various elements of the status quo. Unsurprisingly, in the wake of the shooting he’s been putting out statements on the topic of gun control far more than usual. This pattern has been fine for the last week or so.

Today, however, Cohen released another such statement on Twitter and made a reference to Joey in it. This comment seemed innocuous enough to me, and I gave it little thought more than I would normally. Some, including Makin, saw it as capitalizing on a tragedy in order to promote Hiveswap. Those who held this opinion immediately began condemning the tweet. This promptly ignited a set of discourse that was nothing short of all out war.

The unpleasant details are already fading from my mind, but I’ll try to keep my deliberations as accurate as possible still. Statements were lobbied against Cohen that categorized the tweet as shameless advertising, piggybacking on a political topic to secure attention. After initial pushback, Makin admittedly withdrew his opinion or at the very least scaled down how severely he viewed the tweet, although those who agreed with him were less willing to do so. Minish and Putnam began raging at each other in a way that was nothing less than outright hostility.

This has been exacerbated in no small part by history; Minish tends to agree with Makin’s opinions on various matters, or even go further than Makin in whatever line of thought is involved. This irks Putnam to no end, and in such situations he will go on the offensive and accuse Minish of being a sycophant. Minish becomes flustered by this and starts to openly insult Putnam, which leads to shitflinging each other and only serves to drive the conversation into the ground, effectively destroying any potential it might have. This outcome is awful without exception.

Such is how it turned out today. Putnam called Minish a cock-sucker and Minish immediately flew off the handle. Other people got involved, including Tensei (who to his credit was only expressing how he felt without resorting to petty insults), and the situation only worsened as time went by. It is truly one of the most disappointing conversations that I have ever witnessed in my entire time here.

This entire debacle is in such a strange juxtaposition to the conversation between myself, Putnam, and WoC the other night. That entire ordeal was resolved in a fairly respectable manner, but today was nothing less than utter failure of our group. I don’t know how to feel about it—most of all I feel a rather pronounced shame that we were at each others’ throats so much. It seemed no one was above fighting, even myself (I threw in some extremely heated remarks at Makin, who himself was implying some pretty nasty things about Putnam). It was just an all around shitty ordeal, and I think that no one who participated felt good about it.

That having been said, afterwards I think people generally took a moment to themselves and reflected on it. Putnam and Minish went to reconcile their differences, or at the very least try to understand why each other behaves the way they do. I tried to arbitrate their discussion but got distracted (they seemed like they were progressing well enough as it was); Makin and I began talking about Star Trek afterwards, more amicably than less. I think that by that point we both realized we had been behaving inappropriately, and wanted to move on.

In a way, perhaps this argument was a good thing. Things have been really chummy lately, which I appreciate, but it’s not sustainable. It may be that this ordeal served to remind us that we have our differences, and that we must seek understanding of each other even if everything seems fine in the moment. In the end, all of this may have reinforced our appreciation for each other. Makin might have been joking, but he remarked near the end: "this only made us stronger". The more I think about it, the more I believe this has some truth to it.

Nothing more for today.

-

24^th of February 2018

Things do appear to be calm after yesterday, and things have been nothing if not pleasant today. Mspa lit has resumed its more typical pace, so I decided to venture out into the other channels and observe what’s been going on. Altgen thus became my stop of choice, especially after being alerted to some fuckery that was predictably taking place there.

Altgen has no real stability to it, which means that taking breaks from watching it often leads to a completely different landscape when one manages to come back. There are as many different attitudes regarding its use as there are people using it, and no real consistency exists between any of them. Rangling altgen regulars is not unlike herding cats, although it can be much greater or much worse than herding cats must be depending on how you handle it. For me, it’s a fairly pleasant task because I don’t feel the need to take it that seriously.

My arrival in altgen is often the herald of great tumult and chaos to follow. This can take various forms, some far more destructive than others, but I try not to abuse certain methods if I can avoid it. As a general rule, threatening to ban or otherwise harass specific users for superficial reasons is my staple while there. The next step up is freezing the channel, which is usually enough to whip people up into a frenzy after the fact (greatly amusing). For maximum enjoyment, completely disappearing the entire channel is usually the farthest you can go, although this is typically the nuclear option. It’s inadvisable to go through with this because then the altgen regulars are encouraged to disperse into other channels, which always leads to problems.

For this reason, freezing the channel is typically my mainstay when I want to engender more excitement than simply fucking with people one on one. It’s tempered somewhat by the fact that I actually use the function appropriately from time to time. Today proved to be just such a time: often enough altgen exceeds its bounds or needs to be reminded of the few conventions we have in place there. It’s honestly incredible how often or how severely they ignore the rules in place, and to this end a good za warudo is enough to get their attention and get them to cut it out.

Usually one freeze suffices to get the message across, but today I ended up using the ability no less than FOUR TIMES. This is completely unprecedented, and honestly I may have been a bit too heavy handed in its use—I don’t plan on doing this again, but it was within the bounds of humor that I would expect regarding altgen. I’ve done far worse things in my time here, to be sure. By the end of the day, I feel as if altgen was squared away once more with no one really worse off for it: a good time was had by all.

As for the mspa-lit pocket of our community, today was nice in that it was Putnam’s birthday today. I wasn’t originally going to write about this, but he jokingly gave me shit about it when I asked what I should write about today ("it was my birthday you FUCKER"), and some derivative elements can be explained through this event anyhow.

Putnam is one of the people in this server who never seem to change their appearance, at least not for long. Where many can be found to change their name or their avatar on the fly, Putnam is remarkably consistent and is thus easily recognizable. His profile picture is a fairly amusing crop from a picture known as the "Wizard of Creation". This picture has actually been featured in Homestuck proper, so it functions well as Putnam’s profile picture in conjunction with his pronounced fondness for all manner of magic and wizard art.

In celebration of Putnam’s birthday, Tipsy traced over the titular wizard for him:

A fairly accurate and amusing rendition, all things considered. To make things even better, Nights contributed with a wizard in his own distinct style:

simply accompanied by the affectionate words "happy birthday you bitch". This sort of contribution is not unique, but is always welcome and never fails to make someone’s day when exhibited. After the unmitigated horseshit of yesterday, it is exceptionally heartwarming to see such works and association with each other happening in the HSD—for me it reinvigorates the idea that we all enjoy each other and are happy to be together.

On a more self-aggrandizing note, I would like to comment on the appearance of somebody I consider very important: my brother made an appearance in the server today in an effort to play SCP with everyone. My sister, who goes by the handle of Deroman64 (or more simply Dero), has been the perpetrator of some incredibly bizarre content in the past—such as The Enchilada Complex—which I saw fit to distribute on the HSD. As a result, they have a bit of a reputation without even typically setting foot in the place.

Dero is typically scarce in large servers, but whenever they do appear it becomes something of an event. Their personality is somewhat bewildering, which contributes heavily to the many projects or memes they make—fond of jokes, Dero will often leap for the opportunity to make a joke and has relatively few boundaries on what they will do to make something funny. I’ve tried a few times, to no avail, to try and get them to hang around on the HSD more often because I feel it would liven the place up considerably. As it is, I’m content with getting them to come by just to say hi every once in a while and participate when the group is doing something fun.

Such is as it was today; we all got on to play SCP as usual, utilizing the in-server voicechat designated for gaming. There were a considerable number of people playing, at one point over ten, and everyone had a great time together. It was an interesting feeling having my brother along for the ride, but all things considered I think it was a really positive event for all involved. It was some much needed relief after yesterday’s intense spat.

My appreciation for everyone here has deepened considerably after the event in question; it takes a special kind of community to be able to recover from intense and overly aggressive fighting and resume friendliness with each other the next day. Despite our hardships and the occasional furor—or perhaps because of them—we all seem to care greatly for each other. I hate to imagine that some of us have hard feelings still, although I’m sure such is the case, but it is not enough to force us apart from each other. It reminds me of why I‘m glad that I have this place to look forward to each day.

Nothing more for today.

-

25^th of February 2018

Not a lot to speak of today. I mentioned previously that there was a writing contest being held; it seems as if the entries for the first contest have all been submitted (which can be found here, for those interested). It’s been said that no one has been decided the victor yet, and with a fairly diverse array of writers involved it’s anyone’s guess who might win. I didn’t participate myself, but I’m actually curious to see who is deemed most worthwhile.

There was one set of events today that far outshadowed the rest: at one point, there was a light bout of argumentation with Makin as usual, and Putnam was describing a condition of his remaining in the server. The exact topic concerned editing screenshots in an attempt to discredit an opponent. Putnam’s comment, reasonably, was: "if makin starts doing that i'm actually leaving the server but i trust him not to somehow". I would have left this alone but WoC somehow siezed upon it and turned it into a veritable monster of a joke.

The exact process was simple: WoC literally took a screenshot of this quote and slapped it onto a variety of screenshots and low quality pictures. Yet, despite this mundane concept, it actually succeeded in being pretty funny. For what I predict to be a one-off of comedy in our group, WoC managed to get some astounding mileage out of the forced meme. I imagine he’ll try to trot it out at various times in the future if he thinks he can get away with it.

Nothing more for today.

-

26^th of February 2018

Today was pleasant and relaxed. I set a plan into motion earlier this month that finally came to fruition: Sozzay is a fairly well-known artist in our community, with her style being developed and very pleasant to consider. She actually has, completely unbidden by us, made a set of pictures depicting the entire mod team circa the beginning of July last year as maids, as one might find in a maid cafe. This was delightful for many of us, although some—such as WoC—were less pleased. The pictures follow:

Left to right: Nights, Makin, Drew Linky, Sea Hitler, LRS

Ngame (leftmost two), Cerulean, Wheals, Difarem

LLF, WoC, Tori, Toast

Ost, Anervaria, Tensei, Medixum, Ifnar

Seeing these images again makes me nostalgic for a different time, honestly. Receiving images like this is always a treat, especially when the person responsible for it is so ridiculously talented as Sozzay is.

With this in mind, I decided to commission Sozzay again at the beginning of this month. The changes in the modteam necessitate the loss of people that I still consider friends, people who put hard work into their respective channels. Considering these things, I wanted to pay Sozzay to make another picture as a send off to those who were demodded; a token of appreciation for the efforts they went to in order to make the HSD a better place. This culminated in the following picture:

LRS, Anervaria, Medixum, Tori, and Ost

It is wonderful to me how much one person may characterize us based on our profile pictures and speech patterns alone. Sozzay’s artwork is always a treat, and I hope that those this piece is for may enjoy it as well. They were a part of the fabric of this place and deserve to be remembered as such.

This was honestly good timing: the commission comes just in time for the server’s anniversary, which is tomorrow. Makin has announced some plans, which I will elaborate on tomorrow, but I’ll be posting this picture publicly so that others may see. It is sure to be a nice event, although it’s difficult to say what kind of shenanigans may be involved as of yet. I look forward to it.

As for the state of the server today, I have deepened my efforts to mess with altgen and shake things up there. My arrival there elicits expletives from those who know what my coming means, and it makes me laugh to consider how much I can do to mess with them. There isn’t much in the way of specifics to tell here, other than that I have started to really appreciate my ability to unceremoniously ruin altgen at times for people. It is a somewhat nuanced affair to completely derail and then incapacitate a channel that is known for being all but unassailable, but goodness do I love it.

Nothing more for today.

-

27^th of February 2018 – The Second Anniversary

Many years ago, I didn’t feel comfortable speaking with much of anyone. People I could consider my friends were far and few between, and the actual qualities of what made a "good friend" were largely lost on me. I was content in my solitude, because I felt I understood myself well enough that I didn’t need anyone else to associate with or talk to. In the midst of the social doldrum it’s easy to convince yourself that things are fine as they are, and that no change is needed.

Then I started to speak with others online, and my perception shifted. There was no longer only myself, and the tiny world I had constructed for myself was swiftly torn asunder in order to make way for one that was much, much larger. I learned what it meant to listen to other people and to understand how they feel, and everyone I talked to—no matter how unpleasant at the time—helped to reinforce the concept of how utterly different everyone can be from one another, how valuable it is it to understand what a person feels and believes, and why.

So many years later, in the present day, I’m still learning. No matter how much I learn or see, there is always something different to see and consider. My difficulties with understanding people are far from over, but I feel at this point that I’ve gained an appreciation for it at least. There is such a compelling and interesting array of people that I’m privileged to speak with everyday; I can’t even remember what it was like to not have them there anymore. The thought of losing everything I’ve become familiar with is so terrifying that it’s nauseating. At this point there are few things in my life that I prize as highly as the friends I’ve made in the HSD.

Today is the second anniversary of the server’s existence. I still remember last year’s anniversary somewhat, where Daddy was temporarily allowed back and an old channel called #grist-requests was reinstated for the day. It was quite the celebration, and I was still relatively unfamiliar with everything and everyone. I was simply glad to be a part of it all, and that I was sharing my time with such fun and engaging people. Even then I cared about them all, and wanted to keep them safe.

Now an entire year later, the overall idea has not changed. I still care about everyone, far more than I did before. The way I handle things has slowly changed over time, from my being overly timid and unwilling to exert my influence to being fairly involved and dipping my fingers into perhaps too many pies. It’s easy to lose myself to the rhythm of it all, and more often lately I’ve failed to take a step back and keep an eye on the bigger picture.

Such is as it happened today. Before any of our celebration began in earnest, Minish and WoC had a small spat in mspa-lit: Minish was sharing screenshots of this port of Chrono Trigger being released on Steam, which he was unutterably pissed about because it was a lazy port of the iOS version apparently. This ended up interrupting a conversation that WoC was having with a couple others, and understandably he told Minish to take his rabble-rousing to #gaming, if not in quite so many words. Minish responded to this flippantly, saying: "this is actually important tho". WoC was offended at the implication that #gaming is not important, and Minish grew offended at the insinuation that such is what he meant.

If this sounds asinine to you, don’t worry: it is. I found myself annoyed by this spat in record time and took it upon myself to intervene somehow. I tried my best to get WoC or Minish to stop and listen to what I had to say, but in the end it proved futile and I had to ban Minish for the evening. I then yelled at WoC and described him in some pretty choice words that were more inflammatory than they should have been.

It’s always a sad day when I lose my head and start responding out of proportion with people. I’m still reflecting on the matter and trying to determine exactly what happened, but the overall point is that I fucked up and acted out of line with my friends. I’d go on at length about why, but this time I feel like it would be a bit of a distraction from the main idea, which is that I need to work on how I talk with people. Especially lately, I feel like I’ve been way too involved, to the point that I may be smothering things.

It may be time to take that step back I’ve mentioned; Makin has joked recently—or not joked, rather—about previous moderators who all developed this sort of aversion to his way of doing things and tried too hard, where the end result was each person who went down that path eventually went crazy or left over it. I don’t want to end up in that position, it feels like I’d be fulfilling some sort of perverse prophecy if the same thing happened to me as well. More generally though, I just don’t feel like jeopardizing my position here. I like being able to help and I can’t do that if I’m locked in some sort of idiotic feud, or especially demodded. Better to relax and pick my battles if I can.

Speaking serverwide, with it being the anniversary naturally we had a stream for the occasion. The movies we ended up watching today were Armageddon and Barnyard. Armageddon is important to us for reasons related to Homestuck, where the movie’s plot is mirrored heavily and lots of in-jokes or references are utilized. Indeed, Homestuck references or parodies many such movies; I’m actually surprised we hadn’t watched this one already, but nonetheless it was good to cross off our list.

Barnyard was more related to the HSD itself: I’ve mentioned previously the character Biggie Cheese, and how there was a disgruntled user that got banned and would return to spam "THE PHYSICAL RETURN OF CHRIST" with a picture of the aforementioned rat. Until now, we’ve never bothered to actually view the source material, and the decision to do so went about as gloriously as I might have expected: when the scene with Biggie Cheese began, the stream turned into nothing short of a complete madhouse. It would honestly be frightening if it weren’t so hilarious and idiotic, everyone was shouting and spamming the chat rapidly, no one could get a word in edgewise over the fierce lamentations for our glorious savior and holy figure. In all, it was a pretty good stream.

Despite my imminent enjoyment of this part of the day, I feel pretty worn out and disappointed in myself over the WoC/Minish debacle. Realistically I recognize that I can’t handle everything well, but it’s still upsetting to know when I’ve messed up stuff. Even if it weren’t for that, I feel a pecular kind of melancholy with today. I believe I’m thinking too much about the eventual end of this place, which is a thought that always manages to make me a little more agitated.

An opposing side to this, perhaps, is a statement Makin made in #announcements earlier today. It was silly, but he said: "this is only the second anniversary of many, MANY to come." I’m heartened by the idea that this place may be around for a while yet, and especially in the meantime I see no immediate reasons it should begin to decline. I greatly appreciate all the people I associate with here, and all I can really ask for is to keep talking with them for as long as life will permit. They’ve become a family for me in their own way, and I hope that we will continue to grow and support each other as time passes by.

Nothing more for today.

-

28^th of February 2018

I want to mention something from yesterday that I forgot to address. I’ve been going to altgen and thoroughly messing with all involved more frequently than usual. I believe this behavior is brought about by stress, but whatever the cause I’ve found myself more preoccupied with it of late. I can tell that my presence and the utter nonsense I get up to there has garnered some ire, and I’m afraid the place is becoming desensitized to my antics.

Typically I’m around for about half an hour and freely associate with anyone who seems interested; I do as I like there, mostly within reason, and people have come to associate my presence with the channel being disrupted (only now do I recognize the irony of this, given that I complain about the same with Makin’s use of mspa-lit). I typically try to keep it within tolerable bounds, but then tonight I tried to initiate a purge.

This met with only limited success. Others did join in on the endless spam and screaming, but it felt somewhat subdued compared to previous purges. There may be multiple reasons why it didn’t work out so well tonight, whether it be low number of people present at the time or fatigue, but it feels like another factor at play to remind me that I’ve been involving myself too heavily, playing too great a hand in affairs instead of merely witnessing them and nudging them along occasionally.

This combined with the incident concerning WoC and Minish yesterday has further convinced me that it’s time to lay off. In addition to not smothering people anymore, I’m going to try and step off of altgen’s toes at least just a bit. Relying on the same full-tilt methods repeatedly is a bad idea. I’ll still keep an eye on the place and try to turn it away from the practice of hugboxing, but I can do that without injecting myself so ruthlessly as I have been.

I think that my resolve to approach things in a calmer manner is for the best. I’ve been getting more hasty and judgmental than usual lately, and it’s time I took a long, hard think and got my approach back in order. I want to help people without hindering them. I guess I can’t always promise this explicit, hands-off procedure in every case, because I feel strongly about helping others—as it is though, it’ll be good to try and confine myself to the more serious occasions where my help is actually needed.

Aside from all this musing, today the event of note was this fellow in #oc-shrine who was offering to make original characters or sprites for people if they were paid. This strikes us as immediately foolish behavior—it’s a fairly low effort job, if it can even be called that, and soliciting people over it is laughable at best. As such, this practice was banned in short order. Hopefully we won’t have to see any of this nonsense again, people advertising their work unsolicited can be a blight on the place if it gets out of hand.

Nothing more for today.

---

2^nd of March 2018

Today witnessed the rehashing of an old problem a la SS13 and SCP discussion being hosted in the right or wrong places. SCP is the latest "flavor-of-the-month" game, which as the title implies means that the game is (more than likely) going to be of immense importance for the next few weeks and then interest in it will rapidly fade to the point that no one ever speaks of it again. This pattern was also true of SS13 for us, and such has happened countless times for various games in the many pockets of the internet.

Just as SCP is a flavor-of-the-month game like SS13 was, so to has SCP inherited all of the negative aspects of what that entails. Such status is usually conferred by being of interest to Makin and the broader cabal of mspa-lit regulars. When this happens, discussion can often be completely consumed by the material in question, sometimes for a matter of weeks. This is perfectly fine for all of the people who enjoy the topic, but others who are less interested will often find themselves frustrated with how the channel is being dominated by one topic for so long.

Cookiefonster is one such person who fits in this category. He has, on a few occasions now, voiced his discontent with how games like SCP clutter the channel (a sentiment he also held over SS13) alongside others like Ifnar and Gnawms. This has understandably attracted the ire of most who do enjoy the game, and it led to the predictably terrible and exhausting discourse of where SCP talk goes.

One might remember back during SS13 that this very conversation was already had, and it culminated in a couple of axioms: first, and most readily understandable, is that the topic at hand belongs in the appropriate channel. Second and more controversial was the problem that cluttering the appropriate channel is rude for its current denizens. SS13 chat was ubiquitous while it was popular, and everyone who already used #gaming was more or less weary at the idea of having to host many-hours long, all absorbed chatting for a game they weren’t interested in. For this reason, a compromise was reached and SS13 had its own channel created.

This proved to be a uniquely terrible decision, leading to WoC leaving the HSD for several months and a whole host of other problems that were utterly boring and agitating to deal with. The net result was having the SS13 channel deleted and discussion of that game merged into #gaming, which is honestly what should have happened in the first place. This did kind of bother #gaming denizens but they soon learned to cope, and SS13 talk stimulated the channel greatly for a while. It was overall a much better idea and was fairly appropriate.

Which is why this talk now seems even more laborious than it did back then. The end result of all this is clear, and not putting such actions into motion strikes me as delaying the inevitable at best, and intentionally stirring trouble at worst. Yet, people are defending the decision to keep SCP discussion in mspa-lit for the time being, for various reasons. As confusing as it is, I can understand at least one of their points: mspa-lit is widely considered Makin’s playground, and as such he’s technically allowed to do what he likes there without too much interference from others. The reaction time for these problems coming forth also doesn’t help—Mines described it succinctly: "Someone complains for months without having any real reason to but then the people who actually have good reason to be irritated start speaking up like / 2 months later", a significant lag that can rob the complaints of their weight. WoC is certainly displeased with the decision to keep the game-oriented chatting in a place other than his channel; I can tell this is going to cause problems later.

Other than the SCP talk, people are also disgruntled over the idea that mspa-lit has very inconsistent or no rules besides "listen to what makin says". I’m also not fond of this notion, because allowing him to operate with impunity is a self-reinforcing behavior. Makin will become more and more comfortable with doing as he pleases regardless of how people feel, and I fear the end result will be catastrophic for us.

Tensei is an interesting figure in all of this, where he seems to neither directly support or refute Makin’s tendencies. He seems like he more or less accepts the state of the channel, but then I’ve also seen him freely criticize Makin when he sees fit to do so. In this latest debacle, he’s mentioned that Cookie’s aimless complaints are annoying, and that if he truly wants to incite change that Cookie should speak directly to Makin since he’s the one in charge. Statements like this make me wonder what he must think about all this nonsense on a more personal level.

As for Makin himself, he was noticeably quiet about everything at the beginning. I wondered what he was doing, surmising that he was watching Star Trek (which he’s been binging lately), but it appeared he was simply waiting for the opportune moment to strike: at a key moment in the discussion, he changed the channel name to #anarchy in a font that was literally unreadable on some devices. People trying to take the conversation seriously were upset by this, although most found it unintrusive enough. Then Makin took it another step further, freezing the channel completely and renaming it to #meme-run, then mandating that the discussion could only be about the game Meme Run, which successfully threw off the entire conversation.

With this, the SCP discussion appears to be tabled. It will no doubt crop up again in later days, and I fear for what might happen when that day comes. People are weirdly resistant to the idea of moving discussion, and it bothers me intensely. Makin will no doubt go for whatever he thinks is the funniest outcome, a stance that is perplexing to me. We’ll just have to see what happens.

Nothing more for today.

---

3^rd of March 2018

There was endless discourse today, compounding the already impressive exhaustion from yesterday. The topic today was over something far more sensitive and immediately offensive to some people, for reasons that I’m still struggling to understand. People familiar with 4chan will probably also know what this is, but in short the discussion centered around the use of the phrase and meme "are traps gay?".

As a bit of background on this topic, "trap" in its original context involves a character from an anime or a picture of a person who is androgynous, or whose gender is otherwise ambiguous. The "trap" therein refers to people or characters who appear feminine and attractive, but have male genitalia. From this, it was an enormous meme on 4chan to debate whether someone was gay for being attracted to such figures.

I have to make it completely clear that I’m not joking about this: it’s a real joke that has been around for over ten years at this point. Interestingly, the conversation was carried out in relative peace for many years, but recently in the last year or two it’s come under heavy fire from the LGBT community. The term "trap" has become widely recognized as a term of harassment geared towards transgender individuals. My own understanding of the issue previous to the discussion in mspa-lit was that it referred to people who are intentionally trying to deceive others with their physical appearance, which to me makes a lot more sense semantically (and would also make the term a synonym for "catfishing").

However, it appears to be used disparagingly towards anyone who crossdresses or identifies as transgender. I haven’t seen this behavior myself so I can’t speak to how widespread it is, but it’s apparently enough of a problem that people felt the need to speak out against its use, and it’s become widely recognized as derogatory. With this in mind, it’s easy to imagine that one of the sides of this argument was arguing to keep people from using it despite its initial history as a meme.

Then, there are people who want to keep it in use. I won’t name them here because I don’t see a reason to do so, but as it is mspa-lit was positively consumed with rhetoric over why it is or isn’t acceptable to use the term. I would remark on the proceedings of the conversation at length, but honestly it became such a garbled and confusing mess after a while that I don’t think I could provide an accurate account if I tried. All I do feel like commenting on in particular is that Rar was made exceptionally uncomfortable by the discussion.

Rar, being transgender, was one of the more vocal opponents of the term’s use, and so I decided to ask it about why: "yeah i just / really hate the term / and the people that defend it / its a term that means 'guy that looks like a girl' / being used in reference to trans women / [...] / as well as like / generally used to harass". Obviously the description it provided doesn’t shack up with my own historical understanding of the term, but I guess it’s undergone some cultural shift in recent years. The implication now is that using the term is a kind of tacit denial of the validity of trans women. I’m not sure when this happened, but as it is using the term is effectively taboo.

With this in mind, it might be easier to understand why the conversation was so confusing. There was fierce and immediate pushback against the term’s use, to the point that people, especially Tipsy, were belligerently tossing out accusations as to people using it or defending its use. Tensei was notably caught in the crossfire of this discussion, among others—I keep wanting to describe this situation in more detail, and yet I don’t think it would be responsible to at this point. The details so far are all things I witnessed personally and feel confident about, but anything more explicit would be wandering into the territory of the decidedly tenebrous.

Aside from this, there was an interesting encounter with Icel tonight. There’s been some decidedly dramatic nonsense regarding staff on WP: the details are already fuzzy to me and even if it were explained further I don’t think I’d care to clarify that much, but the overall idea is that someone has been attempting to foment ill will or otherwise harsh feelings between WP and HVSD. Icel was naturally displeased by this, but then came onto the HSD to complain about it and tried to point fingers at Makin. Despite her explanation as to why and my already sympathetic understanding of her distaste for Makin, many others and I immediately disagreed with her reasoning as it didn’t really fit Makin’s modus operandi, among other things.

We realized after some time that we were defending Makin for him, despite his presence at the time. He hadn’t said so much as a word since Icel showed up, and once we realized this we backed off and waited for him to chime in personally. His only contribution to the entire conversation was as thus: "I'm not saying anything because silence will cause funnier situations". This was frustratingly unhelpful for obvious reasons, but it also helped me glean some interesting insight into his personality.

I’m sure that this is painfully obvious for most involved at this point, maybe even for those who only know about him by reading this document, but it seems clear to me now that Makin is trying to emulate the feel and posting style of 4chan boards. Most of his conversational tactics fit this, including discouraging people from becoming too chummy or familiar with each other if possible, and especially his tendency to engender as much chaos as possible in any situation he’s in.

His larger goal with this is to generate situations that are as funny as possible to him, and sometimes I wonder if he understands or particularly cares that this behavior is frustrating to other people. It’s one thing if he’s simply ignoring the agitation of others in favor of his own amusement, but sometimes it feels as if he derives his enjoyment specifically from upsetting other people, which I would find too sadistic to tolerate. It’s hard to say if this is the case and I would prefer to lean towards "no", but as things are the nature of his treatment of others is something that continues to perplex me.

I can feel myself beginning to get tired of this thought process. I’ve dedicated a lot of time and care into understanding why this happens, and why Makin behaves the way he does. It’s not out of an attempt to validate him or feed him attention, but almost purely so that I can understand what’s going on and how to make things better in general. I fear that I’m beginning to approach the idea that I will never understand him or how to help the server in a more concrete fashion, which is intensely agonizing. If this turns out to be true, what should I do?

I don’t feel like musing on this right now. Nothing more for today.

---

4^th of March 2018

A couple of things happened last night that I didn’t remark on at the time for various reasons. The first and most relevant is that I got exceptionally drunk, far more than I’ve ever been (in celebration of a real life event, for clarity’s sake), and promptly made an ass out of myself all night. Drunkposting is a weird thing in our community, considering that most of us are legally underaged. Those of us who are legally able to drink tend to go about it in two ways: for most I imagine the rule is to keep quiet about it, which is probably the safest option. Myself, I like to make a small event of it: drinking usually lowers my inhibitions sufficiently enough that I start to feel more confident fucking with other people, or otherwise having a dumb albeit fun time.

I’ve done this a handful of times in the past, and usually it’s not that big of a deal. It’s always asinine, but never to the point of ridiculousness that it got to last night, to my knowledge. In review I actually feel kind of mortified at some of the utter nonsense I posted, most of which consisted of me ruthlessly gushing over the other people in the server. As far as things I do while inebriated this was absolutely not that big of a deal, but it’s still kind of weird to do such a thing publicly. I’m electing not to worry about it in favor of being short-tempered with people and nursing a horrid hangover.

Unfortunately, this behavior has already led to a problem or two, at least indirectly. At some point we got onto the topic of KC Green’s comics, and were discussing their overall quality. There was some intense confusion or outright misunderstanding of the nature of Green’s work: a lot of webcomics, as the name implies, are primarily comedic efforts. Green certainly has his litany of works that are meant to be humorous, although it can be rather hit or miss: when it hits it’s usually extremely good, but often people find themselves confused as to what the punchline is supposed to be or why it’s funny.

Conversely there are a lot of comics Green has made that are explicitly not meant to be funny, at least from what we can tell. Certain comics like The Dog’s Sins are unabashedly gloomy and existentially driven, and therein lays the confusion for some. Minish in particular was not okay with this, a perspective that was fairly puzzling for some of us. After pressing further, Minish revealed that he found the organization of Green’s overall comic frustrating: there were comics dedicated to being funny and others that weren’t, and that this lack of consistency in its tone was why he found it confusing and disliked it.

Most of us present at the time for this found the explanation to be completely unreasonable, in light of the fact that—aside from various one-offs—Green’s comics are usually encapsulated as distinct from one another, so that the tone is hard to confuse between them. It’s not hard to differentiate between stories, so the confusion over their organization seems baseless. Yet, despite our explanations, Minish proved obstinate on the issue.

All of this is to say that I handled the ensuing tension poorly. Normally when this sort of thing happens I either ignore it or keep trying to help the person involved to understand what’s going on, usually with varying degrees of success. But today, with my considerable hangover in play, I was not having such unmitigated horseshit. No, I was quite disgruntled over Minish’s behavior, and I ended up yelling at him for it. A brief shouting match ensued, in which Makin chided me for acting irresponsibly and then telling Minish to be quiet because his additions to the conversation were not very constructive. This predictably led to Minish leaving the server again, which is an infuriating outcome to any conversation.

I don’t feel like hashing out the entirety of this sequence of events yet again, so I’ll keep it short: I spoke with Minish after some time passed so that we could both calm down, he came back, but he believes Makin doesn’t want him around or some such nonsense. It’s a thought that I’ve seen in a few other people at this point too, and every single time it proves to be a pretty self-absorbed notion. I don’t mean this to disparage the people involved, but rather it’s simply a baseless idea—Makin doesn’t actually care that much besides wanting people to stop posting things that are "irrational", or whatever may fit the bill at the time.

With this generalized description out of the way once more, I’ll turn to the more pertinent event of the day. It’s with great sadness that we learned Billy Herrington, the subject of the Gachi meme that WoC wrote about in a previous entry, was killed in a car crash. It feels like extremely uncanny timing, what with WoC deciding to write about it so recently. The man himself was basically a meme legend, with countless parodies and various sub-memes surrounding his existence. The fact that he’s gone now is hard to recognize, and everyone who knew of him is paying tribute in whatever way they deem most suitable. WoC was allowed to make a post in announcements addressing this containing a short description and examples of the gachi meme, the final part of which reads: "He will be remembered for his legacy of gay porn and gay porn music remixes. The gachi community mourns him. ♂ RIP Billy Herrington, boss of the gym eternal ♂".

Nothing more for today.

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5^th of March 2018

Today was fairly devoid of open conflict, which I’m thankful for. I don’t know that I could have handled another day of discourse in a row. In absence of any concrete events to write about, I’d like to instead explore some cultural elements that are more general than the Homestuck fandom, but are still important to various facets of our community.

I’ve touched upon the topic of furries previously, but not in depth: I’ve described them as people who are variously interested in anthropomorphic animals, especially being attracted to them or dressing up/identifying as them. Furries are a rather notorious subculture, enduring a lot of discrimination from people who view this interest as being too weird or just particularly degenerate. For whatever reason, perhaps because of the comparative strangeness of their community versus more conventional ones, they seem to be in the public eye often enough that even people who don’t use the internet will probably understand what you mean if you refer to them.

All of this leads to furries tending to group up or seek each other out, at least in my experience knowing them. It’s far easier to withstand external pressure and harassment as a group than alone; for this reason and probably also because of their common eccentricities, furries can quickly become a dominant aspect of discussions if indulged. Such is what happened earlier tonight when the topic came up: even though (what I assume is) the majority of people involved weren’t actually furries, as soon as the topic cropped up we managed to discuss it for a considerable length of time.

This is honestly not surprising. I say that the majority of people involved probably aren’t furries, but that having been said I wouldn’t be surprised if a much higher than average proportion of our userbase turned out to be furries. I’m not exactly sure why this is—it might have something to do with some of the characters in Homestuck having animal-related motifs or characteristics—but it stands that the discussions are more prevalent here than they might otherwise be.

Some rather notable people in the HSD are furries, although I’m hesitant to name them because it might lead to them getting singled out. One in particular fears discussing the topic because they feel Makin has an overwhelmingly negative opinion on furries, and they think he wants to earnestly ban or get rid of them from the community. I and others think that this fear is unfounded, but somewhat understandable given the likely considerable amount of persecution they would face for their interest anyway.

At the risk of delving too deeply into the weirdness of it all, I feel like it’d be entertaining or even interesting to explain the various "types" of furries that exist. It’s not a hard leap to make and understand that they’re so called because of the connection to furred animals; indeed, some of the most commonly adopted animal personas, or "fursonas" are mammals like foxes and wolves. Less conventional fursonas involve other classes of vertebrate animals, such as reptiles or fish (commonly referred to as "scalies"). Even less common but still more or less findable are cephalods like squid (apparently experiencing an increase in popularity after the release of the Nintendo game Splatoon) or arthropods such as bees, even praying mantis according to Phantos.

Considering stuff like this reminds me of how diverse and wildly strange our community is, both as an isolated group and then as a part of the greater internet. The internet itself has allowed such bizarre things to arise—it’s amazing to consider how these eccentricities have been allowed to develop, where in other time periods they would almost certainly be seen as aberrant and stamped out in no doubt violent ways. I often grapple with the idea of how strange it all is, but I feel as if that strangeness is a net positive, at least in terms of making things interesting. I wonder what other interesting subcultures we’ll see rise over the course of our lives.

The other thing I want to comment on today is a much more localized idea, a meme that was recently forced into the spotlight. Actually, I should take this opportunity to explain that "forced memes" are a real phenomenon: true to their name they’re memes that end up becoming popular through being abused and spammed by people, to the point that anyone paying attention has grown sick of seeing them by the time they see widespread use. This happened recently with something we call "haha long memes".

If you think the name sounds stupid already, then I’m afraid it only gets worse. The origin is fairly moronic, but bears some telling anyway. WoC has a personal server dedicated to his close friends, but he has also invited a number of us from the HSD for the purpose of playing a game called PlanetSide 2 together. WoC and his friends understandably have a wide variety of memes of their own that, by osmosis alone, us visitors have picked up on. One fateful night while playing together, we were informed of a long-forgotten meme of theirs that consisted solely of the phrase "aren’t guns just haha long knives?".

I’m honestly not sure if I can explain it more, that’s basically all you need to know. The format is simply: "isn’t x just haha long y?", where x is something that performs a function better than y, where the function in the original meme is "killing other people". An immediate variation to help solidify understanding would be "aren’t tanks just haha long infantry". Even typing this out I’m realizing just how absurd and idiotic the idea is, but it’s making me laugh all the same. I guess it illustrates an important lesson: a meme doesn’t need to be complex or clever to be funny, it just has to tickle your funny bone in the right way.

That all having been said, it was successfully forced into prominence recently on the HSD, although I don’t think I could point out who the exact culprits are. I’m sure WoC played at least some part in it, and the only other person I can say with certainty was there the night we learned about it was Barry. Regardless of who’s responsible, it’s now in use in altgen and I’m sure it crops up in other channels as well. I doubt that more than a handful of people know where it’s from or are even using it correctly, but if nothing else it’s an interesting demonstration of how memes spread here.

In a similar vein, another meme that’s popular in our community is something referred to simply as "Loss". It’s a single strip from a webcomic called Ctrl+Alt+Del (CAD) by Tim Buckley. CAD has been the subject of criticism from more than just our corner of the internet, mostly because it was historically not very good in either art or writing. However, it was arguably launched into meme status with the release of the aforementioned strip "Loss" back in 2008. CAD has variously comedic and serious attempts at writing, but "Loss" was of an especially dramatic bent: in short, the female lead suffered a miscarriage.

With anti-fans already doing what they could to take the piss out of CAD, this presented an ample opportunity, and they successfully amplified "Loss" until it was known all around the internet. Over the course of several years, it’s become probably the most parodied strip from the entire comic with countless edits in existence and unbelievable variety between them. It has been stretched to hell and back in all kinds of forms, and it’s referenced fairly frequently on the HSD (although I couldn’t tell you what exactly prompts this).

Honestly, thinking about all of this stuff in aggregate serves as a good reminder of how utterly weird internet culture can get. There’s an entire pronounced culture to this stuff that the vast majority of people will never even know about, much less understand. I have to wonder what someone who was born before the internet even existed would think of these things if they were to suddenly be fully exposed to them. Hell, there are plenty of people around now who would likely think us completely mad if they knew even one hundredth of what it is we discuss and laugh about on a daily basis.

I kind of like that though. In our collective strangeness we’ve found a common niche, and for the most part I think we all appreciate it. It’s gratifying to have this pocket of the world to ourselves, and I find it especially delightful that the medium itself is conducive to creating archives, so that it’s relatively easy to peruse even after the fact. Sometimes I can’t imagine where I would be or what I would be doing without the complete absurdity of the internet at my disposal. I imagine I would get a lot more done, but I might be a lot more miserable too. I can’t say enough times how glad I am that it’s given me the opportunity to meet such interesting people.

Nothing more for today.

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8^th of March 2018

Today has been thoroughly exhausting. It is arguably the end of an era: we were finally compelled to act on something that, based on what we were shown today, we should have acted on many months ago. Now that I think about it actually, it’s two or three things we should have taken care of. I’ll elaborate on each in turn.

The first is Zoey. Previously VDNW, I’ve described her (or others have described her) as one of the oldest users in altgen, present throughout most of its stages of development as a channel and a witness to the various cultures it has played host to. She’s been a fairly amicable figure for mods to interact with, if rather eccentric, but given the nature of the channel she frequents we didn’t think much of this outside of the obvious.

Occasionally we would get reports from people that Zoey was acting, in soft terms, more outlandishly than could be allowed. In these cases we were largely content to give her a slap on the wrist or reprimand her in private, which at the time seemed completely appropriate for the type of behavior that we were shown evidence for. This sort of thing happened for months, and then again today we were approached with complaints.

Except it wasn’t just one complaint, it was a litany of various complaints from many users, I estimate as many as two dozen people in all. I urge the reader to make no mistake about the magnitude of the evidence submitted: it was a truly staggering number of incidents that were reported to me. I felt compelled to include Dingus and deusAscendent, as they’re both altgen pseudos, and to see what they had to say. A group chat was quickly established in order to better share evidence and discuss things; group chats can only handle ten people at any given time, and so in order for everyone to present their evidence and complaints users had to cycle through!

Even more astonishing than the sheer amount of comments and screencaps we were given was their content. The complaints we’ve received in the past indicated behavior that was no worse than some light mockery or something like playing with others too hard, it was certainly nothing vicious. Today though, everything we saw seemed geared towards foul and fouler: manipulation, abuse, lying, targeted harassment, a plethora of offenses that signaled clearly and vividly that Zoey did not care how she treated other people except for her own gain.

I won’t share any of the intimate details here, for fear of giving away the identity of the people who approached us—suffice to say that no one present felt comfortable with Zoey’s presence after everything was out in the open. Some of the stories we heard were nothing short of frightening, and screencaps of these things made it absolutely clear to us what had to be done.

After sharing some of the evidence in the modchat and briefly discussing what to do with other mods less embroiled in the situation, it was quickly decided that Zoey would be fullbanned from the server permanently, pending some sort of further evidence that she was taking real, solid steps to improve her behavior. The people we were talking with were suitably mollified afterwards, and we set forth guidelines wherein they should absolutely present this evidence to us sooner if they want things to improve faster.

In all, the experience was kind of harrowing. We were asked to make a small announcement about Zoey being removed in altgen, since there were a number of people there who were involved with her positively or otherwise. After making the announcement there were a few people who lamented the decision and then an uncomfortably large swathe of people who were happy with the decision. It’s hard to imagine the extent of what kind of damage may have been wrought here, but here I hope that this will be an effective first step in mitigating any further problems, as well as beginning a process where people in altgen can recover.

On a similar note, we had to deal with Molly today. Nothing Molly has done has been quite so bad as Zoey, to be sure—however, there were some distinct elements in her behavior over the last several months that, combined with the lack of a need for a janitor and a proverbial last straw today, motivated us to remove her janitorial status.

Molly has been an odd janitor, who seemed to take her position seriously and then also not. This was more or less expected given the nature of the place, but it lends itself to some behavioral intricacies that have been less than amusing. There was an incident some months back where some silly discourse was began over "light mode" versus "dark mode", meaning the way Discord is viewed (light mode is a white interface for visibility and dark mode is black/grey, to make it easier on the eyes).

For some reason people were seriously getting bent out of shape over this, and Molly was being "persecuted" for using light mode. I don’t understand why people need to get up in arms on the topic, but nonetheless Molly saw fit to state that the opposing side should "kill themselves", which one should immediately take as a joke given altgen’s reputation. Yet, when we questioned her about this, she claimed that the statement was perfectly genuine.

Speaking honestly, we wanted to remove her janitorial status directly after this incident, but we didn’t because we wanted to see if it would be a problem again. There have been a variety of other circumstances that have arisen where she behaved poorly, none of which I feel particularly motivated to explain at this point in time. This all came to a head today where, after banning Zoey, it was found that Molly was distributing invite links to other servers with Zoey on them.

Again, being honest this is sort of a weak basis for us to go after Molly and unjanitor them. Yet, with everything that’s gone on today, it was too much to bear. I was personally stressed out from dealing with the Zoey fallout and the other related mods were also having a hard time for their own reasons. It was thus that myself, Shitler, Toast, WoC, Dingus, and Deus all conceived of a pink slip that would alleviate our stress a tad and put on a show.

This was probably ill advised in retrospect, but WoC drafted a statement detailing what we were doing. We went to altgen and froze the channel, announcing a "public shaming". After all eyes were pretty securely on us, WoC posted the reasoning and Molly had the janitor role removed. After this we turned it into a bit of a circus, shouting inane nonsense like "BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD" repeatedly for some minutes.

We expected this to rile up altgen sufficiently and turn the event into something more jovial, but people weren’t very amused. Molly was well-liked by some regulars in altgen, and they immediately sought her out to make sure she was alright. This succeeded in making me feel like a bit of a tool for a few minutes, but at the end of everything I think I’m too tired to really care that much. Our reasoning was clear and, honestly, it’s just a janitorial position. Nothing to get bent out of shape over.

This all did succeed in royally pissing off one person though, named [as]. [as] has been in altgen for a while as well, and they were immensely peeved at our treatment of Zoey today. They viewed it as the second time we’ve punished a user who "did bad things in the past but has improved over time" (the other such person in question wishing to remain unnamed in this document). Even after explaining our reasoning, [as] very stubbornly pursued the topic anyway.

It was what I would call relentless—after we gave up trying to reason with them, they began resorting to petty insults, saying that the HSD suffered from "shitty moderation". The apex of this was [as] sending a picture of a furry vore (yes, unfortunately it exists) of a disturbingly engorged fox labeled "shitty moderation" graphically devouring what I believe was an ewe, labeled "HSD". Obviously we couldn’t let this sit and they were banned for it.

Thus, a stressful day. From all this it’s become painfully clear that there is a serious potential for maladapted or otherwise malevolent people becoming situated in altgen. We’ve openly asked people to look out for these kinds of people more often and to report them to us so we can help, but who knows if those requests will be effective. All we do know for sure is that a tighter eye must be kept there. Perhaps it really would be better to do away with the channel entirely, if it can lead to this.

Nothing more for today.

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9^th of March 2018

We had a rather nice change from yesterday. For some time now I’ve been variously busy or distracted, and although I talk in the HSD every day and try to involve myself as much as I can, I don’t typically get the opportunity to thoroughly wash myself in the stream of our collective thoughts. I get glimpses more than anything else, but on those days where I’m able to fully enmesh myself here it’s usually a pretty engaging and fun experience.

Today, we had a rather involved discussion about the quality of the first act of Hiveswap. I would call this topic "tired" if it weren’t for the fact that hardly any of us seem that tired of discussing it. Despite the no doubt countless times we’ve bothered to hash out the subject, we always seem content to revisit it, or we manage to think of a new angle in which to discuss it. I can’t exactly speak to whether today’s conversation was particularly unique, but it was certainly engaging for us.

Hiveswap is a fairly controversial topic for us, which might be no surprise considering even just its history. The fact that it’s been delivered to us at all despite the intense brand of development hell it’s gone through is nothing short of miraculous, and is surely a testament to the dedication of the people who have been involved with the project since its inception. Yet, as is often true of projects that go through development hell, it is arguably lesser than what it could be, or at least less than we could have hoped for.

I don’t mean that to disparage the game in particular, as it had many, many factors against it seemingly from the beginning. Yet, it would be a lie to insinuate that Hiveswap: Act 1 is anything close to a perfect game. The more or less common consensus is that it’s a fairly mediocre game—most people in the HSD I’ve talked to at least would rate it about 5-7 out of 10, and it is compared unfavorably to Act 1 of Homestuck itself. I’m in agreeance with this, although I think it would be beyond premature to suggest that the rest of the game will be this way. Hussie himself reviewed it favorably (although to be fair, why would he review it unfavorably?) and we have seen literally 1/8th of the total product so far; condemning or lauding it as a whole would be laughably stupid at this point.

There are some outliers who think the game is worse or greater than the average provided above: Revlar is particularly vocal of his distaste for it, calling it "worse than bad": he insinuates that the game would be better if it was actually an unapologetically shitty product, a la The Room. However, he feels that it—while being completely fine—has committed the grievous sin of being largely unremarkable, and therefore utterly forgettable.

This contrasts directly with people like Cait, Olki, and Tipsy. They all feel that the game has accomplished what it was meant to do, inasmuch as being a fairly enjoyable game with clever writing, good music and art, and an interesting story. As such, they’ve rated it fairly positively.

There’s a distinct difference in the way these two camps perceive the project I suppose, where Revlar is interested in its artistic merit and the second group are more concerned with how enjoyable it is on a visceral level. I can appreciate both of these perspectives, although I don’t feel very strongly in either way myself.

Personally, my feeling is that it exceeded my expectations, but didn’t fulfill my hopes. It did make it through five years of utter ambiguity, and many of us were completely convinced that it was never even going to come out at all. That alone merits it as somewhat of a success, but speaking as an objective experience Revlar’s sentiment about it being unremarkable rings true to me. It doesn’t really push the envelope technically or artistically, and the story so far doesn’t grip me.

As I said though, we’re not that far into it at all. I’m waiting, cautiously and optimistically, to see if it’ll become something that deserves the sort of recognition Homestuck got, something that I speak for everyone on more or less. Despite how negatively some may view it, I can’t imagine they would want to see it fail—they wouldn’t be here if that was the case.

Nothing more for today.

---

10^th of March 2018

Today was disappointing but in a less explicit way than from a couple days ago. I just got done removing a relatively sizeable portion of the document, about three pages worth, concerning people who want to remain uninvolved with it. I will admit this was really upsetting: it’s a sharp reminder that my disregard for the privacy of others in releasing this was going to rub people the wrong way. Yet, I still feel compelled to write in this document and a few people asking to be removed isn’t going to stop me. I’ll just have to redouble my efforts to make sure that the parts I do include are not to the detriment.

This statement is in direct conflict with the situation from the 8th, however. How should I treat situations where someone is clearly in the wrong and would almost certainly not want to be mentioned? Speaking philosophically, I don’t think that a distinction can be made for people who we have come to consider problematic elements. People like Talons are clearly undesirable individuals, and yet is it allowable for me to discuss them? At what point is it acceptable to discuss people even without their permission?

I had a very involved conversation with Putnam over this, and although my original stance wasn’t really moved I feel it’s worth uttering here: people should be treated as more important than any particular thing, and that goes for this document as well. I’ve made it clear in the past that this document does not take precedent over the wellbeing of a living person, and now I’m simply grappling with the finer details in my head. I’m not sure when it could be appropriate to describe someone even against their wishes.

For people who leave a strict and pronounced mark on us and are of incredibly negative stature, the extreme example of this being someone like Talons or Itoan, I don’t think that I’m particularly obligated to honor their requests should they ask to be removed. It becomes more complicated the less offensive a person is, but this general idea should suffice for now. At the end of the day I trust myself to be more judicious with this as time goes by. I just hope there’s no one else in particular that’s going to be affected adversely by this document.

This musing aside, not a lot of note happened today. There was a series of discussions in mspa-lit that Toast wanted me to record for some reason, which I’ve elected not to do so. Some of these discussions were pretty funny, but nothing that I felt was strictly necessary to include (bite your tongue, Toast, I’m not interested in your complaints this time). I probably would have been more amenable to it if I had actually been around for these discussion, but as it is there’s only two things I really want to comment on.

The first is extremely brief: Yazshu came back to the HSD at some point that I don’t recall, but I was informed of a period of time where he was called "knifeass"—I don’t think I really need to or even should explain the story behind this one. On the other hand, the concept of lurking was brought up and discussed to some degree. I’ve mentioned this practice many times without actually describing what it is, although for most people who use the internet regularly the term’s meaning is probably already familiar to them.

Lurking is the practice of physically being in a chatroom or other media platform and not actually posting on it, rather only watching what other people post. For instance, while I’m a very active poster on the HSD, I don’t post on the subreddit nearly that often, but I do linger there and keep an eye on things, so I qualify as a lurker there. There are many self-described people on the HSD who have admitted to being lurkers in the past, such as Rar. Sometimes there may be a pronounced shift in this habit, from lurker to poster—it’s usually kind of surreal when this happens, as you’re being faced with this person who knows your history yet you’re not familiar with them.

As a general rule it’s better to have people posting actively instead of just lurking. We have over 10,000 people in the HSD, of which around 1,500 to 2,000 are active at any given time. Yet, out of those 2,000 I would estimate that no more than 100-150 are actually posting at any given time. It’s hard to say how many of the remaining 1,850 are actually watching the chat go by (as opposed to watching some other server entirely), but I have to imagine it’s a decent number of people. I wonder what they must think, watching the chat day after day. Do they form attachments or affection for people the same way regular posters do, or are they generally more detached? Might be interesting to seek one out one of these days and ask them directly, although that would of course prove to be difficult.

Nothing more for today.

---

11^th of March 2018

I woke up to a complete shitstorm regarding my actions last night. There were no less than fifty private messages I had to read through, which were variously trying to console me and to berate me. Groggy and already sour at this figurative assault I got onto the HSD as quickly as I could to see what the fire was actually about. As it turns out, the fire was about me.

Removing certain portions of the journal proved to be far more contentious than I thought, and I was repeatedly interrogated by Makin, hb, and a couple others as to why I had done it. I was accused of being manipulated and weak-willed or having no spine, and I quickly grew furious with the utter hypocrisy of these individuals trying to sway my opinion on something that I earnestly believed was the right thing to do.

Certain people like Toast, while I’m sure they actually disagreed with me, were simply taking the piss out of it and tossing out as many jokes as they could. While I wanted to appreciate this, it only served to fan the flames and make things more chaotic, as well as agitating me further. For one of the only times of my tenure here I lost my patience and withdrew from the conversation. I didn’t handle this as well as I could, but even so many hours later as I write this I’m still indignant at their accusations and generally ungracious and especially ugly comments about my decisions.

This is not to say that they were the only crowd of people with something to say: plenty of people were completely supportive of my decision, even if they didn’t agree with it, and there were even people who outright agreed it was the right thing to do. I’m immensely appreciative of the people who were supportive of me in this endeavor: Cait, Olki, and numerous others were really nice about the whole process.

To make matters worse, these people began arguing with each other over me and my work. That is the absolute last thing that I want to see out of people I respect and care for. This nonsensical fight between them only served to make things seem worse and I felt horrible for being the ultimate root of this enormous fight between ourselves. It was one of my basest fears with releasing this document publically, and I guess it should be no surprise that that fear would come to pass by my own doing somehow.

Honestly, after all of that I feel too tired to continue writing about it in depth. Today was simply exhausting and I’m honestly quite disappointed at the more negative responses to what I’ve done. It’s worth reiterating that this work is my own, and while it’s open to suggestion absolutely no one but me gets to determine what is finally written down at the end of the day. Besides, other than reading about it again here they’ll all probably forget about it in a day or two. No sense in carrying a grudge when no one will reasonably keep pursuing this idea—if people continue to harass me for my edits then I openly and derisively call them foolish here.

With that, I really need to rest. I might describe this day in more detail tomorrow once I’ve had a chance to recuperate, but we’ll see; it was honestly really upsetting. Nothing more for today.

---

12^th of March 2018

I want to briefly describe something that has entered the common HSD lexicon, namely a series of videos on Youtube under the name Khonjin House. Created by Connor Lavery, it is a rich set of videos concerning the son of a mafia boss who is simply attempting to obtain some pepperoni pizza, and in the process utterly ridiculous things happen. By chance it was streamed for the first anniversary of the HSD if I’m not mistaken, and due to its ribald wordplay and aesthetic style highly reminiscent of classic Youtube Poops, it became an instant classic for our community.

Youtube Poops themselves are a fascinating element to crop up in internet culture, and arguably one of the most famous. I’m not necessarily an academic on the topic but I think it’s safe to say that these videos, abbreviated to YTP, are a bit of a gateway to the larger collection of obscure internet culture: memes themselves have entered the mainstream consciousness, but YTPs are one step removed from all that.

YTPs involve taking source footage, from a TV show or a video game or anything else on video, and editing/manipulating it to achieve new jokes. A great example of this that I’ve linked before is Fesh Pince of Blair, a parody of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air by KroboProductions. Another famous example is the assortment of King of the Hill YTPs by a Youtuber named DurhamrockerZ, whom many of us feel has shaped the fate and nature of YTPs throughout the history of their existence. His influence on them is not to be understated.

Bringing this back to Khonjin House, unfortunately Connor Laverty has been suffering from a bout of financial instability. Some months ago he opened up a Patreon so that he could stop working a day job and make videos--a job humorously and seriously called “vidsmithing”--which was far more successful than any of us expected it to be. This proved to work for a while, but now it’s become clear that it’s unsustainable and he’s needed to cut back on some things. Connor is even going so far as to disconnect his internet, although he will still upload his creations using internet cafes. All of us who are fans of his work wish him the best.

Not to bring more journal talk into this, but Putnam mentioned repeatedly today that he feels bad for his part in talking with me about edits or removals in this very document. I had to reassure him that, while his input was valuable, it was already something I was considering doing. I feel the need to reiterate my annoyance with anyone attempting to manipulate me in my efforts, or to assuage those who are afraid of doing so. I’m not going to be easily swayed unless I already was considering something heavily, I’m not so soft or impressionable that I twist in whatever wind blows at the time. I just hope everyone forgets about this editing debacle soon so I can go back to writing without people meddling, inadvertently or otherwise.

Nothing more for today.

---

13^th of March 2018

Not a lot to comment on today aside from some particularly frustrating nonsense in mspa-lit, although that in and of itself is hardly surprising. Everyone in the channel was discussing socially-oriented matters in a more persistent manner than usual, which naturally led to Makin freezing the channel. In fact, he froze it no less than three times in rapid succession, which succeeded in pissing off myself and no doubt several others.

It was all done with some pretty severe mockery, too. Makin has secured the channel as a place where only he has any direct control over it: mods aren’t allowed to freeze or unfreeze the place, and only he has channel editing permissions, the only channel on the entire server where that’s true if I’m not mistaken. This leads to some pretty blatant, hypocritical uses of power whenever he feels like overriding other people.

The worst offense of all this was in the second and third freezings, I believe: after freezing the channel to stop other people from talking, he began talking to himself about Star Trek episodes he was watching at the time. It was strangely frustrating to watch him spin yarn to no one in particular, treating the channel as his own personal soapbox and playground.

I recognize that this criticism may sound particularly weird coming from me, given that I’ve literally explained mspa-lit as being Makin’s designated sitting area several times in the past, but make no mistake: I don’t actually support this interpretation, it’s simply the one that’s closest to true. It’s actually quite agonizing to have to deal his chicanery on a daily basis, and I find myself fervently hoping for some sort of resolution to this where he stops mucking with the channel, at least in so blatant a manner. Increasing server activity is important, but he relies too much on tactics that are naturally controversial, which I believe stems from the Slate Star Codex post entitled "The Toxoplasma of Rage".

I’m going to go on a tangent here: the author of the post explains the nature of a disease called toxoplasmosis and relates it to societal interactions based around controversy. For those unfamiliar, toxoplasma refers to the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, found ubiquitously in cats. The disease is transmitted to rodents in various ways, mostly by cat waste infecting water sources, and once infected the rodents‘ behavior is actually altered in such a way that they are more prone to being caught by cats and eaten. Once the parasite is back in a cat body, it can fulfill the rest of its lifecycle and repeat the process.

The author connects this idea of altering behavior to situations where, instead of a biological toxoplasma, it is a societal one that explains why controversial stories or events are focused on so much more than stories that have more straightforward or logical conclusions (for example: the few sensationalized news stories about false rape allegations compared to the countless, unpublicized stories about verifiable accounts of rape).

The nature of toxoplasma is that it replicates by altering the behavior of those infected by it: in social contexts this takes the form of situations where distinct "us versus them" scenarios arise, and the "parasite" replicates when each tribe strikes at each other in return for previous offenses, real or perceived. The long and short of it is that these more controversial stories are driven by outrage and generate far more interest—and therefore activity or revenue—for the people who bring them to light.

To wrap this back around to why it’s relevant to the HSD, it is a relatively simple matter to identify this behavior: as anyone who has bothered to read even a fraction of this document may surmise, Makin has been by far the largest source of this supposed toxoplasma, at least in the last several months. He has made it known many times that one of his goals is to increase server activity and have people talk more often, and he utilizes this concept as a justification to inject controversy and achieve that goal.

In light of his desires this seems like a logical thing to do, but it’s not without various ramifications. The original post on Slate Star Codex stipulates that relying on this sort of behavior in order to manufacture interest or activity is often accompanied by a decrease in the reputation of the person or organization starting it.

Again, this is an easily traceable pattern with Makin: every time he does or says something inflammatory, he does in fact achieve greater activity, at least for a short while, but so too does it manage to alienate someone or make them see him more negatively. Every time he invokes the toxoplasma, so too does he exhaust a little bit more of his social capital, eroding the trust people have in him. Several real examples of this can already be found, such as the plethora of splinter servers people make explicitly because of Makin’s vexed behavior, and more severely in terms of What Pumpkin’s relationship to the HSD (or perhaps even to the fandom at large).

With all of this in mind, I’m forced to wonder how long this pattern may continue. Makin’s reliance on the tactic is never a net positive: even if it may temporarily spur conversation, the overall outcome is a decrease in his reputation among those who know him best. It’s actually quite frustrating to witness in light of the fact that he doesn’t behave this way in other servers. Everything I’ve ever been told about his presence in other places has suggested that he behaves like a more reasonable, even amicable person in places like CANMT or LOFAM.

Why then does he insist on playing this game here, in the HSD? I’m growing increasingly afraid that it’s a simple case of the old internet truism: "a normal person rendered anonymous and given an audience is turned into a total fuckwad". This would be less bothersome to me (routine, even) if it weren’t for the fact that most of us variously respect Makin or like engaging with him.

Part of the Fuckwad Theory is that the person being examined doesn’t care about the people they’re interacting with. If this is indeed the case, then the implication is that Makin does not return our respect or feel any sort of attachment to us and instead sees us all as disposable, or unworthy of consideration. In this case, the users of the HSD and everyone Makin talks to will have been rendered as mere tools for some undefined purpose. Anyone with even a basic comprehension of humanity should understand why this is upsetting to consider; I sincerely hope that it turns out to be untrue.

Nothing more for today.

---

15^th of March 2018

There’s been a trend in the last week or two where everyone seems to be more involved with personal projects. There’s a lull in the organization of community activities: nothing is currently being done, but plans are being made for the future, especially with the anniversary of Homestuck coming in a month. With a lack of larger overall events to discuss I’ll comment on some of the individual activities that are happening, interspersed throughout the community.

I guess it’s inaccurate to say that we’ve had no group activities: we still play SCP on a fairly consistent basis, at least once a day. It’s actually been a fairly solid mainstay, all things considered; there was some rather intense discourse with Cookiefonster and a couple others over where the talk should be located. Cookie actually left the server (or stopped talking in it, rather) for a couple of weeks over this issue, something that bothered me somewhat. I can’t begrudge him for not dealing with something that obviously bothers him, but I don’t understand the nature of his distaste for it.

That having been said, it’s not that I disagree with him: I don’t feel the same way about the talk itself, but historically and logically SCP talk should have been moved to #gaming ages ago. I think we’re going to try and make a more concerted effort to guide conversation there in the future, in keeping with SS13 in the past and to avoid these kinds of pointless confrontations in the future. Hopefully we can be more preemptive with this sort of problem in the future, with other games.

Honestly, gaming has been a common theme in general, even with individuals. Makin plays Skullgirls frequently, and if I’m not mistaken he’s been trying to get others to play the game⁷⁶ as well. These attempts have been met with some success: Nights, Cait, Putnam, and possibly others have all begun playing it, or at the very least are playing it more obviously.

Indeed, they’ve all been playing with each other periodically. There is some spirit of competition in the community, and occasionally they face off against each other for fun. This is not unique to Skullgirls, either: recently Putnam and I did something similar with Super Smash Brothers Melee, playing together over the internet for fun. I’m sure there are other examples of this throughout the community, and is something I’ll have to keep an eye out for.

Also relevant to gaming, I finally felt motivated to set up streaming software so that I could play games and have other people watch. This was an activity I dedicated to anyone who was interested: I started playing Super Metroid because it’s a classic and I’ve been curious about it for years, never having played it before. It’s Putnam’s favorite game, so naturally he decided to watch. Rar was also a regular participant, and then a host of various others joined at will. It was quite exciting having them around and playing for them, and I believe I’ll be doing it again in the future, especially if people have recommendations for me.

Speaking of Putnam and Rar, lately it feels as if the three of us have, by chance, repeatedly been engaging with ourselves during smaller stream events. Occasionally when we watch a movie or a TV show off the cuff, there will initially be at least ten people involved, but then as the evening progresses people naturally fall away. For whatever reason, myself, Putnam, and Rar have always been the last three involved, to the point that we’ve all consciously recognized the trend. It’s been kind of nice to indulge ourselves, calling ourselves a club and such. It serves as an effective example of the spontaneity with which smaller groups can form, completely by accident sometimes. I’m interested to see if this proves true for us more in the future as well.

The journal has occasionally cropped up in conversation, usually serious at first but then slowly turning to jokes as people grow fatigued with the conversation. I feel compelled to reexamine my work in the past and see what I can do to improve it, especially ethically. I’ve already taken steps in this direction, but there is still more work to be done. I’m going to vague this for now unfortunately until I know better what to do.

On a similar note, I feel worried about the prospect of me trying to put too much stuff into the journal that doesn’t actually need to be there. Since things have been generally quiet lately, I don’t feel it would be appropriate to write down stuff that’s utterly trivial or unimportant just for the sake of having it. Fluff is not really something I want to fill this document with. If nothing of importance happens then I guess there will just be large breaks in the entries—it’s unfortunate, but quality over quantity is still a good concept.

Nothing more for today.

---

19^th of March 2018

There has been a significant uptick in how many times content has been streamed. I think that today was the end of that crescendo: we ended up watching a few Doctor Who episodes today because there is a decent spread of people who have seen it and then a number of people who haven’t—it felt appropriate to expose the unfamiliar to it, and much reminiscing about various episodes and sagas was had.

One would reasonably expect the stream to end after its original purpose is complete, but in keeping with the procession of events over the last so many weeks the stream continued with some suggestions from various people. I mentioned previously that Rar and Putnam have both been a staple of my events lately, and sure enough Rar conceived of watching some Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) to help the stream along as much as possible.

This was initially a great idea, and all who participated enjoyed it very much. However, it’s become clear that we’re running into that point of fatigue once more, where the streams have been too plentiful lately and we’re starting to get tired of them. Consistently streams have dwindled down to two or three people, which is usually the point where you turn it off unless you have a really dedicated cabal in place for the occasion. With this in mind, I think the streams are basically over for now.

Similarly, it feels as if SCP is winding down in a big way. It’s hard to remember when we started playing it exactly, but for various reasons people have been a little more sparse than usual. At its height we had over 15 people (not including the time where Makin misguidedly invited 4chan to play), and that number has pretty regularly gone down over the last so many days. I’m sure that we’ll continue to play regularly for a week or two, maybe more, but numbers will continue to decline and before we know it SCP will be a thing of the past. The exact point at which this happens will be difficult to determine, but I’ll try to pinpoint it regardless.

The lack of commentable events lately is not to say that we have stopped talking. The opposite is actually true: for the last few months it’s been a fairly consistent amount of discussion at all times, which has lent considerably to a unique energy surrounding the place. It feels as if mspa-lit is becoming increasingly cosmopolitan in nature, with participants from all parts of the globe and all manner of viewpoints engaging in the discussion at any time. It’s quite nice to see this in action, especially in light of my fears from a few months ago that the place was growing too inactive.

It is such that our community is growing steadily more comfortable with itself and the position it happens to be in right now. Another result of the increasing activity is the development of familiarity with each other. With every conversation we have, people become more in tune with the idiosyncrasies of other chat members and they become more self aware about their presence in the community, and how they affect each other.

This general trend led to a discussion spearheaded by Tipsy today, concerning the nature of interacting with people online versus in real life. She mentioned feeling uncomfortable with the idea of socializing purely on the internet versus real life, and cast aspersions towards the idea. There were a number of people who were quick to disagree, claiming the more neutral position that whether online or real life interaction is better depends entirely upon the individual. I imagine there are some sociological studies about this very topic available, but our layman sensibilities are as yet unaware of them. I’m sure anyone familiar with this document will at this point be able to intuit how I feel about the subject.

After this, the discussion turned into something far more absurd. It is not uncommon for users who are fond of each other to tease each other endlessly about all manner of in jokes or past events. One particularly sophomoric example of this would be a common exchange had between Toast, LLF, and others within the community at times. I can’t help but laugh to describe this, but the idea—brought up again today as like from the dead—is a long running joke where each person mocks the other about being aroused, and specifically involves the imagery of "nipples hardening enough to clink on glass".

As weird as it may sound, this is the sort of thing that drew my attention and got me to start using this place so frequently. The nipple example aside, this sort of ribaldry is a calling card of communities where the people involved are witty, amusing, and—most importantly—fierce friends. If it weren’t so utterly stupid I would call it nuanced, but the overall point is that it’s one of the many things about this place that will catch one off guard, but is worth looking into. Other examples of this phenomenon include much teasing over "tender ass valleys" and casual insinuations of incest between various members of the chat.

After phrasing it in this way I can see why people might be made uncomfortable by all this. I imagine that those not inclined towards the weird would find all of this pretty disturbing, especially if they’re not familiar with socializing on the internet. It all makes for a fantastically funny story for us though, and in the end that’s what matters.

Nothing more for today.

---

22^nd of March 2018

Speaking with people is a skill that must be developed and paired with a variety of other understandings, if one wishes to effectively converse with others at least. Even this is not enough, however; all participants must be operating in good faith, or else a conversation is not what it is taking place. Rather, in conversations where bad faith is in play, one or both people involved will not actually be interested in interfacing with the other and will instead be attempting to "win" the conversation by whatever metric is most desirable to them.

Winning a conversation is fine in something like a debate, where all parties are ostensibly attempting to sway each other and rely on employing the finest logic or rhetoric available to them. Sometimes people will soil this with ulterior motives, and especially in cases where the underhanded or even nefarious methods are employed this thoroughly ruins a conversation. It is a particular brand of frustrating to encounter conversations where this is the case, and it is especially so for those who, instead of trying to engage with others in earnest, care only about being technically correct and "winning" the conversation in their own eyes.

Sometimes I feel at the mercy of those belonging to this latter group. On several occasions now I’ve found myself trying to explain something or bridge a gap in understanding between people, only to have one of them errantly dismiss everything that does not conform to their expectations or serve their interests. This is a particularly insidious and despicable conversational tactic in my opinion, serving as willful ignorance at best and dedicated evil at worst.

All of this is in the wake of an immensely disappointing conversation I had last night which had the gall to follow me today. Without going into gratuitous details, it was singlehandely one of the most upsetting events I’ve been through on this server. I’m still processing everything that was said, or wasn’t said perhaps, and being forced to come to terms with the fact that the other person involved doesn’t actually care what you have to say is exhausting and disheartening.

This actually carried over to this morning, where I was attempting to explain what happened to everyone present. The conversation ended up progressing back to journal discourse and, due to the changes I’ve made, Makin demodded me. At this I decided to take a small break from talking in the server. After I mentioned I was leaving the conversation, Makin said "it was a meme" and reinstated me, but I wasn’t really feeling up to the joke at that point.

I took my time outside and thought about the state of the place for a while. Last time I wrote I was under the impression that things were settling in more or less desirable ways but clearly something is not working out with all of this. There is still room for intense disquiet of the unamusing kind: it feels like there is little distinction made between jokes that are pleasant and enjoyable versus those that are disruptive and upsetting, and there is no shortage of people who are interested only in "winning" conversations, like I said. There are too few people trying to bridge gaps and establish understanding between each other, and it’s all due to the influence of a choice few people who are arrogantly selfish in their desires and ideals.

By the end of the day I had returned and felt sufficiently ambivalent about the events of the day that it wasn’t a big deal anymore. This is not to say that I did not care, but in the face of overwhelming nonsense what can one do but accept it, at least for the time being? No, instead of continuing to fight I reminded myself that I get too invested. It is habitual at this point, and I have no doubt it will happen again, but all of this stinks in a way that is hard to put my finger on.

Nothing more for today.

---

23^rd of March 2018

Yet more discussion about the journal. This did happen yesterday, as I mentioned, and in my low spirits I neglected to describe this in any detail, but in summary the conversation largely concerned the nature of this document, and what I should do with it regarding censoring certain details.

This is particularly frustrating for a few reasons: I’m afraid of bringing this up too often, both in the chat and here, because it feels sufficiently narcissistic and annoying. I don’t want to make it seem like I’m forcing this topic to crop up, which would be self serving at best; most importantly, the controversy of bringing this document into the public light was worse than I anticipated, and I foolishly assumed that I could attempt to compromise with everyone in a way that also preserves the integrity of what I’m trying to do.

On that note, what am I trying to do with this? What is this document and how should it be treated? I want it to be useful and interesting to people, but I also want it to serve as a record of things that happen and people that are here. This latter point feels to be the most important to me, and thus removing certain details outright is inappropriate. There is concen with this in the sense that what I’ve written can’t be objective: my position in this community is well-established, so writing about it will be an inherently biased activity.

Yet, I don’t think I’ve ever said that this account is objective. It is certainly true that I would like for it to be so, but in the end I recognize my fallibility. Beyond seeking external corroboration for certain events, there isn’t much I can do to illustrate the subjective nature of my writing besides disclaiming so, which I have done repeatedly. The problem with what I’ve been trying to do after releasing the document is that I’m changing it for other people, but it’s time to start focusing on what I want to do with it.

This is my project after all, and it’s under my purview what happens to it. I need to think a little more about how to accomplish what it is I want, and this time I will make sure to more firmly establish my "rules", so to speak, so that I feel less obligated towards others and their desires. Above all else, I want to preserve the history of this place as thoroughly as I can: completely removing events or entities defeats that purpose. Anonymizing is fine as long as the essence of what transpires is retained.

These deliberations are tiresome and I’m sure particularly boring after going through them so many times, but in a way I feel a bit more free after this latest instance of the discussion. I’m not beholden to anyone over this project, and while ethical consideration is still important obviously it’s my decision what goes in and what doesn’t, complaints be damned. With this in mind, it’s time to reevaluate what I’ve been doing and hopefully craft a method that works better this time around for what I want to do.

Returning to the events of the HSD finally, today was notable in the community: Austinado’s project Vast Error experienced its seventh anniversary yesterday, marking the occasion with no less than a stream for their community and a new music album release. This was understandably a pretty big deal, and it was assumed by most that all this activity would merit an announcement of some kind. Yet, when the appointed time came, Makin explicitly told us not to announce anything.

This flies in the face of a lot of precedence with VE. It’s one of the most popular fanventures on MSPFA, being the fifth most liked and thus listed on the front page, and has been around for a long time. Historically we’ve almost always announced significant VE events, and so this refusal from Makin was puzzling to many. It escalated quickly throughout the morning, discussions being hampered significantly by my frustration with Makin’s capricious whims and, unfortunately, because I was distracted at the time.

Not that my frustrations were ever satisfied—due in part to my anger at the time, I’m sure Makin was simply motivated not to listen to anyone else on the matter, which only served to make me angrier. I maintained then and still now that I was not too angry to discuss the matter, but having my concerns and points dismissed offhandedly because of how they were presented was nothing short of infuriating. It is the worst sort of rhetoric: rather than focusing on the content of a message, it becomes easy to ignore the statement if it’s not issued perfectly. This is a common conversational tool of cowards, and in this way the topic only escalated with nothing accomplished by its end.

After some hours spent away from the chat, I tried revisiting the topic to try and get a more solid answer out of Makin as to why he was doing this. He listed a few different metrics, saying that Vast Error was not "quality" enough for an announcement. He also declared that he was unsatisfied with the idea that Austin is "hogging all of the good artists and musicians and not doing anything with them", in the sense that the update speed for VE was too slow. He further clarified that he feels compelled to reward content producers who release content quickly.

These claims felt odd to me, at the very least, and I’m sure others commented on this as well. Vast Error’s quality is indisputable—Makin even acknowledges that Austin has a litany of artists and musicians working on it with him, all of which have contributed really clean and admirable content to the fanventure. Thus, his claim that VE isn’t "quality work" is nonsense at best. The point about rewarding faster content producers was also upsetting: he mentioned offhandedly that he would probably announce an adventure that updates with 1,000 pages in one go, but failed to address what would happen if all of those pages happened to be utter shit.

There is a disconnect between Makin’s explanations and what he’s actually doing. Encouraging faster update schedules at the cost of quality is in direct opposition to the reason he gives for not announcing VE—encouraging comics that update faster but have less thought put into them is the exact opposite of what most people want. There is indeed a middle ground to be had between quality and pacing, but encouraging one over the other is farcical.

Of course, these discreptions in his explanation make less sense assuming that he is giving this criticism in good faith. The alternative is that he is simply following his desires and giving empty justifications in order to get people to stop bothering him about it. I can’t say with complete certainty which he’s doing at this point in time, but if it turns out this is in fact what’s going on then he deserves every ounce of anger and controversy that follows him.

His wanton disregard for the power that he holds over people is a continued source of agony and community wastefulness: instead of recognizing the potential he holds as the leader of this community, he renounces his responsibility when he doesn’t want to deal with problems (many of which he causes himself) and retains it when he can get what he wants. These are categorically selfish traits, and being forced to recognize that over the last so many months has been an exhausting, often deeply saddening experience.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem as if there’s any way to get through to him on these matters. I’m forced to resume my position of solidly ignoring him when I can and taking care of things regardless of his chicanery. Revlar has spoken at length, especially today, about finding ways to convince Makin to abandon his nonsense; he was prompted in this discussion by my anger earlier in the morning, as he understands very well that Makin is not swayed by such displays.

Yet, for all of Revlar’s advice neither of us have come any closer to actually devising a fool-proof way of getting through to him: the biggest way of convincing Makin to do something would be through the tyranny of the masses, and I have serious doubts that even that would work—gathering a large enough group of people to air their grievances against him would only succeed if everyone were unified in their message and refused to let it go. Unfortunately, I am certain that he would create some distraction and would succeed in breaking up the coalition through diversionary tactics, and it would amount to nothing in the end.

All of this is very dispiriting to consider and reinforces the idea that I need to rethink Makin as an individual in his entirety. It’s especially disappointing because I feel as if he and I manage to get along most of the time. Toast and I had a discussion about this where he states that Makin and I are foils of each other (an assessment that made me personally uncomfortable in its implication), and that Makin is given more license to do what he does because I exist, in a way. I don’t know how much stock to put in this—it is amusing in a way, but also unsettling. What am I supposed to do about all of this? Is there anything I can do?

Nothing more for today.

---

25^th of March 2018

There has been some alarming developments that I was previously unaware of. Apparently about a month ago, James Roach announced his release from What Pumpkin. A couple days ago on the 23rd of this month it was his last day. In addition to this, artists Poinko and Gina were let go as well. It is clear that James at the very least is under an NDA about the conditions surrounding his release, which is extremely concerning to a lot of people.

Tipsy made a post on her Tumblr yesterday which was over this subject, and provides a good background into the history of these sorts of developments and why people are increasingly worried over the departure of these workers. In short, the pattern of staff releases and a lack of communication from WP over the matter preceded an intense delay in the release of the game, where "several weeks of bug-testing" turned into nine additional months of hard development time. All of this is—for all outward appearances—sudden and most importantly unwanted. Not only are we unaware of why the staff being released is happening, but we are also left in the dark as to the future of the project.

James, Gina, and Poinko all being released can only be to the overall detriment of Hiveswap at this point. It is no secret that many of us were at least partially unsatisfied with the way Hiveswap was being handled, but it was obtaining a style that we could be familiar with and recognize immediately. With two concept artists and a musician gone, what is going to happen to the artistry of the game? With luck it’ll remain unchanged or maybe even improve somehow, but it would be extremely jarring and—in a word—bad for the game to suddenly shift in the way it’s being presented.

On a more personal note, too, James has released a couple of details about Hiveswap development that I found interesting, such as a post mentioning a concept character codenamed "Busker". Busker was apparently written so that if you came up to him and said the right things, he would play you a small song as a street performer. Busker was written out of the game due to being a one-off appearance, and thus not needed. This is a fairly esoteric detail in the face of everything else about the game coming out right now, but it is something I find intriguing and somewhat concerning.

I like to play video games a lot, and naturally so do many others in the HSD. After so many years of playing them, a lot of us have begun to intuit various things about game design. I don’t claim to be an expert by any means, but a game like Hiveswap is predicated on having interesting interactions with all manner of things. Act 1 accomplished this to a pretty significant degree: the game was fun and compelling because you felt like seeking out connections between things to see what those interactions would yield.

The removal of Busker is kind of the opposite of that idea. He may have been a character you only see once, but having the extra, unimportant goal of being able to get him to play music for you is a detail that adds life to the game and makes it more fun for people to try to do everything they can. In a game that’s about exploring your environment and finding answers to puzzles, what good is it to remove interesting elements which would otherwise compel people to explore the game more?

That personal gripe aside, all of this just signals an increasing disconnect of this game from its target. Although it is meant to be accessible to anyone, Hiveswap resonates far and away the most with Homestuck fans. Part of the dynamic of Homestuck has always been involvement with the community, and this news feels like the latest development in a trend of trying to get away from that community. Concerns about the eventual fate of the property and how fans will be treated are common now—we earnestly hope that this is not ill-fated, but the treatment of these artists who have been enmeshed in the project for so long does not inspire much confidence.

I had a rather pleasant exchange with everyone later at night—Toast and others were asking about my history with the Sydlexia community, and I provided a more fleshed out history of the decline of that community, and stuff that came after it. This led to a general powwow of storysharing, wherein many of us revealed their histories on the internet. Some, like a user named tmtmtl30, lamented "not having an interesting history", which I found amusing. Minish briefly described his history with the Undertale Wiki, a revelation which was vaguely stunning to us.

Minish described us as being far less "abusive" than his previous internet community, which was gratifying to hear. We have our problems with him on occasion and I worry what he must think, but I believe that at the end of the day, no matter how fierce a problem may have been he manages to come around and realize that we’re fine in all actuality. It reinforces to me the idea that this place is a positive one, and I’m happy it can serve as such for people.

The conversation proceeded in much this way for a while, and now many hours later a few of them, including Phantos, Kayjeth, Lobster, Minish, Canis, and a fellow named gslayer14 are all discussing random tidbits like SCP and the eventual fate of humanity. It’s 3:30 AM EST, and everyone involved in this discussion appears lively, with their own interpretations of the end of the universe. It reminds me greatly of long nights spent chatting idly with friends from Sydlexia, often going into the wee hours of the night. I feel an immense affection for them right now, and I hope that at least everyone present can be happy with their time here.

Nothing more for today.

---

27^th of March 2018

The glowing feeling of the last entry faded yesterday as I was reintroduced to old conflicts and annoyances. Yet, I don’t feel that bad about it all. It is certainly tiresome to deal with various aspects of this place, especially if one is concerned with approaching everything in good faith, but it is something that I’m willing to involve myself in and try to improve as long as I’m able. An assortment of interactions over the last couple of days have reconfirmed my appreciation for this place, even in spite of its problematic elements.

Yesterday, I finished streaming a game called Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective for an average of ten people at any given time, which was really exciting. It was suggested by Tensei and Niklink, and I had been putting in at least a couple hours each night. The conclusion brought with it a flurry of excitement, and participants of the stream like Tipsy and a couple others began posting relevant memes in the HSD.

Far from annoying people, it only inspired the discussion to turn towards what I should play next. I’m really happy that everyone involved enjoys watching me, at least so far. I’d like to pick something that continues to be fun for everyone, but of course it’s hard to ensure something like that. Hopefully this continues to be a positive experience—I might give it a break, I’m sure saturating people with my playing games all the time is a surefire way to bore them.

After the stream ended though, I was massively exhausted: it takes a lot of energy to do something like that, and the net result was that I was only sort of present for the rest of the evening. That is, until later at night when we started discussing the end of Homestuck as we’ve got it so far. I’ve touched on this subject at length, but a refresher may be helpful.

Back on April 13th 2016, the final major part of the comic, Act 7, was released. As I’ve said in the past, an enormous part of the response was confusion and, eventually, upset at the conclusion. It was not what we had expected and it felt like it left an absurd of plot threads untouched that we had been curious about, so naturally there was significant furor. This was accompanied by a newpost from Hussie declaring Act 7 to be, in no uncertain terms, the final installment of the comic.

With the response being what it was already, one should understand why this concurrent newspost would have only made matters worse. In a matter of hours, Hussie made an edit to his newspot saying that "for some time" he had been considering an epilogue. This mollified people, but the initial response was not subdued; this assurance was too little too late, and the comic was for all intents and purposes a perceived disaster.

Today, the discussion centered around what Hussie’s true intentions may have been in writing the edit to that newspost. "For some time" implies a considerable length of time, indicating that he never intended Act 7 to be a standalone thing. Yet, the way in which the addendum was supplied felt like a scrambled, hasty attempt to pacify angry fans to many at the time. This last point was the focus of the talk: mainly between myself, Revlar, and then Putnam, it centered around the likelihood of Hussie actually planning to include an epilogue or if he had attempted to mislead us way back when.

Putnam was vehemently against this interpretation, because it assumes bad faith on Andrew Hussie’s part. The overarching idea to this is that there are two equally likely possibilities, one of which makes out Hussie to be a liar and the other to assume that he was telling the truth. Given that the probability of either one being true is the same, to Putnam this means that one should assume good faith and perceive Hussie as speaking truthfully on the matter.

Yet, Revlar and I weren’t convinced. Revlar spoke in much harsher times than I did, which lead to comments from Cait on the matter. Initially I tried to speak in more neutral terms—while I personally believe that Hussie only added the edit in to calm people down, I didn’t want to speak so bluntly on the matter in case that proved to be untrue. Unfortunately, I was tired at this point and eventually stopped caring about maintaining this air of neutrality.

I abandoned all pretenses and started siding with Revlar, speaking perhaps in more blunt terms than even he. I brought up Hussie’s past and made a few scathing jokes about how Hussie "has never misled anyone on anything ever", and eventually lost interest as it dragged on for many minutes afterwards (we’ve been through this song and dance enough times in the past that I felt it unnecessary to stick it out and see what happened).

Today after some much needed rest I was reflecting on this, and I felt bad about my untoward behavior towards Putnam and whoever shared his side of the argument. I thus went to go apologize to him, but he responded only with "literally when were you being rude?" This took me by surprise at first, but then I had to laugh: this exact scenario has played out a number of times before.

There has been at least two or three occasions where I’ve become flippant or (what I perceive as) rude in a conversation with Putnam, only to feel bad about it and offer an apology to him later. He rebuts by saying that he didn’t see me as rude at all, which always manages to catch me off guard. Makin explained today that it’s because people like himself and Putnam are emotionally detached from conversations, hinting in a possibly taunting fashion the idea that it was because they were too rational for emotional attachment.

Of course, I think this is mostly a crock of shit. I have my doubts Makin believes this instead of merely trying to propagate the rationality meme even further, and indeed I feel as if most of the conversations he participates in are so he may gain amusement out of them. Even if he does sincerely believe it, he has shown emotion in conversations before; his supposition is thus silly to me. Otherwise, Putnam is decidedly more rational than Makin—at least outwardly—but argues often about things that are not strictly rational in nature. Perhaps I’ve commented on this subject too often, or it’s becoming tired; I can feel myself growing bored with this conjecture as I type.

Far more interesting to me is the revisiting of a topic today that I seem not to have written about in a long while, and for relevant reasons: Hiveswap Discord has fallen out of the collective consciousness of our group and has been relegated to something less related to us in nature. People there, like Icel, have repeatedly suggested in no uncertain terms that they want to cut ties with the HSD completely and be allowed to do their own thing. I‘ve honestly been arguing for that almost since day one.

Even if it weren’t for that outright intent, there just haven’t been that many noteworthy events between our two communities lately. I would go so far as to say that there have been none whatsoever: it seems as if more modern conflicts arise as a result of already extant ones, which is pointless and frustrating to pursue. I think that HVSD has already achieved its desire of being irrelevant to us, and I think there are no shortage of people who will agree on both sides that this development is for the best. This will be the last I write of them, save for some immense catastrophe between us.

As insurance against anyone so inclined to manufacture such a disaster, I will also not write about HVSD if anyone from HSD can be conclusively pointed to as the catalyst for whatever problems may arise. As a general outward statement, don’t make me have to write a disclaimer out in full for this issue. I’m tired of having to deal with people trying to be "clever" and finding gaps in my words instead of understanding the spirit of what I’m trying to say. You know who you are.

Later in the day, Difarem made a program—a neural network—that took in all of the posts in mspa-lit as data and spit out randomized phrases attached to also random handles in text files. Dif provided text samples filled with dozens of of these random phrases, and the chat was quickly consumed by their silliness for about two and a half hours, predictably to the great enjoyment of some and immense annoyance of others.

In total there were over 30 batches of text samples that Dif provided, and each one of them contained an ample amount of chance phrases or groups of phrases that were humorous to us, often as flanderizations of our behavior. My personal favorites included one such grouping of Makin and myself, structured as such: "Makin: it’s good bad / Drew Linky: no", perfectly encapsulating the spirit of our interactions. There were countless examples of this from a hefty portion of our users.

This was greatly amusing to most present, but a few such as Tipsy and Cookie were not pleased with how much it dominated the chatroom in the process. In keeping with my apparently lowered inhibitions I tried to cut to the heart of the matter:

the only time anyone gets upset about shit in this channel is when they can't be part of what's going on, if people were more patient and just decided to come back when things were more accessible none of these things would really be that controversial.

A small part of me regrets being so blunt in this matter—I’ve stressed before that I try to be diplomatic in what I’m doing at all times, but at this point in the conversation being tired was overriding my desire to maintain the cordiality of it all.

Thankfully, despite any of my perceived rudeness the conversation continued just fine. I think I give us too little credit in our ability to handle criticism or behavior that is decidedly "smushy" in nature. As an aside, "smush" is a concept loosely defined as flamboyant and often inflammatory behavior that forces people to stop and regard you with bewilderment, as typified by an emote we have called "makinsmush": which is often used liberally to great comedic effect. As should be expected it is also used as an actual callout when the need arises.

Nothing more for today.

---

28^th of March 2018

Something happened today that I feel vindicates everything I’ve been trying to do over the last couple of months with prepping this document for public release. Pushback from people was upsetting and made me feel as if I was making an enormous mistake in doing this, but I was reminded in a very concrete way of why I bothered to do all of this in the first place.

Before I made this a publically accessible document, I distributed all of this material on a more private basis: people asked to see it, they were vetted somehow since personal information was more excessive back then, and if they were approved they got a copy of the latest release, as well as being put on a list for people to automatically receive updates (a laborious and exhausting effort due to its inefficiency). There were of course people who asked to see it and were denied for a variety of reasons—one such individual was a user named Tetrahedron.

Tetra is an altgen personality, shitposting lightly in places they’re not supposed to (or at the very least, appearing to shitpost and generally confusing everyone involved as to their true intentions). Due to this, it was decided not to give Tetra a copy of the journal, at which they became extremely upset at being left out. This pattern played out with a number of other individuals, and every time I saw it I felt a little worse about being unable to share this information with them.

Thus I was inspired to really push for making it a more accessible document. I was extremely happy to have it out there so that people like Tetra would be able to see it. I had assumed he would find it when it was announced, but apparently Tetra took a break from the HSD for a couple of months for unspecified reasons, and wasn’t aware of any of this.

Journal discussion came up briefly again today and Tetra briefly mentioned being upset about and requested people not talk about it (a move I would consider selfish, but that’s less important for the purposes of this entry). Everyone was confused about his statement so I decided to pursue it, and discovered he was unaware of our efforts to push it out publically.

He was still upset that everyone else was getting to read this and he apparently wasn’t. I actually laughed at this and immediately informed him of the truth. It was a trivial matter to tell him he could read it now and provide a link—I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel the slightest bit smug, and even later I still feel pretty satisfied with the chain of events that has culminated in this encounter.

I feel it’s worthwhile to restate that this document is for people like Tetra, who want to know more. I don’t know if any ulterior motive is involved here, and unfortunately I’m aware that people would try to use this information inappropriately, but for my ideal—openly available information for the convenience of the curious—this is optimal. Everyone should be able to read this if they want to, and I’m happy that my efforts appear to be paying off so far.

Nothing more for today.

---

29^th of March 2018

There was actually really comprehensive discussion today, I’ll do my best to render it with justice to the original.

It all started with an errant conversation about the bigwarnings tumblr, which hasn’t been relevant since it was created (a fact many of us are thankful for). I’ve written at length on bigwarnings before but it merits a brief reexplanation: bigwarnings is a Tumblr blog that was created by someone many months ago with a significant amount of knowledge and experience in our general community, as evidenced by the highly specific nature of the posts there. It is written anonymously, no doubt so that the person responsible will not have to face direct criticism for it. To this day no one is sure who wrote it, although many people have guessed.

The very existence of the bigwarnings blog is extremely annoying for obvious reasons. It would be more defensible if we knew exactly who was responsible, because then we might understand the circumstances that led to its creation. As it is, all of the complaints on bigwarnings are aggravating in the extreme for two reasons: the first and most obviously gross violation is that all of the screenshots used as "evidence" are taken out of context and specifically made to look as bad as possible, without any real substance to them.

The second and less obvious problem, which is arguably more important, is that these complaints rob the criticism of real weight because they fail to address actually significant issues that do in fact exist in our server. Anyone who has read this document and especially those personally familiar with the HSD know that it is replete with all manner of problems that need to be addressed somehow, but none of the things that the bigwarnings blog brings up are particularly substantive or convincing.

I guess rehashing this further is unnecessary, except to say that it is extremely annoying. Yet, in the end that was all it ever was: annoying. It was the attempt of a disgruntled malingerer to draw attention to things they deemed a serious issue, but instead their whinging only served as a reminder (to me, if no one else) of the scale of what is so hotly contested. That is to say, it is a reminder of how small our place in the world really is.

Our community is rather large considering the source material and conditions of our existence, but in the grand scheme of things we are fairly insignificant. I don’t say this as admonishment of some kind, but rather as a simple truth. Indeed, I think it’s actually a nice thing. It’s a pocket of our own, something that we have to ourselves and for the most part insular. Nothing we do here matters in terms of the seriously concrete.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that idea though, in the midst of all the discourse that happens. More often than not we find ourselves involved in criticizing others, to the point that it blinds us to all else or removes our sense of scale. I recognize the hypocrisy in saying so, but that sort of tunnel vision is abhorrent, if not outright dangerous. In light of this, my defense is simply that I try to maintain that sense of perspective and consciously recognize the exact extent to which this place actually matters.

None of this is to say that I don’t think our community is pointless or doesn’t matter: I still care very much, but it is necessary to compartmentalize things and treat them appropriately. I wonder if our influence will grow in any significant way. Of course, we will (without some exceptionally bizarre turn of events) never become influential beyond the scope of Homestuck itself, but there is a non-zero chance that the HSD may become more significant in the future of the fandom as a whole. I’m interested to see how this plays out.

More relevant to today, our talk about the bigwarnings blog also led to some timely reminiscing about Elvish. The exact progression of the conversation made sense at the time, but in retrospect makes me laugh with how convoluted it is to spell out:

The talk about bigwords led to Tipsy recounting a callout post she made; Makin jokingly asked why Tipsy hasn’t called him out, but she said that Makin hasn’t done anything shitty enough to warrant being called out; after some laughing and pointed reminders of Makin’s previous behavior, Tipsy clarifies that Makin hasn’t done anything similar to the person she was personally calling out, namely "abusing a teenager"; this prompts further reminders of Elvish, and how many of the greatest complaints levied against Makin involve that specific event.

And so it goes.

From here we got into a rather lengthy conversation about the actual nature of Elvish’s presence in the HSD, and the circumstances leading to their departure or dismissal from the community. NOMW discourse contributed to this as I’ve previously described, but then I was made aware of something that I had never heard of previously: apparently Elvish personally messaged or pinged Cohen in an attempt to get him involved. At the risk of spreading misinformation, let it be assumed that this is only a rumor until it’s otherwise confirmed; in the case that it’s true, however, it paints a very disquieting picture.

This previously missing piece of the puzzle was small, but significant nonetheless. It also prompted a conversation about the state of What Pumpkin’s relationship with us, and their attitude towards the HSD. It was clarified by various people that they don’t necessarily hate the server as a whole, and instead only hate Makin’s presence here (hardly surprising, unfortunately). Makin himself mentioned that the only one of WP that has a reason to dislike him anymore is Cohen.

This line of discussion petered out eventually, but not before a good round of joking centering around the concept of non-disclosure agreements, or NDAs. There is an intense hatred of NDAs that abounds in our server because of their very nature: it shrouds things in secrecy that most would prefer to be in the open, a symbol of contractual power that complicates things beyond what should be necessary or morally supportable.

Many people belonging to WP have signed such documents, promoting much ire among us whenever we learn such is the case. It is fairly common for us, then, to trash such NDAs and turn their existence into as much of a joke as possible. I don’t recall the exact reason why it was said, but the last thing I want to comment on is another joke that’s repeated incommonly here: Tipsy made a pass at Makin based on his behavior, saying that he’s secretly an AI learning to interact with people, which is why he’s often so bad at doing so. I’m actually quite fond of this joke myself due to some parallels in the literature he likes to share with us.

Nothing more for today.

---

31^st of March 2018

There have been some more alarming developments regarding What Pumpkin. Tipsy wrote another post on the matter: the most radical of all the listed changes is Cohen changing his description on Twitter from "makes Hiveswap" to "made Hiveswap", the ramifications of which should be obvious. Additionally, sections of the What Pumpkin website have been scrubbed and the link to the WP merchandise section has been removed.

Tipsy summarizes all this succinctly: "It seems to me like Whatpumpkin is being stripped from their own website." There is significant cause for distress in these latest events, although no one is quite sure what to do about it at this point. I mentioned in a different entry that I worry about the future of Hiveswap: how will it turn out based on all these changes.

It seems Hiveswap: Act 2 will appear much the same as Act 1 did in tone and style, which is fine. Even if it’s not spectacular, the consistency is important. Where many people will become upset is if there is an incredible shift in the aesthetic or the way the game is played, fans will become despondent. Not to mention if the game is somehow canceled after all this time: nothing less than a riot would ensue.

In absence of and other concrete news, I will wait to describe the situation until more news is available or something significant occurs. The last I will say for now is that I hope the project itself and especially all the people involved with it—past or present—will be fine.

Honestly, I guess there isn’t much else to say for today. I feel like I should say something more: in a matter of hours I’ll be releasing the latest update to this document publically, and based on patterns in the past I’d say it’s become something of a tradition to write something optimistic or positive in the last entry before doing so.

I don’t think I’d pursue this if it felt wrong or inappropriate to do so at the time: I could be wrong, but in the past when a particularly heavy or disruptive event was taking place at the time of a release, I kept the tone of the release suitably somber. I’m not actually sure why I’m pointing this out except to call conscious attention to the fact that it is indeed something I do. I admit that this explanation is making me laugh even as I type it, but this sort of self-referential analysis is becoming a tad masturbatory so I think I’ll move on.

In the last entry on the 29th, I wrote a whole thing about the nature of the community in the grand scheme of things, specifically that it’s kind of small. I still maintain that this is true, the HSD is just a tiny and insignificant thing nestled away in a remote corner of the internet, and after so much time has passed it is a near 100% chance that no trace of us will remain and that we will have been completely forgotten.

This is not to say that it renders the HSD meaningless or unimportant, certainly not on a more personal scale. Some people have openly criticized this document as being inherently worthless or a waste of time. Even if I didn’t find this offensive, it’s simply untrue: the HSD is important, to the people who use it. Even more so for people like me, who might consider it their internet home so to speak.

Is that sort of behavior healthy? I’m not really sure. Probably not, but this is all I know for now. Last night I was writing down some thoughts about this place, deciding what it is I wanted to say based on what I said in the previous paragraph. What I settled on feels somewhat inadequate for what I would like to say, but it’s enough for my purposes: "I love this place". It’s of course important to remember not to take it so seriously all the time, but isn’t that true of everything, more or less?

It’s good to maintain a sense of perspective and remember when not to care too much, but there’s no harm in that affection otherwise. I care a lot for all the people that I see here on a regular basis, and seeing the HSD change as it has over the last year and a half is wonderful. Sometimes those changes are unpleasant, sometimes they’re enjoyable.

As turbulent as it may seem, this is just how life is: the more time that passes the more I’m convinced that this online habitat of ours is less a simple simulacrum and more a bona fide abode. We have our rough patches, and as it is in real life people will come and go, offenses will be had in abundance. This doesn’t need to be the only take away though: so too do we laugh and enjoy ourselves, and grow closer over time. It may seem weird to some, but in spite of the problems we have sometimes I’m genuinely glad this place and all the people in it exist.

Nothing more for today.

---

1^st of April 2018

Today is April Fool’s Day, something that a lot of people in our server have been looking forward to. There is a lot of potential for japes and pranks in any online community, and ours especially is prone to some pretty big jokes even on days that aren’t dedicated to the concept. I’ve already described the prank that we did last year at great length, specifically in the entry from the 28th of August 2017. Given the ambitious nature of last year’s prank, there was of course great trepidation over what we would do for April Fool’s Day this year.

This year’s events involved some rather off-the-cuff stuff. First, shortly before April Fool’s Day proper, Makin created a poll asking whether or not we should split #art-music into respective channels. The rest of the mods and I all thought this was a horrible idea: historically, splitting channels has always led to a net decrease in activity, as was displayed with #cartoon-tv. #cartoons and #tv brought in less conversation combined than #cartoon-tv did by itself. Obviously, this was untenable so Makin recombined the channels sometime last year.

We’re afraid that this will be a repeat of history, but the responses to the poll overwhelmingly voted “yes” to splitting the channels, so now we have #music and #art-cosplay. They both appear active for now, but time will tell if this division is sustainable. Rar has also expressed some concerns about the development of #music in even just the one day since it was created, although I’m not privy to the details on that matter. I’ll comment further when I can.

Another, more nuanced joke for today is that people were allowed to type in “quirks”. Quirks are modifications to one’s typing style that are—in theory—meant to convey a distinct tone or feeling to one’s speech patterns. This is based off of parts of Homestuck itself, where certain characters display quirks that are meant to give them flavor (1337 speak is a historical and in-story example).

Unfortunately, this practice is one of the things about Homestuck that exploded into ridiculous popularity at its height. This led to significant overuse of quirks such that the practice is generally seen as undesirable, and now most places have a moratorium on using quirks. Some exceptions include roleplay websites and then Pesterchum, among others.

All of this is to say that the ban on quirks was “lifted” for today, and the result was actually quite amusing for a time. Quirks saw massive increase in usage at first, but then as people grew tired of using them they instituted their own ban on using quirks. This result was a little unexpected: it turns out a simple solution to the quirk problem would have been to simply let everyone burn themselves out on it ages ago.

I jest, of course. If people had been allowed to use quirks from the start then it would probably have ballooned into an outrageous problem over the years as the behavior was normalized. It was rather entertaining to see what many people came up with though; a lot of people end up creating quirks that are visually interesting or serviceable, but not really emotive or very good at expressing some sort of speech pattern without also being tremendously annoying.

In keeping with the holiday spirit, most quirks were only meant to be funny: Rar spoke in nothing but Chinese all day, with others following suit in various languages. WoC impersonated a character from Homestuck so flawlessly that it was honestly frightening on a visceral level, yet also extremely entertaining. It was a shock to discover he was responsible for the impersonation, and in the end it managed to contribute heavily to the bizarre atmosphere of the day.

The last and arguably biggest joke that was implemented was the creation of a channel which was filled only with automated messages generated from the neural network Difarem made the other day. Each message was attached to a person and given a smushed version of that person’s avatar to complete the uncanny repertoire. No one was allowed to post in this channel aside from the associated bot messages, but everyone in the server could see it.

For most of the day, #hangout served as a sort of viewing room: since we weren’t allowed to comment in the bot channel itself, most observations were conducted from there. Especially funny or noteworthy bot messages were pinned, and the channel was archived at the end of the day. It was named #read-tnc, TNC standing for “The Northern Caves”. TNC is one of Makin’s shills, and consists of a group of online friends obsessed with the works of a particular author. The bot channel was supposed to mimic a phenomenon in the story where the characters enter an alternate reality of mishmashed nonsense, after which they become insane—rather on the nose, one might say.

In all, this year’s April Fool’s Day pranks were satisfying enough but unfortunately just couldn’t hold up to the intensity of last year. We may need to plan something far more extreme for April Fool’s of 2019, I have no doubt in my mind that we could come up with something truly extraordinary if we tried. Then again, it will be difficult to top the idea of Makin leaving the server—there is little else I can imagine that is so unlikely. Thankfully we have an entire year to come up with something new.

There has been some more news about Hiveswap: it was discovered today through a post by James Roach that neither he nor Toby Fox will be associated with future acts of Hiveswap, and that apparently there is an NDA in place to prevent us from knowing anything else. This was somewhat expected given the recent loss of other employees from WP, but it is yet more of the trend that has begun to irk us so. What Pumpkin truly seems to be dissolving right before our eyes, and none of us are quite sure what to make of it.

The last thing I’ll say for today is a piece on how the entries for the month of March were received, at the risk of seeming yet still full of myself. I was greeted with a wide range of criticism on the last five weeks’ worth of writing, to the effect that it seemed to be too emotional or charged in nature. People who are usually wholly receptive to the document—Makin, Toast, as a couple examples—were instead rather unsatisfied with how it turned out.

They made mention that a lot of the entries of the last month were little more than glorified complaining, and after some consideration I’ve tried to come up with an explanation for why this may be. March seemed to be extremely turbulent, with lots of conflict happening as one might expect for us. Despite this, there was in fact very little that “happened” to give things that feeling of substantiation.

I’ve tried to quiet my discomfort with this by saying I only write about what material I’m given, but looking through some of these older entries it is very clear that I was upset and trying to unleash my personal feelings through my writing. My criticisms of Makin (while still well deserved) are less objective and more vindictive in nature than usual. It is clear that--yet again--I need to rethink how I’m approaching this and try to figure out a more tenable way of expressing my frustration whenever it should happen to arise, especially in an effort to more accurately preserve the events that occur here.

After some more extensive discussion on the topic with other people present today, I believe we’ve all settled on the idea that March was “just kind of a bad month”. Between our seeming collective irascibility and the lack of very many concrete events to hone-in on, it was just sort of a generally unfortunate time period. I guess the reality of non-eventfulness can’t be helped sometimes. We all hope that April will be a better month for us, and even just with today I think we all already feel like it is better. Here’s to hoping that the feeling will continue.

Nothing more for today.

---

2^nd of April 2018

One of the criticisms lobbied against me yesterday was the fact that I failed to cover something important from March, and I will do so now. This event comes in the form of an addition to Makin’s shill list, namely that of a “leaderboard”. In short, it is a list of all the works Makin is shilling, and every time you complete one of the works your name is put on the board. With this you can keep track of who has read what from Makin’s shills.

I initially ignored this development because it felt insignificant or like a rather large joke, but apparently I was hugely mistaken in this assessment: a sizeable number of people have started reading more of the shill list specifically because of these leaderboards, with two people now having finished the list in its entirety: Minish and Gitaxian. Toast is literally one work away from completing it himself, and then a smattering of others such as Revlar and Khauvinkh are within a couple works of completion as well. Griever has positively been tearing through the list specifically because of the leaderboards, which surprised me for some reason.

I was skeptical of the efficacy of this leaderboard in motivating people to read the shill list more, but it appears my doubt was misplaced. It feels as if the shill list is becoming far more institutionalized than it was before—no doubt this was Makin’s intent, but it went from something seen as a joke to something that is viewed with at least some degree of legitimacy. The general attitude among detractors has only deepened; people like Nights and Tensei have expressed displeasure with being included on the leaderboard since it makes it seem that they’re interested in completing the shill list as well. However, such complaints have been completely offset by the increase of readers. It’s interesting to me how fiercely Makin pushes this literature onto other people, I wonder if he might have any possible ulterior motive for it besides sharing what he loves with others.

Today I was consciously made aware of the fact that Rar wants to step down from being the #music pseudo. It mentions that the channel has rapidly developed in a way that it had not foreseen. Olki is also acting as the pseudo of #music right now, and Makin apparently expressed surprise that it had not asked to step down sooner. I assume Rar would still be acting as pseudo to #art-cosplay, which I am content with. Rar seems most happy there and is familiar with the lay of the land so to speak.

More related to the fandom at large, something incredibly tumultuous has happened. At some point early in the day, around 2:30 PM EST, the official MSPA website mspaintadventures.com completely disappeared. Instead, it now redirects to homestuck.com. The ramifications are unclear but no doubt far-reaching implications can be gathered from this change.

The website is, naturally, more dedicated to Homestuck than MSPA was. This comes with the nuance that it takes emphasis away from other adventures Hussie has made, which some are taking to be a sign that Hussie will in fact not be working on any other new stories in the future. This prognosis feels a bit premature to me, although I certainly hope it’s not the case.

Due to the complex nature of Homestuck, it has many pages that rely on the browser and page layout in order to achieve a particular effect in-story. In the first breath after people learned of homestuck.com popping up, there was concern that these pages would be significantly altered or, at worst, rendered so poorly in the transition from Flash to HTML5 or what have you that they would be unusable. Thankfully, with a few exceptions it seems our concern was mostly unwarranted.

Regardless of how necessary that concern may be, Skyplayer has begun reading through in earnest—checking more important pages first and less important ones after—for significant changes that could compromise the integrity of the experience. This would be noticed most easily by people who read the story on MSPA first, but there is worthwhile concern that such errors could drastically impact new readers as well. Skyplayer will present these transitioning-related errors to whoever is in charge of managing the site—likely Viz Media at this point—should such suggestions be requested by them in the future.

Particularly worthy of note was that, shortly after homestuck.com went online, there was an “Info” tab with links to related materials, such as a link to the fandom-driven Homestuck Wiki. I bring this up because, for a short while, the Homestuck and Hiveswap subreddit itself was also linked there, something that caught a lot of us off guard. The effects of this were immediately noticeable.

Shortly after the new site went up, we started receiving a far larger influx of people than we were used to seeing on any particular day. In the span of maybe an hour we saw several dozen new people join, and at this point we were what I could only call giddy at the development. It was highly amusing to us that this was happening, but then all of that was undercut a short while later when the link to the subreddit was removed from homestuck.com.

This change, while it probably should have been expected, was more than a little disappointing. We’re not sure why exactly this was done and any in depth speculation at this point is completely unwarranted, but for a short time there was considerable furor in mspa-lit over it. Tipsy echoed my feelings on the matter, saying something to the effect of “I would have preferred that they never added us honestly”. Others are more ambivalent on the matter, although in general I think all of us were at least greatly amused by the incident despite any anger over it.

On the opposite side of this are people like Niklink, who is distressed with the idea of Viz’s involvement in the Homestuck property. There is a warranted concern that corporate influence will turn the work into a veritable cash cow, and that Viz muddying the waters will lead to nothing short of complete fandom ruination in the pursuit of profit. Archie has taken this viewpoint to its utmost extreme, publicly saying that he was “literally in tears” over this development because it “is the death of fandom as we know it”. I can’t speak for anyone else but this felt overly dramatic to me.

I think that most of us are urging for calm and to not make too many assumptions on the matter. There is a nonzero chance that Viz will put the link to the subreddit back up in the future, although it’s impossible to tell at this point. It’s important to point out that, up to this point, Makin had been offline and thus was out of the loop on certain points. He had been around for the link being introduced on the website, going so far as to put up a “Welcome to the Subreddit!” post in preparation for it.

With this in mind, Makin was not around for when we discovered that the subreddit had been taken off the page. Many of us were worried what he might think about this development, but when he came back he seemed downright pleased with it. Confused, everyone present pressed him a bit further on why he was okay with the change. He mentioned the problem of getting too many people in the server, citing 10,000 as a decent amount to keep the place active “100% of the time”, and that many more would lead to destabilization of the HSD (a phenomenon I’ve described at length in the form of “The Eternal September”, the entry over which can be found on the 26th of January 2018).

The last noteworthy thing of today is that there were yet more firings at What Pumpkin, to the point that it truly seems the company has been gutted completely. Significant artists, musicians, and the creative director himself are all now unattached to the project. While this raises enormous questions over the future of Hiveswap and indeed Homestuck itself, there is the added benefit that our baggage with What Pumpkin is effectively gone.

We may have an opportunity here for a new start, and perhaps to establish some solid relations with Viz if such an opportunity may arise. While it is highly unlikely that such a thing may happen, it is still a possibility that people can get excited about—historically the community absence of WP has been enormously bothersome to a wide variety of people, but there is the chance that Viz will be more involved in the community from here on. Time will tell if this arrangement is a more beneficial one for us.

Nothing more for today.

---

3^rd of April 2018

The Reddit April Fool’s Day event is in full swing now. For those unfamiliar, Reddit always holds an event, which they refer to as a “social experiment”, on April Fool’s Day every year. Such events have become highly anticipated over the years due to a few of them being rather exciting and engaging for people in general.

This year’s event is called the “Circle of Trust”. Every user on Reddit with an account created before April Fool’s Day of this year (as is customary for each April Fool’s Day event) is allowed to create exactly one “circle”, which is graphically depicted as a literal circle containing smaller, orbiting circles. The circle comes with a password set by the owner, and one invites people to join their circle by sharing the password. Once the password is put in correctly, users then have the option to join or betray the circle. Betraying the circle permanently disbands and destroys it.

As more people are invited to a circle, the chance of that circle being destroyed grows larger. Therein lies the experiment: Reddit is no doubt collecting statistics on average circle size before betrayal, patterns of inviting people to circles, or innumerable other metrics that could be used to study human behavior through this event. This is something they have done for previous years as well; patterns will spontaneously arise throughout the course of the experiment, which is often what makes it fun for the people involved and any observers.

Naturally, this has had a noticeable effect on the HSD’s users as well. All throughout the day users were messaging each other seeing if they could join circles or have users join their circles, only distributing their own key to people they trusted. Nights and I joined each others’ circles, and his circle currently has over twenty users in it (some of whom being from CANMT, if I’m not mistaken). People are ruthlessly trying to join as many circles as they can convince people to let them in, and then betraying those circles immediately. Carlarc already betrayed Makin’s circle, and Gitaxian asked me to sacrifice mine (although for scientific purposes). Naturally they have grown quite the reputation in just a short amount of time.

Here near the end of the day, however, it is clear that this experiment is not as engaging as last years was. Many people are already tired of hearing about it (Makin: “can we stop talking about boring circles”), which is probably caused by one thing in particular: the scope of the Circle of Trust is just too small. The breadth and depth of this event is unfortunately nowhere close to what Reddit did for April of 2017. In order to help understand, I should now describe that event as well: it was an experiment simply dubbed “Place”.

With no warning or preamble, on April 1st last year the Reddit admins unveiled a blank 1000 by 1000 pixel canvas. For 72 hours any user on Reddit with an old enough account was allowed to drag and drop a colored pixel or tile onto any position of the canvas, after which there was a cooldown before they could place another. The tagline for this project on the subreddit was: “Individually you can create something. Together you can create something more.” None of us knew at the start just how true this would be.

The very beginning was loose and chaotic, with no one really sure what to do. Any creations were small due to the placement cooldown and lack of coordination. This swiftly changed, however—within a couple of hours, the first of many factions were born. In the lower right corner of the canvas, a large group of people began placing the color blue down and expanding it as rapidly as possible. Just above them, another group began doing this with the color green. In the top right corner, a similar faction arose with the color red. These three factions warred viciously for a while, until a semi-stable truce was reached and each color stuck to their own territories, eventually being subsumed by later groups.

More complicated projects arose: the flags of many countries were reproduced in various sizes, with some being fairly small and others being outrageously big; a group succeeded in completely recreating the Mona Lisa in pixel form; the Darth Plagueis copypasta was miraculously written out in its entirety and for the most part left unbothered by others; most commonly, an incredible number of individual subreddits carved their own spot out of the canvas to advertise themselves and pay homage to their subject material.

/r/Homestuck was one such subreddit, and for the three days that Place was active we organized both on the subreddit and on the HSD with frankly outrageous amounts of effort to immortalize our section of the event. Makin created an entire channel for discussion and coordination on our section of the canvas, sometimes leading the charge himself. Many such as myself, Cookiefonster, Linkslittlefriend, and Kingarthur furiously kept track of changes to our place (which had to be relocated at least once), sometimes sparking the annoyance of people who were less interested (none of whom I can recall now).

We struck alliances and bargains with other subreddits or groups in order to secure more space: at various points we were raided and attacked by other groups, and /r/India (yes, the subreddit dedicated to the country of India, of all places) once came to our aid to battle away aggressors. It was a manic event, with no one wanting to miss developments or sleep lest our place was destroyed in our absence--we were in fact forced to relocate entirely at least once.

Near the very end, we were aggrieved by a subreddit with a similar name to our own subreddit in a cheap attempt to subvert our effort for their own. As a result, some of our logo was wrongly colored at the time that the experiment was stopped, but all things considered our section of Place came out just fine. The completed canvas for Place in its entirety is commonly considered no less than modern art, and stands as a testament to the power of teamwork and sheer determination. If one looks closely enough they will find our immortalized and heartfelt contribution there as well (hint: it’s near the upper left corner just below the infamous clown from SS13, funnily enough).

More related to the modern day, the incredible flow of information from yesterday has not quite ceased: today we received yet more news, from multiple places in fact. First to comment on is a bona fide newspost from Hussie himself (in case of future updates, it’s the one on the 3^rd of April), the first thing that he’s posted to the news section since Hiveswap came out last September.

The post itself is fairly dry, and simply tells us about the site makeover in an official sense. So bereft of his iconic witty humor is the post that some people, while still positive, remarked that it didn’t actually sound like Hussie very much (“I mean, they got him to do a news post, even if it did sound like they had Andrew at gunpoint”, says Squarewave). As near as I could tell, most people were simply happy to hear from Hussie again in any capacity.

As if that weren’t enough, we received word officially from WP on their blog about all of the recent firings. The post is positively dripping with the sort of language one might expect from a company profile. This isn’t entirely surprising on its own, but it did prompt an impressive number of people reblogging the post to ask, in various fashions, “What the fuck happened to all the What Pumpkin staff that were fired?” I will be nothing short of gobsmacked if we receive any sort of public word about this.

The attitude from Tumblr is a stark reversal of what people have noted in the past; it is typical that the subreddit community and the HSD are more negative in their perceptions of what transpires concerning Homestuck, whereas the Tumblr community is usually pretty accepting of most developments. Today, the opposite is true: most people here are pretty content with these changes and the Tumblr side of the fandom is nothing short of incensed.

The reason why this reversal has occurred is not imminently clear, and I hesitate to make any final judgments on the matter. If I were forced to speculate, however, I would perhaps point towards what it is that’s being affected exactly. What Pumpkin staff historically has not had very good interactions with people from the subreddit or the HSD, but their Tumblr presence is pretty solid. It may be that users on Tumblr are far more familiar with WP staff than we are at this point, so any of their dismissals from WP are more shocking to them than they are to the HSD.

There are certainly people here who are upset at the news; Tipsy is absolutely furious with this development, but she’s stated this is because it reeks of a similar incident in the past when Hiveswap was still in development hell (she has also written a post to commemorate the dismissed staff members). In general though, people from the HSD seem to be far more content with the proceedings, and this departure from more normal attitudes is interesting to watch.

Before I get into too much detail on that though, it’s prudent to comment on an exciting new development that was also featured in the WP blog post: they released a trailer to a set of minigames that WP will be “shifting focus to”, which has been dubbed “Hiveswap Friendsim”, to come out “sometime very soon”. The minigames will consist of a visual novel style wherein the player talks with characters from the Troll Call, heralding exposition on these characters that some feel was very badly needed. Hussie is even writing for it, which is something that everyone who even remotely cares about these properties should be excited about.

Ironically, this development was one that indeed caused some upset with users from the HSD. The newspost was worded ambiguously, such that some interpreted it to mean that work on Hiveswap would be halted due to these minigames. Toast and Spiral were ungraciously missing while this was occurring, so Nights and I ended up having to go into #hiveswap for an hour or two to keep the peace and explain what this actually means to people.

The atmosphere in #hiveswap was nothing short of tense, with people arguing viciously over what these developments might mean. It was honestly a rather interesting experience, sort of like traveling to another country. I was completely surrounded by people I didn’t recognize, and the proceedings of the place were culturally mysterious to me. There was an incredible, if understandable, emphasis on relating things to the various characters from Hiveswap and especially the Troll Call, but this was of course overshadowed by the ongoing conflict of the Hiveswap Friendsim news.

One user named Dudester joined the HSD specifically because of this news, calling it “worrying corporate lingospeak” and decrying the Hiveswap Friendsim as something that would take away from Hiveswap’s development. I ended up pinning a brief summary to discourage further rabblerousing, clarifying that it is clearly specified in the newspost WP released that development on Hiveswap was still the greatest priority, although it’s not clear at this point whether WP will be working on it or if Viz Media will get one of their teams on it.

One of Dudester’s concerns was monetization: they claim that WP putting a price tag on the Friendsim would be unethical given the “low quality of the game” as evidenced by the trailer. Most tried to assure him that WP would probably not be putting a price on these minigames, or if they did it would be somewhere in the $1-2 USD range. Even this relatively low amount proved too much to contemplate, and they left the server shortly after the discussion. It is worth noting that the “low quality” of Hiveswap Friendsim was deemed a misguided understanding of how visual novels usually operate, although perhaps they were truly that put-off by the art style.

Whatever the reason for their vitriol, Dudester’s fears were confirmed by a post from the developer of Hiveswap Friendsim. This fellow is named Trace, and he was previously in charge of the site for a webcomic we followed and critiqued heavily (some would say mocked) called Neokosmos. The post stipulates that all of the Hiveswap Friendsim games will be 99 cents each. It’s not known how many of these games they plan on creating, but this price point is so low that I don’t think anyone can bother being too upset about it.

All of these developments are inordinately exciting. Bambosh summed it up concisely, saying: “it's whiplash / we went from borderline silence to borderline hourly updates in the span of two days”. The increase in activity is unlike anything I’ve seen since joining the HSD, except maybe for when Hiveswap: Act 1 came out. I would go so far as to call it magical—the only question now is whether this trend will last, something I’m sure everyone is morbidly curious to see.

Nothing more for today.

---

4^th of April 2018

There was some discussion about Bowman and Stutzman today that I felt like writing down. I’ve mentioned before that the two created a series of comedy videos on Bowman’s Youtube account that the community has received warmly. Bowman in particular is already important in the Homestuck fandom since he composed music for the comic, but Stutzman is popular for us through his videos with Bowman and is also an independent composer.

Of the two, it’s noted that Bowman appears to be satisfied with his successes. Tensei lamented over Bowman not being as popular as he deserves based on his musical talent. Makin commented: “I've always thought bowman is comfortable with where he's at”, and Minish chimed in: “man you think bowman has it bad / stutzman only gets like / three sales each album”, which is the exchange that inspired me to write about this conversation.

To be completely honest I’m not that into the music from Stutzman or Bowman (not a reflection on them in any way—I’m notoriously unattached to music in general), but something about the way that the above discussion played out helped me to become cognizant of the affection this community has for them. I’ve always been mildly puzzled by how much everyone seems to care about these two people, but regardless of why this is the case I’ve been taken by just how much everyone here enjoys the duo.

Beyond a simple enjoyment of their work, it is clear to me now that people in mspa-lit earnestly care about the success and wellbeing of Bowman and Stutzman. At one point it may have been a more casual enjoyment of their work, but in the current day it seems obvious to me—if no one else necessarily—that there is real love here for these two artists. I find these displays to be utterly heartwarming.

A trend that I’ve neglected to write on before is the increasing popularity of Star Trek with various members of mspa-lit. I guess calling it a “trend” is disingenuous—I only know of two people who are actively watching it right now, but it has been notable nonetheless. Makin started watching it sometime last month, going through episodes of The Original Series as listed by a “must watch” guide on 4chan. After he completed this he watched the movies and, perhaps partially at Tensei’s urging, began watching The Next Generation as well. Minish followed suit not too long ago, and has been positively blasting through the show so far.

To be perfectly honest, I’m surprised that Makin hadn’t seen the show before. Even if it weren’t for Star Trek’s enormous popularity worldwide, it is historically important in a rather specific sense: Star Trek gave rise to the modern concept of fanfiction, which I would have thought important enough by itself to warrant a look from Makin. Given the show’s success and long history of broadcasting, there is surely an unbelievable amount of fanfiction to sift through. Even better still, I’m sure that a significant portion of it is geared towards more rational bents of thought, which should satisfy him greatly. It is nothing short of a fanfic smorgasbord.

This all aside, there have been no more immense bombshells from Viz Media or What Pumpkin, which is probably for the best (I’ve commented often in the last two days that we’re being positively spoiled with all of this new information). I am delighted to say, though, that we are still witnessing some better interaction with Viz Media concerning the new homestuck.com website.

I mentioned already that there has been some significant trepidation with people in general over how the new website is structured, given the nature of Homestuck as a complicated form of media. A lot of pieces of the webcomic have been altered or in some cases even ruined by the transfer from Flash to HTML5, and people like Skyplayer have been meticulously combing the comic for evidence of changes or sections that need to be coded differently.

Even more impressive, Skyplayer themselves has assembled a thorough written list of these problems, and has been laboriously writing a changelog of stuff that changes in the site’s construction from day to day (this log may be found in the Related Materials document, in Appendix C under “Log of changes to homestuck.com”). The errors they find have been getting submitted to Viz Media, and here’s the part that’s catching everyone by surprise: Viz has been responding promptly to all of the important suggestions in earnest.

This has been true for all of the visual or structural elements of the website, such as the graphical inconsistencies in certain pages, but Viz has also taken other comments seriously: the site redesign initially featured agitating popup ads that would appear every 15-20 pages, which served as the basis for a lot of people’s frustration with the new site at first. After people criticized this, today we noticed that the popup ads are gone.

Another example of this behavior is in the so-called landing page, or what people see when they first enter the website. Since Homestuck came out MSPA’s landing page always displayed the very first page of the comic, which shows the protagonist standing in his room. The new website mirrored this and included that image as the landing page, but also enhanced it with similar shots of all the other main characters doing the same thing. Each character had a random chance of being the landing page for people visiting homestuck.com.

To the layman this would appear to be a positive development, and it was surely well-intended. Unfortunately, the very existence of certain characters is a massive spoiler for people who have never read the story before, and so this addition prompted some backlash. Astonishingly, after complaints were sent out people quickly discovered that Viz had removed all of the characters’ landing pages that counted as significant spoilers.

In the grand scheme of things this is a minor move, but the spirit of it is nothing short of astounding. For those of familiar with the near-complete lack of involvement from What Pumpkin, this is not unlike being found by search-and-rescuers after being stranded in the desert for years. Far be it from me to speak for everyone, but what this improved involvement signifies for the future is nothing short of exciting.

Obviously there are some who are not impressed. Revlar perhaps jokingly commented: “Stop worshipping Viz for doing basic, boring shit”, although he has always had extremely high expectations for just about everything (a more or less defensible position, all things considered). This has not deterred those of us who are excited by this turn of events, such as Makin.

Makin’s usually cynical attitude has been replaced by a joviality that is nothing short of striking. After effusing praise for Viz listening to user feedback, he suddenly brought up a possibility for what the epilogue might be now that Viz is involved; this is something Makin is usually rather pessimistic about, but in this scenario he was completely the opposite. Sora was thus prompted to asked: “Makin have you joined the "epilogue optimists" camp?” to which he responded: “with viz as they are, yes / if they can get hussie to do PR for them, they can do anything”. If that statement alone isn’t a sign of the times, then I don’t know what is.

Nothing more for today.

---

5^th of April 2018

Not a lot to speak of today: Hussie released an interview in which he spoke about his history with Homestuck and the partnership with Viz. I’ve only skimmed it myself, but from that and the reactions of others to it, that appears to be all that was worthy of note. It mostly serves as a reminder of the new print books that are supposed to be released before long, something that we’re unsure of whether to look forward to or not.

At this point the main attraction to printed Homestuck books are the commentary within--we’re certainly not enjoying them for the print medium itself, it robs Homestuck of a lot of the qualities that make it so good. Instead, the commentary itself is valuable because it offers greater insight into the making of the comic.

Unfortunately, we’re hesitant because it’s still not imminently clear whether these new printed books will features old commentary written for the previous set of prints from some years ago, or whether they will be newly written. Optimally it would include both the old commentary and new commentary, but I don’t think anyone is holding their breath.

Still, the increase in activity from Hussie himself is something we’re all happy with. Phantos described the sequence of events we’ve been subjected to over the last few years quite well:

Andrew runs out of money, inks deal with Viz, fires employees, gets rich again but has to keep working. / If someone told you that this would happen after so long and that it immediately jumpstarted a bunch of activity, idk.

It’s strange of course, but I doubt anyone could call this an uninteresting turn of events all things considered. In the end, we’re mostly just happy to have more to talk about again.

Nothing more for today.

---

6^th of April 2018

Today saw the last of the comic entries for Hiveswap. It proceeded as normal, but there was something a tad more disappointing about this week than previous. It is customary at this point to bemoan the choice of winners each week, talking about the quality of each comic included.

This was especially common of the second and third place winners when they were awarded to comics that were deemed “low effort”. One instance I can remember relied on the theme of a character (branded as being the “vaporwave troll”) to make a very quick one-off joke, which many found dissatisfying. Despite these grumblings we moved on each week, because almost every time the first place winner was satisfying enough that we didn’t mind the rest.

This week was different. There was an immense, 143-page comic draw by a user named SourisChicot called Another World. It is nothing short of impressive: drawn entirely by hand, the art is kind of rough in places but has all of the signs of a loving and dedicated creator. The story itself is enthralling at parts and actually does all of the things one would want a Homestuck/Hiveswap comic to do: it is interesting, faithful to the source material (and respectful with its exploration thereof), and is actually written well.

The comic had been in the making for a period of several weeks, and when it was finally completed recently everyone immediately assumed it was a sure win for the final week of Hiveswap comics. “if i could give this comic a rating I'd rate it 100 out of 10 tbh” one user named thedeer.jpg humorously commented, and while it’s hard for me to find them at this point rest assured that there were a plethora of comments all saying similar things.

The point is that it seemed obvious beyond a shadow of a doubt that this comic would win first prize.There was some joking that Another World would only win second or third place, given the history of the comic contest and how questionable the judging has been in the past. Sure enough, our fears were confirmed and then some.

The comic in question didn’t win first place, or second place, or even third place. It in fact did not win anything, which prompted a veritable flood of confusion (“did the 150 page comic not fuckin win” from Carlarc) and then upset (“anyone else sad that the 140+ page comic entered / In the comic contest didn't get mentioned” from Prime) when people realized what had happened.

Ever since this was revealed to us, mention of the comic contest has been utterly tainted by this injustice. It’s even led to some rather disturbing conspiracy theorizing, with users speculating that the comic was skated over because the organizers are afraid it’ll make Act 2 look bad. There is real fear that the comic was selected against because it would draw unfavorable comparisons between itself and Act 2 once it’s released, which means that people are now questioning the quality of the second installment of Hiveswap. How close this is to the actual reasoning is impossible to say and it’s more than likely inaccurate, but the possibility is worrying nonetheless.

After some time of this, the furor naturally died down. Tensei mentioned that the real reason it wasn’t selected is probably closer to “it was too long” than anything else. Toast commented: “just passively agree that its a shame that he didnt win but say that if people are fans of the comic they can support him”, and in this way the community was not totally happy with letting the author of Another World go unrewarded for their efforts. After learning Another World didn’t win, Makin asked if people wanted him to gift SourisChicot some money from the Patreon--the answer was a complete, resounding yes.

The prize for first place in the comic contest each week is $75 towards merchandise in the affiliated store. Thus, after confirming whether this was an acceptable expenditure with the Patreon donors, Makin gave the author $75. It was briefly argued that this was a better prize than winning, even, because that money can be spent anywhere instead of just in the What Pumpkin store. Despite this, I think it’s safe to say everyone feels a little worse about the entire affair for the fact that we felt compelled to do this in the first place. Tipsy summed everything up better than I ever could: “this contest ends how it began / utter bullshit”.

Outside of this, I feel like describing this odd phenomenon that’s been taking place over the last few days. It was subtle at first, but now it’s undeniable: mspa-lit has been getting far more new users than is usual. We thought this was a raid from altgen when we first noticed it, because some notable figures like $trider were among those showing up to speak more often. Yet, it seems that the majority of these people are simply wanderers who found their way in by chance.

Nonetheless, it elicited comment about such individuals. I think that one such user who has come into at least vague prominence lately is a fellow named tmtmtl30, or just tmtm. Tmtm has been using mspa-lit regularly for the last few weeks now, and is still fairly enigmatic to us.

She appeara to be a fairly pessimistic individual: I’ve noticed that the vast majority of discussions involving how we feel about certain works will witness at least one comment from her saying, “oh, that? That sucked!” I don’t mean this as a condemnation, somehow she manages to say it in ways that we (or at least I) find amusing. It has been interesting having another such person in our fold, and I look forward to seeing how her presence plays out in the future.

Finally, I mentioned a long time ago the idea that I could have some pseudos write about their own channels if they felt like it. I won’t describe these pieces at any length, they’re for the writers to portray their homes in whatever way they see fit without my own words acting as a filter. Rar was very happy about this idea, and it has been writing away for some time now. A full length article is more than I expected, but Rar appears happy to do this, so I’m looking forward to what it can come up with.

A more unexpected but no less welcome addition is from WoC, which I have included in the Related Materials under Appendix B: “Channel Descriptions”, subsection “#gaming”. One of the things he writes about is in fact relevant to recent server history, so I feel like I should describe it here. I’ve actually touched on this topic before, but to summarize it, WoC feels like he is embroiled in conflict between himself and the rest of the mods--especially Makin--over the nature of #gaming as a legitimate channel.

WoC hates the treatment of his channel: in short he feels like it is considered nothing more than a joke, and he claims that all attempts to get people to use it are met with derision. He has been slowly ramping up this rhetoric for the last several weeks, and finally it came to a head. I think he considers me more approachable or bendable, so he has complained about this to me at length several times now, although I’m unsure if he’s done this with others. I’ve already made it clear to him that I support moving #gaming talk to #gaming (who doesn’t?), but he insists that no one else takes it seriously.

One of the oft-cited issues is that, when people are told to move to the right channel, they complain and resist. This is certainly true: however, WoC also stipulated that people actively hate on #gaming for this reason. After looking into this issue more closely, I discovered that people do this far less than he suspected.

In fact, across all 16.5 million messages this server has on it, the phrase “#gaming sucks” has been explicitly uttered exactly once (by a user named Kreuz, who is not exactly of the sort to take seriously). After telling WoC this, I think that he’s toned down a little bit. Maybe I’ve mollified him sufficiently, or perhaps he’s mulling over other things he doesn’t like about the treatment of his channel. For as hard a time as I give him on the matter, he is simply correct that people don’t use #gaming the right way sometimes. Maybe we should be making more of an effort to help with this.

Nothing more for today.

---

7^th of April 2018

Nothing of strict importance today, but there was an exchange that I felt would be good to include for posterity’s sake.

We were shitting around in mspa-lit as usual, and Nights mentioned that he’s at the beach. This is completely unremarkable outside of the fact that he hates swimming in the ocean, so naturally we wondered why he was bringing this up. He then mentions that there are two people, a couple, standing in front of him and blocking his path to shore. This is where the fun begins.

It started off innocently enough: we simply asked for clarification. “Why are they blocking your path? Why can’t you just go around them?” At this point Nights mentions that they are “PDAing too much”, meaning “public display of affection”. This might make sense at first, but then more questions followed. What does “PDAing” in this context mean? Nights refused to explain any further--it’s assumed that he was too embarrassed to say exactly what was happening--but naturally we started to lightly make fun of him for this.

This particular brand of mockery revolves around a joke that I personally consider on the same tier as haha long memes. It started on 4chan, but to put it simply there are two figures: the “Virgin X” and the “Chad Y”. “Chad” as a term is a catch-all for people who are somehow superior to the Virgin in this joke, and the two are typically graphically depicted (using bases that are edited to be context-appropriate) with short descriptions of each peppered into the image.

The Virgin is always a small, thin, and dejected looking person with undesirably skittish traits while the Chad is shown to be dominant and huge, heavily-muscled to the point of being grotesque (I believe the Chad is based on an indigenous artwork of some kind, actually). A similar example would be the far older and now ubiquitous meme about “alphas and betas”, which is rooted in wolf pack mentality. If you are somehow interested in learning more about this, I recommend you look up more details on your own.

All of this is to say that we started to make fun of Nights for his decidedly Virgin behavior; Tensei went so far as to call him an “anti-Chad”, which only propelled the jokes and laughter further. His constant typos grew only worse under this barrage of ribbing, until finally he said that the couple had moved on and he was able to go to the beach. The day’s fun was not over though.

Shortly before this conversation began, we were talking about a game called Kerbal Space Program (KSP), a highly-realistic rocket simulator game. I don’t remember why it came up, but we found a way to play it together and Makin briefly made a server for us to all to play on. At some point, Cookiefonster came in and started trashing on us for talking about video games outside of #gaming yet again.

For a time, the KSP discussion ran concurrently with Nights describing his problem at the beach. Cookie complained, calling this “the next flavor of the month game” for which we promptly yelled at him; we told him not to participate if he had nothing good to say about something we were all clearly interested in.

He was quiet for a while after this, but finally said, “Can I at least ask a question about the game?” To which we reluctantly said yes. On a relevant aside, at this point Nights was specifically complaining about the couple in front of him because “there are little kids at the beach”. Cookie’s question was thus: “first off are the "little kids" at the beach actual people or npc's or what”. As soon as we realized what he was asking, everything went completely off the rails.

I could never adequately capture the spirit of this conversation in my own words, so I’m going to break my unspoken rule of not including screencaps and do so for the immediate response to Cookie’s question. There’s too much for it to be included here, but here it is on Imgur. There are few things in this server that make me laugh so hard, but today came together in such a beautiful way. Cookie will surely not live this down for a long time.

Finally, this is more mundane but a quality of life improvement for our server was undertaken recently: Makin mentioned the other day that he wanted more color roles in the server, because the ones we had were starting to get a tad bland. Nights immediately seized upon this and created something like 24 new color roles for everyone to enjoy, which I have seen being employed more as time gradually goes on. The original colors were all based strictly off of colors that represent characters in Homestuck, but I can tell already that people are glad to have more to work with now.

Nothing more for today.

---

8^th of April 2018

Not a lot to speak of today, but definitely an interesting development: Sora was at a Barnes and Noble today, and by chance stumbled across a copy of the new Homestuck book. This is remarkable because it’s not officially out until the 13th of this month, and so naturally everyone turned to Sora once they learned of their serendipitous acquisition.

To make a long story short, the overwhelming reaction appeared to be a muted disappointment: after some analysis, Sora concluded that every single bit of commentary in the new version is identical to that of the old, so there is effectively no reason for owners of the first printing to buy this copy. This is unfortunate, but is more or less what people expected if I’m not mistaken. Developments after that make me suspect this not actually the case, but of course it will be impossible to tell until I have a copy of the book in my own hands.

More pleasantly, WoC writing his piece for the #gaming channel seems to have opened the floodgates: Rar, Ifnar, Deus, and Ngame have all written sections about their respective channels already, and Toast, Spiral, and even Ceru have expressed serious interest in writing sections of their own. I’m very pleased to see this happening, and as always their contributions may be found in the Related Materials in the same section as WoC’s.

Each of them have written more than I could have expected or hoped; it feels like they have managed to contribute part of their identity rather well. Even further, each section written functions as a nice little snapshot of what the server looks like at this point in time. I hope that all of this together will successfully preserve the zeitgeist of this place more effectively.

Nothing more for today.

---

9^th of April 2018

I’ve noticed a distinct pattern of behavior that defines various members of our group. When we all encounter and discuss statements or actions from other people, there are of course numerous members of the chat who take such things at face value and believe what they are witnessing. This typically consists of people like myself, Cait, Nights, Olki, etc. However, there is a second group of people who respond to these developments in the exact opposite way: those like Makin, Revlar, Tipsy, and assuredly many others will, for whatever reason, believe the inverse of what is being presented to them.

It would be one thing if this pattern only worked in one way: it is understandable and even natural for people to be pessimistic and even critical of positive developments. For example, things such as the Kickstarter or the upcoming book releases are all things that deserve a healthy dose of skepticism because of the many times we’ve been let down in the past.

However, this behavior extends in the opposite direction as well. This is far and away most pronounced with Makin, but in general negative proceedings will be met with a more optimistic interpretation from these people than what we’re actually witnessing. An excellent example of this strange, inverted behavior would be the appearance of a rather vitriolic post on the subreddit today.

The post is particularly odious, and I don’t know that I feel like explaining the actual content of it in any real detail. The long and short of it is that the author was complaining about their friend in real life “endlessly talking about Homestuck”, calling it no less than a cancer that was steadily destroying their friendship. I’m sure I needn’t say why that bothered people here.

I think that I’ve been affected in no small way over the last year and a half of my time here; my first thought upon seeing this was that it was pretty obvious bait material, and it would be well to ignore it. This was perfectly in keeping with the people I mentioned above, like Makin and Revlar. It was assumed among this group of individuals that the person posting on the subreddit was actually someone trying to get a rise out of us, so by them the post was downplayed or even made fun of rather jovially.

On the other hand, there were people in mspa-lit who were rather taken against the whole thing. A wide variety of responses began to accrue on the thread of interest, many questioning why the poster was bothering to bring up the problem in a subreddit wholly devoted to the material. To them, it was a completely genuine affair.

I don’t think we ever did find out whether the author of the post was serious or not, but it stands as an example of the behaviors I mentioned. There is a fascinating tendency of some in the group to immediately go against the narrative, so to speak: exacerbating the simple and downplaying the complex, decrying the good and softening the bad. It’s a strange tendency toward the neutral, although I’ve noticed this pattern’s employ in various situations elsewhere. I have more to say on this, but I need time to think about it--there are things I want to say that I feel would be too hasty at this point in time. More on that in the future perhaps.

In other news, an extremely exciting development occurred today concerning Viz Media. Makin has been running a blog on Tumblr for some time now, called the Homestuck + Hiveswap Community. It has gradually risen through Tumblr rankings (however that may work) until the blog entered the topmost Homestuck/Hiveswap centric Tumblr blogs⁷⁷; high-quality posts from the subreddit are sometimes crosslinked to the Tumblr for more exposure, and the system has worked decently well in its modern incarnation.

The relevance of this is that Viz created a Tumblr blog of their own and ended up reblogging a post from Makin’s blog concerning the interview with Hussie on Newsarama that I’ve linked previously. There was clarification on the post that the interview had been found by Skyplayer, and there was a link to the HSD included on the post.

The ramifications of this are immense. It’s a sort of de facto recognition of the subreddit and the HSD, which is kind of funny in the context of the link to the subreddit being deleted from homestuck.com previously. Makin was actually asleep for all of this, so he missed out on it when it was happening; everyone lamented this and found this emerging pattern of Makin being asleep for momentous news amusing.

At this point, an account for Viz Media posted an official announcement for the first book on the subreddit. It consisted of a simple picture of a calendar with the day of release marked, but it was nonetheless successful in generating some hype for the release. There is some limited amount of rabble-rousing, but people are generally excited about the business practices associated with Viz.

This is especially true of people outside the United States who have a primary concern in shipping, such as Tipsy: “finally i can get homestuck books for the price theyre fucking worth, instead of paying over £100 to get a couple of shitty posters and a low quality hoodie to my local post office”. The previous set of books--and merchandise in general--cost a ludicrous amount of money in shipping outside the US, so the improved publishing practices will increase accessibility to the books for fans. It’s truly an exciting time for the fandom.

More immediately relevant to the HSD in particular, we also had a Discord account join with the name VIZ and the associated logo as a profile picture. This is itself exciting, but also vaguely alarming. It’s one thing to associate with Viz over the subreddit, where posting and interactions are all slower by nature. The Discord environment is different, in that it’s all in real time and very rapid.

There is some worry that Viz will see posting habits they aren’t fond of and leave, which may ruin our reputation and preclude future opportunities for association. Considering how this turned out with What Pumpkin, there is of course a pronounced desire to avoid repeating the past. It would be an absolute shame if everyone in the community was denied the chance for greater association with the people in charge of the property, especially if it’s caused by the actions of only a few.

Of course, this is all assuming that the Viz account is in fact from Viz Media and not simply someone pretending to be. It is impossible to rule out this idea, although the account has not posted since joining. Makin claims to have confirmed its validity independently; everyone is waiting to see what happens with this account; Kreuz fucking pinged it shortly after the account joined, but since then there have been no further issues. We are curious to see if they start to interact with people in the future.

Nothing more for today.

---

10^th of April 2018

I wanted to take the opportunity to speak about a smaller piece of our community that has popped up in the public view occasionally. There is a D&D group that’s being run by Revlar which includes various members of mspa-lit: Tensei, Nights, and Wheals are all regular players in this group. LLF was also a regular up until recently (which is what prompted the most recent discussion of it) and Tipsy apparently wanted to be involved (while never actually becoming a player) some time ago.

This group, affectionately called HSDnD, runs once a week on Sundays or more often Mondays. The group’s main priority, of course, is just to have fun. When I asked, Revlar mentioned that the current campaign has only been in play for two sessions so far, taking the place of an older campaign from last year that was disrupted when Revlar left the server.

The older campaign was subject to problems of varying seriousness over time. For example, Nights’ sleep schedule used to be even more treacherous than it is now, and I distinctly remember this jeopardizing a number of sessions. A problem plaguing the current campaign, as previously mentioned, is LLF’s departure from the group.

This has apparently been an issue historically where he would simply not show up for sessions or be otherwise unable to participate. Oda beat me to the punch in asking: “why is links so flaky”, to which Revlar responded: “Because he wasn't super invested to start”. It seems as if LLF’s absence today prevented the third session in this campaign from happening, so they have formalized his absences and are asking for someone to take his place.

I’m glad that Revlar and his group have all managed to engage in this activity together. It’s outside the purview of the HSD and I’m sure many people will question why I bothered to write about it this much. I feel that it’s an important example of the potential for friendship and interaction in our community outside of the scope of just Homestuck-centric content; it makes me happy to see users here becoming friends and doing more things with each other. I hope that their group finds another member so that they’re able to progress more consistently in the future.

Otherwise, more information from Viz today. They posted their first trailer for the Homestuck books on the subreddit. This was expected, but something rather extraordinary is associated with it: the music used in the trailer are two songs from LOFAM1. This inclusion raises a lot of important questions: how did they find out about LOFAM? How and why did they select those two songs in particular for the trailer? Did they seek permission from the composers for it (after some independent research, the answer to this last question at the very least is “yes”).

Most pertinent on my mind are what this means for the future of LOFAM, and whether more of this use of fan content will be seen in the future with Viz. It is unimaginably exciting to see this kind of interaction between a corporation like Viz and our community as a whole. There are some who must find this appalling, but for those of us who are more curious and optimistic this is a sign of good times to come.

The last thing I’ll comment on today is a discussion that was had later in the night. Niklink, Roots, and I were all watching movies together so I missed out on any existential debates or quandaries that might have been had throughout the day itself. However, once we were done, we came back just in time for a prompt from Sora. They mentioned that, without my going into any details here, they have been having a hard time in real life and that they are grateful for the people in the HSD; they appreciate having people they can associate with here.

This signaled the start of a conversational topic that I feel is rare (although maybe necessarily so). Anyone who has read this document with any real degree of attention will understand that I write about this community because, in short, I love it: the construction and maintenance of the server itself, the source material, the people here, and our interactions with each other all come together to form a spectacular experience.

For myself, the last two points are of paramount importance in this consideration. Without other people that we can interact with on a regular basis, there would be no point to this place. The source material is monumental even with its more negative aspects included, but by itself it is not enough to sustain interest and activity in this place. The fact that we’re all able to build off of each other and have a nice time talking about anything, everything, and nothing in particular at all is what gives this place life and meaning. It’s the people that matter; the people in the HSD are what I care for.

The comments from Sora and others like Toast this evening served to mirror my sentiments and validate them. I feel that it’s not often we get the chance to be sentimental--there is a considerable layer of plausible deniability for some or even most people here, a veneer of irony that they put in place to avoid saying outright how they feel in these scenarios. Sometimes though, like tonight, that layer can be peeled back and genuine expression may come through.

I love these moments. It may not always be good--indeed, for these interactions to always be positive is impossible--but the inclination to reveal your inner thoughts and nature to other beings is nothing short of magical to me. The willingness to share part of yourself with others is the spirit of this community, and is at the heart of what brings us all together.

Nothing more for today.

---

11^th of April 2018

There’s a pattern of behavior from someone that I felt like pointing out today, after I was reminded of some similar experiences dealing with it from the past. Throughout the course of my time here, there have been numerous situations where I felt it would be appropriate to consult others to see what they said. This is done more with some than others: occasionally I’ll consult Phantos, whom I trust for their wisdom; there are even a few people I consider staples in situations where I feel the need to do this (Cait and Tipsy being too such examples).

Putnam fits into this latter category, although upon recollection of the past I’m not sure why this is the case. The way he presents himself has something to do with it, I suppose; to contrast, it’s hard to take Makin seriously once you get to know him because so much of his behavior is derived from the desire to have fun and often involves making fun of people (the jury is still out on whether he wants this amusement to be inclusive of the person he’s making fun of or if it’s purely, even consciously for his own benefit).

Putnam, on the other hand, instantly and overtly includes other people in whatever deliberation he happens to be making. This has established a precedent where I will occasionally ask him about issues that I think are important enough to warrant talking with other users about, to see what they think. Yet, unlike Cait⁷⁸ and Tipsy--both being more or less opinionated on any given matter--Putnam typically has little significant input for most issues here which aren’t directly related to him.

I don’t mean to suggest that he has no opinions; Putnam is himself rather opinionated, but unless he is strictly involved in an ongoing issue it’s likely that he won’t even know that it exists, or of the people involved. There have been many occasions now where I’ve turned to him for his perspective and he simply says: “I don’t recall what you’re talking about”, which never fails to make me laugh.

In my eyes, such responses lend heavily to an appearance of unwitting detachment. On the occasions where Putnam has relayed his lack of awareness, it very clearly brings to mind this mental image of one who is simply unconcerned with such earthly affairs. This absurdity is only heightened by the fact that Putnam cares very much for the well-being and happiness of others; his absent mindedness at times is offset by the very real and intense affection he feels for people in general, and his desire to see them prosper.

As for today, there was an extension of something that was actually happening yesterday which I didn’t quite feel like commenting on. Those who pay attention to the going-ons of the internet may be aware that, today and yesterday, the founder and CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg is attending a hearing in front of the United States Congress to answer questions about his social media platform.

“That’s all well and good Drew,” I hear you saying, “but why on earth is this relevant?” To keep matters simple, most of us in mspa-lit are either ambivalent or outright hateful of Facebook for its overreaching and extremely invasive data-handling policies. Makin is a clear and obvious example of this: his penchant for privacy (and assuredly many other factors) should be a clear indicator to all that he would never even dream of making a social media profile. At least, not one that wasn’t obfuscated through innumerable barriers to protect his identity.

While most of us aren’t quite so extreme, the atmosphere here is one decidedly against Zuckerberg’s creation. Thus, when we learned that this hearing was being broadcast live for anyone to see, we decided to check in and see how it was going. One might imagine that the proceedings of a congressional hearing or two would be enormously boring and unworthy of comment. Historically I imagine one would be right, but this time the right mix of elements was in play so that it became an event of its own.

Last night it was a hearing with senators, and today it is a hearing with representatives. In both cases, there are numerous people (over 30,000 total) watching this broadcast, and treating it like a game. The sentiment against Zuckerberg is not rare on the internet, and there was no shortage of people who came to watch him be humiliated live on television. There are numerous jokes about the corporate leader’s mannerisms and patterns of behavior (robot, lizard-man, etc), and these jokes were brought out in full force for the duration of the hearing.

It’s honestly quite refreshing: Zuckerberg is a figure of such infamy that there’s hardly anyone who objected to the overall roasting. Even those I would suspect of decrying the behavior have joined in, and the overall atmosphere is more of joviality than anything else to me. It’s one of those often-written yet rarely-seen moments of a common enemy uniting people together, so to speak. And then, of course, the fun was promptly interrupted by an update for Worth the Candle. Such as it is here!

Later in the day, Makin acted upon some jokes about Americans that he has steadily been ramping up in the last so many months. On the internet Americans are frequently taunted for being fat--sometimes referred to as “Amerifats” or more hilariously as “burgers”--and stupid, as well as a few other idiosyncrasies that people find amusing (such as clapping more often than people of other cultures, for whatever reason). Makin has gradually increased jokes of this nature for some time now, and after Tensei made a meme about this it culminated in the creation of a channel today called #burgerclapping.

It started off simply enough: memes about America are in abundance, already so people began posting those in the channel in short order. I pinged WoC, due to his stereotype as “The America Guy”, although he was initially confused. He posted only one meme at first, saying: “I don’t usually engage in Patreon channels”. When it was explained to him what the channel really was, however, all bets were suddenly off.

WoC took to the place like a fish to water, and before long everyone was marching to the beat of his drum. Calls for a democratic election of the pseudo mod rung out, there was demand for a ban-role simply entitled “communist”, socialism (among many other things) was bashed at length. It was every stereotype about “‘muricans” come to life.

Finally, after about 20-30 minutes of this, Makin stepped in and simply said: “woc is growing too powerful”. Without any further ado, Makin closed the channel and--some might say prematurely--ended the fun. Yet, #burgerclapping will forever remain in our hearts alongside the enormous quantities of cholesterol. Rest in peace, child of freedom.

Nothing more for today.

---

12^th of April 2018

I’m excited to write about today: Viz Media recently contacted me on Discord, saying that they wanted to perform a giveaway of the Homestuck book on the subreddit for 4/13 this year. I contacted the other sub mods and together we decided how we wanted to do it, giving them an affirmative. Niklink wrote up the thread, which went up in the afternoon and is in progress for 24 hours. After it concludes two people will be randomly selected to receive the book.

More involvement from Viz is always welcome, and we’re excited that they’re engaging with the community. There is some fear that they’ll drop away once 4/13 is over, but for now the activity we’ve seen from Viz over the last week alone has been more than we got from WP for the last so many years. I don’t think anyone can properly complain so far. I just hope (I’m sure along with some others) that they’ve gotten a positive impression of our community so far; we can be pretty weird at the best of times, I’m sure no shortage of people have been scared off by how esoteric or strange we might appear.

More related to the HSD itself, I ended up having an extensive discussion with Phantos in #serious about the nature of mspa-lit. There had been a long string of conversation about various facets of our personal lives being played out as the night went by, and finally it reached a point that I realized we should have moved the conversation ages ago.

As we are typically supposed to do, I asked people to move to #hangout, or alternatively #serious for heavier stuff. I assumed this was fine for a while, but then Phantos specifically said he wanted to talk with me about something in #serious. This kind of request from him is unusual, so I immediately assumed that it was pretty important.

When we started conversing, he brought up some things I’ve said about the nature of mspa-lit that he felt were discrepant: I mentioned in a recent entry that Sora’s been having a hard time, although I neglected to mention that I felt the need to step in at some of the things they were saying. Without going into too many details (again), I tried my best to impart to Sora what exactly mspa-lit is used for, and in theory it sounded accurate or fair to me to say that mspa-lit isn’t about discussing ourselves, but rather about concepts and things.

This didn’t seem controversial to me; #hangout is reserved for talking about our personal lives with each other, and mspa-lit is typically used for discussing stuff like Makin’s shill list or whatever thing/event that people are most interested in at the time. Obviously in practice that isn’t always the case, but I used this general principle to stress to Sora that barging in to a given conversation to talk about ourselves is looked down on in mspa-lit and wouldn’t win them any favors.

Apparently, Phantos was not pleased by this assessment. When we started talking in #serious, he mentioned that he’s grown increasingly frustrated by discussions in mspa-lit being railroaded into other channels, among other things. After prompting him on this for a little while he clarified that he was upset with the inconsistent moderation on the issue--sometimes topics are moved and other times they’re not, and it all reeks heavily of bias to him.

He summed up his feelings on the matter concisely: “Either abolish the rule or do better at being fair on whose topics get moved and whose do not.” I made it clear that I understand where he’s coming from, although I also stressed that I don’t know if I can successfully motivate other mods to care about this enough. In an ideal world, all topics would be moved to their respective channels immediately, but realistically I’m not sure if that’s remotely possible to achieve.

Regardless, this discussion brought into focus some of the problems people have with mspa-lit’s existence. Indeed, two others took the opportunity to speak, saying they disliked mspa-lit for various reasons. Furrylatula claimed to be confused by its very existence (“i basically have no idea what mspa-lit is about … its confusing and hard to get a handle on”) and then a user named qweq described that they find the place incredibly intimidating because of the high mod presence and the cliquey behavior.

Honestly, just thinking about the conversation is enough to exhaust me. I felt bad that I wasn’t able to address their concerns by myself, but I’m only one mod on a team of people--I can only do so much by myself on this matter, and that’s not even to speak of Makin’s influence. Nonetheless, I promised I would bring it up to the rest of the team and let them speak their thoughts on the matter, although (without betraying the names of the people in particular) some already seem rather dismissive of the idea. Time will tell how this turns out, I guess.

Unrelated, but I felt like briefly commenting on an extension of something I’ve seen play out in real life. There is a pronounced rivalry between the east coast and the west coast of the United States. The general structure of the USA is such that the coasts are--generally speaking--more progressive and technologically forward than the middle parts of the country, but the culture of the two coasts differs enormously. This rivalry can be lighthearted or can become deeply serious depending on who you’re talking to.

This behavior also exists on the HSD, although thankfully it belongs more to the lighthearted category. I can’t count the number of times jokes surrounding this topic have been uttered. For example, restaurant chains are a popular topic in this regard. I can’t count the number of times that a more easterly chain like Five Guys has been brought up only for someone like Toast to immediately shit on it in favor of Californian chains (“but do you have in n out B)”). Nothing else to be said about this, I just thought it was an amusing note to be made on the behavior here.

Less amusing lately has been a rather sudden shift in the conversational quality of mspa-lit. I mentioned recently that some users from altgen have been taking up residence in mspa-lit, and at first it was subtle but the quality of discussion in this channel has suddenly plummeted at certain times of day. No one is quite sure who is responsible, which suggests to me that it’s a loosening of everyone’s contributions somehow. Maybe it’s just one of those times.

This change has transformed from slight to massive over the last week, prompting a lot of comment from various users about how the place is more shitposty than usual (“What the hell happened this past week honestly / This chat is WAY more shitposty than it used to be” - MINES). No one’s quite sure what to do about it just yet, but I have faith in the system. If it gets to truly be too much, then Makin will probably step in and mandate some grand change that inevitably fucks the channel up temporarily, although I’m sure that will be entertaining an and of itself once all is said and done.

Nothing more for today.

---

13^th of April 2018 - Ninth Anniversary of Homestuck

The big day has come. With the arrival of 4/13, so too has there been a massive influx of people all of a sudden. I believe this happened last year as well, but the flow is truly astonishing: we started the day with around 10,500 people but by the end of the day we’re closing with about 10,800. The amount of activity in #general is absurd, not to mention monstrously fast.

I actually came in a bit late, witnessing panicky discussion with the other mods about how best to police #general. At that point #general had slowed down so that it was still pretty quick-paced, but not panic-inducing by any means. After asking, Makin simply said: “you are late / it was basically AAAAAAAAAAAAing before / that kind of message speed”.

After this, Makin tried to compensate for #general being “too active” by establishing the channel #413. It was quickly and fiercely taken over by shitposting (the very first post was from Cait: “aeiou”), but it successfully siphoned most of the shitposting away #general while simultaneously giving it a focus. #413 became a one-stop repository for all manner of shitposts related to Homestuck. It will be retired (maybe even deleted) by the end of the day.

The stream was a wild success even by previous conventions of what we would call successful: at its height, there were over 300 people all watching at the same time, where previous community streams typically garner no more than 150-200. This was true even after the release of Hiveswap Friendsim, which itself was a rather fun event.

Makin tasked me with announcing the release of the game as soon as possible; on Steam the game had been announced as coming out in so many hours throughout the day, such that people were beginning to get hyped up for its release. Finally at about 2:50 PM EDT, the game became available. I announced this to everyone, and the stream was momentarily filled with cries of: “HIVESWAP FRIENDSIM IS OUT? FUCK THIS SHIT!”. No one actually left the stream from what I could see, but it did become momentarily less active as people began exploring the game.

For this, Makin made yet another channel in the Homestuck category called #friendsim, which was quickly populated by everyone who bought the game within approximately 10 picoseconds of release. The importance of this release is not to be underestimated: it’s the first real source of Hussie’s writing we’ve gotten in two years. Though the game itself is short (30-45 minutes is more than sufficient to exhaust all of its paths) the content is faithful to what we would expect and, from what I can see, the overwhelming response to it has been positive so far. This all speaks of good things for the future of the property and installments of Friendsim to come.

In all, I think it’s safe to say that this year’s 4/13 was immeasurably better than last year. I commented at one point that “last year basically didn’t exist / on an official basis” to which Cookie agreed: “all they did was the bare minimum then / a new hiveswap trailer / that gave a mild tinge of hope / but went back to silence right after”. The enjoyment was there last year but muted considerably, with no real developments to tide us over.

This year, however, so many things have happened that people feel truly excited about Homestuck for the first time in a long while. The energy in the chat is palpable with new interest in the comic, and this involvement from a figure of some authority has given everything a sense of legitimacy again. Personally, it feels like the HSD has aged and grown enough to warrant being called an establishment of sorts. It fills me with great pride to see us on days like this.

Happy 4/13. Nothing more for today.

---

14^th of April 2018

Over the week there has been a set of events that I’ve failed to describe so far. For Fans By Fans has announced a giveaway of their own, where grand prize winners will win a commission from “a popular community artist” to draw an original character of theirs. This is pretty substantial given the nature of Homestuck’s fans to create fanventures, and to make things even better this has been nested in a series of things you can do to win “entries” to the contest, including a number of puzzles that have taken the attention of people in the HSD.

The first puzzle was a wordsearch, then picross, a magic eye picture, and on the fourth day a simple alternate reality game, or ARG. The fifth day, however, consisted of something called Alphastuck and Omegastuck, which turned out to be a far more complicated and in-depth ARG than the previous one. Skyplayer was immediately taken with this and set upon the challenge with great relish.

Alpha/Omegastuck has since been solved, although not strictly by any one of us. Skyplayer commented: “some rando solved it in 6 hours and gave the community hints for the last leg / that's why we don't know what the right way to solve it is, other than guessing / like, the answer makes sense given the context, but not all the clues lead somewhere”. The prize for solving it, however, is of extreme interest: it leads to an official letter from Andrew Hussie.

It is an item you can buy from the store for zero dollars (you still have to pay for shipping) with limited numbers available, and most people that know about it are absolutely consumed with curiosity over what the letter could be. Some are less trusting and assume it’s just going to be a trollish thing of some sort, with Hussie making fun of people in the letter. This strikes me as a definite possibility, but at the same time something about this feels different. We’ll eventually see what the deal is.

Alongside the letter has been a flurry of other comments that border on the decidedly conspiracy theory-esque; before the first book release, Viz tweeted an image of a calendar that was lifted from the comic and edited to be related to the book. Of interest on this calendar is a little face that was drawn over the 16th of this month, being this Monday. Some of us immediately noticed that particular detail and grew worried; this is the sort of thing that sets off our theorizing sensibilities and leads to a whole host of (usually) baseless conjecture, which has the considerable potential to backfire.

Indeed, there is frantic talk about what might be happening on Monday. Others are not swayed by the mostly tenuous hints that have come out regarding this. Upon surveying the growth of hysteria on the topic, Makin commented: “is this how homestuck fans look to hussie”, which of course dissuaded literally no one from the current course. I’m mostly ambivalent myself, being hopeful of something happening but not expecting it in the slightest, and I look forward to everyone’s reaction no matter what happens.

Within the HSD itself, I wanted to take the time today to comment on a particular user I’ve noticed in the past that I feel embodies a highly specific part of our spirit here. They are named Jade Mail Delivery Service, with Jade being one of the characters in the story. Every so often, they’ll appear unprompted in #general and ask if people would like a random picture of the aforementioned character “delivered” to them.

Every single time at least one person will take them up on the offer, and after some follow up (as well as asking for and receiving one of these pictures myself), it seems the user will send them through DMs to everyone who asked. This is highly amusing to me because of how weirdly specific it is, but it’s such a wholesome and innocent activity.

Furthermore, the consistency of their actions is impressive; to my knowledge they always deliver the picture as promised, acting as nothing short of a consummate professional. It’s such a tiny part of what goes on in the HSD, but I feel like it’s a good example of the kind of quirky and touching behavior that can arise in the Homestuck fandom that made it such a special thing for most of us. I hope we’ll see more of this as time goes by.

Finally for today, I noticed something today that made me laugh. Occasionally the discussion in mspa-lit can be suddenly and swiftly converted into something completely different from what it was before, and this is often associated with some extremely specific topics. For instance, today we were discussing something casually and then Putnam for no discernible reason brought up jet fighters.

I didn’t expect much to come out of this; Putnam sometimes talks about a video game series called Ace Combat which is based around dogfighting, which is well-liked by some people in the group but is not exactly of great fame for us. To my surprise, Tensei also chimed in on the topic and the two started discussing various models of planes that have been in use or were designed historically.

I bring this up because I was kind of enamored by the conversation. With no real prompting, they suddenly pulled out a topic that itself is pretty narrow, and then started injecting some rather in-depth and esoteric knowledge on the matter. I think Makin echoed my thoughts on the matter: “why do you people suddenly know everything about planes”. It all came together in this bizarre blend that I couldn’t help but laugh at. I’m always fascinated when people discuss anything like this in such a specialized capacity, even when I’m unable to contribute myself.

Nothing more for today.

---

15^th of April 2018

Things are winding down since the thirteenth. There is still some residual excitement leftover from the festivities, but by and large the fun is mostly over. Talk about the Friendsim didn’t last very long due to its extremely short nature--there just isn’t a lot to talk about. On the other hand, most of the channels are experiencing a swell in the amount of activity it sees.

This is due, of course, to the relatively large influx of people we got for 4/13. Each channel has been variously more active with the newbies that came in, and server activity as a whole seems up. Unfortunately this isn’t an entirely positive phenomenon, as illustrated by the precise nature of the increased activity in one channel in particular. Probably only one guess is needed to find out which channel, too.

Altgen has been even more outrageous lately than it normally is. Dingus has specifically complained about the inordinate shittiness, and after poking my head in I can personally confirm that it is more frenetic than before. It seemed previously that the channel had been slowing down, but the addition of new blood to the mix has led to a small coup of the place. All semblance of order has been dispelled; naught but chaos remains.

To mitigate this, Dingus and Deus have been doubling down. The mods look in there sometimes, but both of the altgen pseudos have really been cracking down with mass bans of people who are failing to adhere to the rules, or even people who are raiding. I actually had to console someone who they thought was raiding but had actually just picked a bad time to make a dumb joke.

This problem aside, their efforts are clearly working. Altgen is at least vaguely usable again, and the raiders have slowed their pace in other channels. I suspect that by the week’s end the problem will be all but gone. That having been said, I kind of liked this form of altgen a bit. The raids were too much and obviously any really bad content like porn or gore is to be discouraged, but the energy was palpable again and the shitposts flowed freely. There must be some kind of balance that can be instilled here.

Nothing more for today.

---

16^th of April 2018

There was some brief alarm earlier today. I was checking Worth the Candle for an update, but then noticed that the story was not accessible. Concerned, I alerted Makin and he swiftly confirmed that WTC was not available. Given the story’s relative importance to us, this was obviously deemed A Problem. Before long, everyone who remotely cares about the shill in question was conversing about what could have brought on this development.

There was some concern on my part due to my understanding of the author. A rational writer under the pseudonym Alexander Wales, it is known that he suffers from depressive moods on occasion. In conjunction with some ill-timed, decidedly poor criticism from one of his readers, I was worried that perhaps Wales had decided to delete the story outright. It was made known to me that this was probably not the case due to the exact nature of Wales’ depression, namely seasonal; Toast commented “its almost summertime / his writing will only get stronger / until winter again”.

Makin actually made a thread on /r/rational addressing this topic, since WTC is a popular read there. Within an hour or two, Wales himself showed up to comment on the issue. Thankfully, it turns out to be a minor issue over conditions in the TOS for the website he’s hosting the story on. He mentioned that the story would be back up as soon as possible, and very shortly after this people were able to access it again much to the relief of everyone fond of the story.

In totality after it was all said and done, I think I liked this development a bit. It offered an easy opportunity to look into an alternate community Makin openly associates with, namely the rational writing community. He often talks about such things and the discussion can be guided that way in the HSD, but it’s not often that we are explicitly exposed to “the rational community”, such as one might be.

This occasion, however, offered a glimpse into Makin’s other places of habit. It’s interesting to see the stark contrast between how he behaves there and here, even if it was only a snapshot. On reddit in general he appears to be far more composed; I think the nature of the website contributes to that due to it not being real-time, but that’s a whole load of conjecture that I don’t feel I understand well enough to really comment on at this point in time.

Instead, I’d like to shift away from this topic to talk about the more Homestuck-centric announcement we got today. According to this post on Tumblr, there will be efforts towards an official Homestuck zine, which has simply been called Aspect. For those unfamiliar (like myself previously), a zine is a short document or work published on a more underground basis than other publications. Oda helpfully described them in the chat: ““Zines are how communities shared fanworks en masse before the internet / They're an important part of fandom history”, and in accordance with this the organizers of this (What Pumpkin and For Fans By Fans) put out sign-ups for artists who might be interested in contributing.

Fitting with the name, it looks like it’s going to be a celebration of a feature of the webcomic that I’ve described before called “aspects”. For lore purposes this is interesting to most people, and according to the post any artists who have their work used will be compensated. There is some concern, though, that the pay will be inadequate ($35 per work if I’m not mistaken), with many considering this a bar set too low.

Underpayment aside, there is also speculation that this is just a way for WP or whoever to look for more artists. Revlar described it thus: “The zine is absolutely a shitty scam … It's Paradox Space 2.0 / And probably meant for poaching / More than for profit / They're just trying to minimize their losses this time which makes it look more scummy”. Alternative concerns revolve around the scope of the project (“oh the zine is kinda limited. they're really looking for just drawings of characters and its only gonna be 24 artists. I thought this was gonna be like a big ol' thing” - Skyplayer), and at this point it’s hard to say how people feel about it exactly. There is hope that it’ll turn out well and be interesting enough to engage people, but time will surely tell.

Even with this though, people have managed to glean some related information out of the zine announcement. Wheals mentioned: “the biggest news about the zine is that WP still exists enough to officially endorse things”, which may answer some of the questions people have had about their overall position in what is being jocularly referred to as “The Viz Takeover”. It may not be inaccurate to say that Viz is handling the property on a more generalized basis while What Pumpkin and the merchandise websites like For Fans By Fans will be operating for the people who are dedicated fans.

Nothing more for today.

---

19^th of April 2018

It’s time to describe something that has recently swept through our group, catching some of us in its soft grasp. Omori, stylized as OMORI, is a game that was backed on Kickstarter, launched back on the 21^st of April 2014. Centering around the titular character. Omori began as a short blog comic in 2011 by a person known as OMOCAT, and then in 2012 the creator started writing and illustrating a graphic novel for it (although the only thing related to this I can find now is a short piece from 2013). The Kickstarter for it was rather successful, although a demo for the game only just came out recently for backers.

There are some people here who have recently played it and have been trying to spread it. Minish in particular is rather taken with the game, as well as Toast, Rar, and Spiral. Tensei mentioned that he actually knows a person developing the game, and would like to see it become more successful (especially seeing as he considers it a legitimately good game). Their appreciation for it is infectious, and they have successfully persuaded numerous people (including myself) to play the demo. Even though it’s only for backers, the demo was “pirated” amongst us because it has no security; MINES helpfully provided me with a copy of it.

They further show their appreciation by imitating its art style; OMORI has a particular style to it, easily recognizable by anyone who’s played it already. Each of the people I mentioned above have adopted a profile picture in the same style; Toast, Rar, and Spiral all requested customized pictures drawn in the style and color palette of the game from a fellow user named Ivy, who helpfully provided some rather nice portraits:

Top row: characters OMORI (Tensei’s avatar), AUBREY, KEL, HERO, and user Ivy.

Bottom row: users Toast, Minish, myself (made as a joke by Tipsy), Rar, and Spiral.

I’m fascinated with how rapidly and thoroughly people have inducted this element into our server, and the ways that they’ve shown their appreciation for it is nothing short of impressive.

It goes without saying that there are people who don’t care for OMORI being included. Makin in particular tried to play it for a bit, but decided he didn’t like (although it’s worth noting that he was bad at playing it, so maybe that factored in). Red is also not fond of it, although VirtuNat seems to be the most vehement against it from what I can see. I haven’t been paying the greatest attention to the naysayers so I’m not quite sure, but their protestations are pretty amusing regardless. We’ll see if Omori has a lasting effect on the culture of our place sooner or later.

There are some developments for #altgen in the works, but they will be more relevant tomorrow--as such I will write about them then. Nothing more for today.

---

20^th of April 2018

Today is an infamous day: I’m sure most are already familiar with it, but for the uninformed it is Weed Day. Historically, April 20th is the day chosen by marijuana enthusiasts to celebrate their drug of choice, and despite its illegal status in various countries and states it has become a pretty widely-known event. Obviously we don’t strictly observe the event on the HSD for various reasons, but at the least it is being parodied in a way.

Hella Jeff as taken from the third SBAHJ comic. This image is our emote “howHigh”.

As such he is arguably our patron saint of Weed Day.

In the spirit of the day, Makin announced yesterday that he would be performing an experiment with #altgen. This is hardly unprecedented, #altgen is kind of a dumpster where we feel comfortable messing around with it as we please. The experiment started with Makin hiding #altgen and introducing two new channels: #general2 and #shitpost; the functions of these channels should be obvious.

However, he quickly deleted #shitpost and unhid #altgen, simply choosing to rename it to #nu-gen instead. #nu-gen has since gone through innumerable name changes, from song lyrics to various memes to random nonsense. It’s hard to tell if there are any real, overarching patterns, but so far that doesn’t appear to be the case.

It was hoped by some that this experiment would rescue some of the activity of #altgen, but unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case. So far it is mostly as it has been for the last month or two. It’s unclear what may be done to fix this problem, although I’ve started talks with Dingus, Deus, and Shitler to try and correct it. More details on this will follow tomorrow.

Otherwise, there was an unrelated incident later in the day. A user named Kreuz began airing complaints in mspa-lit concerning the presence of mods in other places, claiming that we don’t listen to users. The nature of this complain involved our banning procedure: specifically, a ban in #general will also lead to people being unable to speak in #hangout or #serious. The guiding principle with this is that if someone is unable to handle being in #general then they probably can’t be expected to handle #hangout and definitely should not be trusted to act appropriately in #serious.

This explanation only prompted more complaints, and for the next half an hour or so we attempted to variously identify exactly what Kreuz was talking about and/or mollify him. After being unable to find any other users complaining about the same thing, we asked him to provide screenshots and for whatever reason he said that he wasn’t able to or simply didn’t want to. We tried to explain what was wrong with this (Tensei laboriously attempting to inject logic into the situation), but we were also admittedly pretty tired of dealing with it at that point, so we started making some fun of the issue in an attempt to move on.

To Kreuz’s credit though, this did open up some conversation about how we might improve the server some more. #general in particular remains destitute, as it has been for a while now. Makin briefly floated the idea of creating more #general pseudos, who would have the express purpose of generating activity instead of managing the channel. We ultimately decided against this and turned our attention to a more unique feature of #general.

Being the first channel that people see, #general has doubled as a place to talk about anything and also where one welcomes newcomers. Aradiabot has always included a message welcoming new people, announcing their arrival in the server for all to see. Lately it feels like this feature has been getting in the way--other servers will often sequester these introductions into their own channel, while others do away with them entirely.

Makin opted for the latter, and thus he asked Ceru to remove this function from the bot for the HSD. There was initially some pushback against this since the welcome messages ping the newcomer, which serves as effective bookkeeping. Since we have another channel that does this very same thing, we were ultimately fine with it. We’re not sure if it’ll actually help, but in this way Makin decreed that the bot will not welcome new people for the next month to see if it helps improve activity in the channel any.

I feel like pointing out at this point that Ceru briefly became upset with Makin’s request because he interpreted them as being aggressive. I always feel the need to talk with Ceru after incidents like this; he’s rather sensitive, but a quick talk always manages to help him feel better. It’s important to me to reassure him--sometimes it’s easy for Ceru to become discouraged about his abilities or his social position in this server.

I always find his discouragement to be unwarranted, though. Recently he created a function for Aradiabot that allows someone to call up Homestuck on Discord and read it in its entirety there. While I can’t comment on the technical difficulty of this in any sort of official capacity that sort of functionality is insane to me, and this is not to speak of the several other creative ventures he’s accomplished using Aradiabot.

I always try to stress to him that he undervalues his own abilities and worth here. It’s clear to me how much he cares about being important (indeed, he mentioned to me that he wants to contribute something of value to humanity as a whole someday); I try my best to help reassure him when these things happen. His humility concerning his place here is endearing to me, and I hope that he can build his self-confidence more as time goes by.

In a different but related vein, I was watching a conversation between Revlar, Toast, and Nights today. There was an extremely bizarre discussion in progress about how to define a punch or a kick, and how it would relate to Nights and Toast fighting each other. I joined in late so I was naturally confused--after making some comments about how their definition of punch didn’t really make sense, Revlar simply commented that it was how they were proceeding with the conversation and provided justification for the definitions.

This exchange was small, but it opened up my eyes to something Revlar does with precise consistency. I’ve complained about him doing this in a more rigid capacity (or when he was more rude about it in the past), but he is extremely good at remaining dedicated to a conversation’s flow of logic--even if what’s being discussed isn’t realistic, he can accept new definitions for the sake of an argument and hold them in mind with impressive accuracy.

The realism in their definition of what a punch or a kick is didn’t matter; it only mattered that Revlar knew how they were defining it and he was able to hold each of them to it as the conversation progressed. I’m amused and impressed at how well he manages to keep hold of even the most obscure facets of a conversation, something that he has done ever since he joined and for all manner of topics. For conversations like this one, where it is clearly joking in nature, it always makes it more entertaining to talk with him.

Finally for today, the second Friendsim was announced. It certainly isn’t hiding the spirit of Weed Day at all, which has actually been funny enough to make plenty of people look forward to it. The implications of this are good, namely that the Friendsims will be released often enough to tide us over while we wait for the second act of Hiveswap. A couple of weeks between each Friendsim isn’t bad at all, especially with Hussie responsible for writing them. The release date for Friendsim Volume 2 is next week; we wait to see if it will live up to the first.

Nothing more for today.

---

21^st of April 2018

I mentioned yesterday that I was in talks with Dingus, Shitler, and Deus about the state of altgen. It is undeniable that the channel has been declining in activity, and this is true even more so for its entertainment value. For whatever reason, the channel has not been as enjoyable as it once was. Is it a matter of us growing past the shitposts? Is there an actual, identifiable shift in quality or are we realizing it’s actually just not that funny?

To address these questions, we decided to take a look at the rules of the place. The level of activity has been inversely proportional to the number of guidelines we put in place over time, roughly speaking. It went from being a place of “few to no restrictions” to having more hard rules than literally any other channel in the server. I’m sure I don’t need to explain why this makes no sense, and is probably hurting altgen’s viability.

To this end, I discussed a rework with the people mentioned above. There are Six Main Things that should be taken into account with the place, topics or concepts that are non-negotiable insofar as things that shouldn’t be allowed: porn, gore, spam, raiding, sexism, racism (or whatever -ism or phobic concept one might include in that list). Aside from those things, all of the rules that we’ve garnered in the channel over time are about specific behavioral instances that either no longer apply or didn’t need to be properly banned in the first place.

All of those problems that we instated hard rules with before will now be covered under a more generalized philosophy that we’ve taken to calling Rule 0. This name and concept were both taken from D&D, which says that the person organizing the game has full purview and final say on all matters, regardless of the codified rules. So too have we given ourselves that power here: no matter if the rule is explicitly detailed already or not, if we say something in altgen it goes.

I feel like this will give us all a little more breathing room: when it comes to moderation we’ll have more license to stop things if needed or ignore them if it’s not; similarly, the users will have more freedom to do as they please, assuming that their activities aren’t in violation of the few things they must actually avoid at all times. Hopefully this will help reestablish the flow and energy that altgen used to have in the past.

We floated the idea of removing the extraneous rules with Makin, who instantaneously agreed (he has always maintained that a more hands-off principle is desirable in moderation). Thus, yesterday we reworked the description of the channel and got rid of an immense picture kept in pins with a list of all the supplemental rules. All of this was explicitly an attempt to increase interest, activity, and entertainment value of the channel.

It’s a bit too early to tell having only been one day, but so far it seems at least mildly successful. We don’t exactly have a way to quantify this (and even if we did it’s been too soon), but even just in the last day the conversations had there have all been more hilarious, more energetic, and have more people in them than before. It may just be an effect of the weekend, but it is our sincerest hope that this will yield better balance in the channel going forward.

While there have been some unfortunate individuals trying to take advantage of this, it has been pretty easy to invoke rule 0 and get rid of the troublemakers. On the opposite end of this spectrum, there have been some rather savory people in altgen that I’ve increasingly wanted to recognize as time goes by. To this end, I jokingly created a role entitled “Altgenner of the Week”, to be awarded to one person each week that I feel deserves it.

This was discovered by Nights and other mods much more quickly than I would have hoped, but it hasn’t actually been removed. I’ve taken this as tacit approval for what I’m doing and have taken great pleasure in administering the role to people for the last two weeks. The first Altgenner of the Week was a relatively gentle user named Oblong Meat Product. The beginning of this week was $trider, and today (after a long streak of spamming “SACRIFICE” at blazing speeds with the other users) it was a fellow named Kople, who was rather graceful with some teasing we administered to him.

I don’t expect this to really go anywhere, if anything I’ll forget about it by the end of next month. In the meantime though, it feels like one more thing on top of the numerous ideas we’ve had for shaping altgen into a better place once more. I would speak more on this, but Makin actually forcibly removed me from the channel so that I would focus on writing this entry. Sad!

Outside of altgen, today there was an update for the SCP game; despite how infrequently we seem to play it in recent weeks we all decided to get together for it again. This was accompanied by a rather nice surprise: Jit, another member from the Music Team, decided to join us in playing the game. I wrote about Jit in the Music Team article, and he was one of the members who provided a rather comprehensive response to my questions.

Jit actually joined the HSD some weeks ago, although aside from an initial conversation with him I don’t believe he commented on much since then. Back then, he mentioned being worried that his responses to my questions were too dark or pessimistic for the article--he actually mentioned being prompted to come here because he thought his posts on the subreddit were being shadowbanned since he was critical of What Pumpkin, which we were quick to reassure him was not the case.

Personally I found his responses to be refreshing even if they were more cynical in nature. I’ve mentioned to him before, but it is useful to have as wide a variety of opinions as possible when critically analyzing anything. It was not uncommon to have positive responses about the Music Team, so having more negatively-oriented answers was beneficial too: it helps to establish a dynamic range of interpretations and memories. I hope that after his discussion with us he felt less apprehensive about his responses.

There’s been some development on the “Letter from Andrew Hussie” that is being offered as a prize for solving the ARG from last week. Some users have already received their letters. True to Hussie trolling fashion, it was revealed that the envelopes each contain exactly one gigantic alphabetic letter: the first we became aware of was an “R”.

Other letters gotten so far include “H”, “I”, and Sora just thirty minutes ago posted a picture of a freshly obtained D. I actually paid to get one of these letters which hasn’t yet arrived, but there is already speculation on what these might be spelling out. Based on the letter so far, Makin surmises: “yeah pretty much confirmed / letters spell ANDREW HUSSIE”, which would not at all be surprising. Until we have more letters it’s impossible to be absolutely sure, but from our current perspective the mystery seems to have cleared up.

Nothing more for today.

---

22^nd of April 2018

Some of the best times on this server are those days where the energy never drops and people manage to pass it along to each other without pause; such is at it was today, where everything seemed to accelerate into this whirlwind of fun and, at times, deepness. There was no room for awkwardness or the timidity of strangers, only a maelstrom of conversation and the warm glow of a close group of friends.

Nothing of real importance even happened today: there was no news about Hiveswap, Viz, the Friendsim, or Homestuck itself; there were no major issues in the server; everything that may have served to move people here was absent. Instead, the activity all came from within.

At first glance I imagine most would have mistaken it for something more sinister, as it consisted mostly of us arguing with each other about all manner of topics. We ranged from such inane nonsense as the best fursona to discussing which Star Wars movie sucks the most to what should go in this journal to geese being evil⁷⁹. The full range of topics we’re willing to discuss amazes me still, and I would not be surprised if we haven’t even touched the vast majority of ideas that lurk within our collective consciousness.

It would be one thing also if it were simply the same group of people that this is possible with each time, but part of what excites me about this is that the people involved will vary throughout the day. There is a definite shift in the users present as the day progresses, which adds this sense of depth to the community that wouldn’t exist otherwise. It is refreshing to be able to go on at different times of day and witness these complex interactions and relationships that have formed, sometimes independent of each other.

There appear to be many people who have formed fast friendships with each other in the thicket of it all: Tensei and Nights are one such set, and then there’s Skyplayer and Sora. Some distinct groups exist, such as the Dragon Ball crew (primarily consisting of myself, Tipsy, Putnam, and Griever, although others like Revlar and Cait join in frequently). It brings me immeasurable joy to see such associations pop up in this community.

Then again, at the end of the day we’re all together too. There are plenty of people who are online seemingly at all times, defying time almost brazenly. I do this a lot, looking at the server from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to sleep. Others may also do this, like Makin himself. Honestly, it’s hard not to think of someone who engages in this kind of behavior. Perhaps this group simply accrues those who are more naturally drawn to online socialization; it would certainly fit with the themes of the story that brought us all here.

In the midst of this thicket, we had a newcomer that asserted themselves more quickly than others have done. Another of Tipsy’s friends alongside Brooke, a fellow named Jun, came around after only two days of messing about in the server. It was only a matter of hours, I think, before they had firmly implanted themselves in our midst.

It was actually quite impressive: there was no weeks wasted on flitting here occasionally before settling down as it usually goes. Instead, they associated with us freely for a bit and then simply said: “its literally a clique / but still pretty welcoming … i love this channel”. They came here to reacquaint themselves with Tipsy, but have stayed for the camaraderie. I find it thrilling in a way--it’s always nice to have new people, and I hope they’ll stay awhile.

In the past, I’ve often wondered--sometimes publically, sometimes to myself--whether the long-term stability of our group is assured or not. Of course, it is still impossible to say one way or the other whether we will persist indefinitely; the threat of disbandment lurks always, sometimes closer and sometimes farther away from us. Yet, days like these convince me that the potential to last exists in our community, and I think I can be more than satisfied with that.

As time passes it becomes harder to remember what it was we talked about throughout the day, but that feeling of warmth lingers. At this moment I feel an incredible sense of kinship to the people that come here, which may be fitting since I talk to them each and every day. I’m sure that I will forget more and more of the finer details that permeate our existence here, but I will never forget the golden glow of our afternoons spent hashing it out together, total strangers and yet resolute friends.

Nothing more for today.

---

23^rd of April 2018

Nothing of real importance happened today, so I want to take a time to describe the pins list of mspa-lit. I realized only recently that I have not actually bothered to describe what pins actually are, despite mentioning them occasionally in the past (and recently, in reference to altgen’s rule list). “Pin” refers to a simple system where an important or otherwise noteworthy post may be stickied in a list for others to easily find at all times.

We may add or remove pins at any given time, although there is a limit to the amount of pins we may have. I’m not adamantly certain how many pins we’re allowed--I thought it was fifty at first, but upon review that appears to be too many and I believe the answer is closer to 25 or so. At any rate, this makes it so that pin space is a valuable resource; it is the rule for old or less amusing pins to be removed in favor of the new, although there are many older pins which have stood the test of time.

Looking through the pin list of mspa-lit, the earliest is from a month before I joined, at the beginning of October in 2016: it’s from Makin, and is a screenshot of one of Hussie’s Formspring responses. Less important than the actual pin itself is the precedent this sets (or once set) for the pin list, where an important piece of information may be selected so that it can be referenced with little trouble later. That of course changed as time went by, but for some the principle held true.

After this are a smattering of quotes from various people that used to come around the HSD, including James (with the infamous “Yikes”) and Cohen (“it’s not a meme if you never stop saying it, it’s respiration”). After this, the consistency of pins shifts rapidly. One of the first memes involves a comic edit involving the word “misguided”, which I’ve described at great length before.

From there, it only gets more shitposty the closer to the present you get. Sometimes the pins still function as bookmarks for important events, such as this video of WoC losing a bet about the release of Hiveswap and having to snort hot sauce up his nose. Niklink and Tensei both have a few pins in here, all of which are genuinely funny--each of them have a variation on the trolley discussion, and Tensei has an uncanny ability to recreate generic memes in a more HSD-centric fashion.

This one from Makin manages to make me laugh literally every time I see it, although I can only imagine what someone who has no previous exposure to any of this might think about it. It’s times like these where the absurdity of it all compounds on me and I’m reminded of just how truly nested our community is in the grand scheme of things.

I wanted to take some time to describe someone who isn’t around in the HSD, but rather on the subreddit. A user named Mindbleach is a figure of some note, with a remarkably consistent posting habit. Nearly every single day, Mindbleach will post several pictures of fanart on the sub that other people have drawn, with credit to the original artist.

This has been going on for as long as I can remember, and after consciously witnessing this for several weeks I decided to ask Mindbleach a question or two. I was curious especially if they ever reposted certain works for any reason, to which they said:

Oh yeah, sometimes on purpose. When good stuff doesn't do well it goes in a spite list so I can throw it at people later. The main list grew out of control after some art binges for my own sake left me with stuff so good it had to be shared. This bloomed somewhat into merely high-quality art with useful tags.

The hilarious idea of a spite list aside, I’m intrigued by this person’s implication. I would not be surprised if they have an incredible catalog or archive of Homestuck-centric fanart, which is something that anyone reading this should realize that I get excited about. I’m glad to see other people engaging in the spirit of preservation.

Nothing more for today.

---

24^th of April 2018

In the afternoon, there was some rather poignant discussion amongst Olki, Nat, Rar, and a couple others about members of a community suddenly disappearing: “its sad when people disappear” remarked Jun, to which Olki responded “especially when the people are like / an integral part of a close knit, super small community / the kind of person who drummed up half the talk through their presence”. I think that many of us quietly fear this possibility.

To my surprise, Nat in particular seemed quite upset at the idea. She’s always struck me as too gruff for that kind of affectation, but the mention of a tightly knit group breaking apart suddenly seemed to truly get to her in a bad way. She started to describe herself and her life’s circumstances a bit, but then she policed herself into going to #hangout before saying anymore.

I worry about Nat sometimes. She can be aggressive with people, beyond what I would deem acceptable from a pseudo, but she also carries this air of impishness that makes it hard to approach her about stuff sometimes. We aren’t terribly close--sometimes I get the impression that she just doesn’t like me that much for some reason. All the same though, I hope that she’s alright.

Speaking more broadly, Makin continued his pattern of exiling certain topics from mspa-lit by creating something that has been often joked about in the past: #science-math is now the official STEM-dedicated channel, provoking the ire of some (especially WoC) while also appeasing many others.

Putnam and Nat and a few other people are all rather pleased with the development, as they were the ones that this channel was primarily dedicated to. Putnam historically has ejaculated much programming or math into the channel, and previously Nat would hang out in #coding-tech habitually, posting long reams of code she happened to be working on. For them, and perhaps more in the future, the new channel is a boon.

Ironically, I’m not totally sold on its existence. I feel like splitting up conversation further is unnecessary, and that this is more just an opportunity for Makin to flex his administrative muscles and exert a little more control on the topic of the channel. At this point I would suspect him of earnestly trying to break up the channel, but that doesn’t really make any sense to me. I wonder what must go through his mind sometimes.

Nothing more for today.

---

25^th of April 2018

I was just describing this problem the other week, but the shitposting in mspa-lit has reached an uncomfortable high. Revlar was complaining about it as he is wont to do, but this time his words stuck to me. That was a few nights ago, and since then the cause of his concern has rapidly made itself more visible.

There’s a concept concerning memes called “snowcloning”, which is when a particularly funny meme is suddenly and quickly copied en masse. These copies are the eponymous snowclones, where the idea is that snowclones make for very cheap and easy humor following the template of the original meme, but they rapidly become annoying as hell. Snowclones were recently banned on the subreddit a few months ago after they started to grow massively out of control and were noticeably bringing down the quality of the entire sub.

So too has it been the case here lately, where memes long past or even new ones are now being snowcloned. This is normally acceptable but the rate of it has gotten to the point where people like myself and Revlar are starting to get sick of the pattern. Many people are ambivalent of the process like hb, or others will actively engage in it. Coupled with a tendency among some regulars like Toast, Rar, and Olki to engage in some decidedly shitposty behavior, it feels as if the channel quality has been dropping like a stone recently.

No one is really sure if this needs to be handled immediately or what to do about it should we decide to intervene. After my decidedly heavy-handed decisions in recent history I’ve decided to mostly recuse myself, only speaking up if it truly reaches a level that is clearly unacceptable. Revlar has been quick to condemn this, because he feels like my disappearances almost always coincide with a drop in channel quality (flattering, but he fails to consider my appreciation for dumb fun).

In the interim, once the discussion was broached there was some decent dialogue about how to proceed on the issue. Some blame was cast towards the new arrivals in the group, but Barry dissented: “i dont think its the new people specificly tho … shitposting is a way for people who arnt in the current convo to participate”. Null took it a step further and consciously admitted to engaging in the intense shitposting behavior: “... revlar brings up a good point and it sucks when things get just swallowed”. With that concession in place, at least one person is willing to try and rectify the problem.

It’s good to see everyone listening to each other properly for once. I would like it to avoid turning into some sort of fracas--mods getting involved is not supposed to be a commonly-required occurrence, I would much prefer to nudge them along the right course of action, if indeed any intervention is required at all. Perhaps I’m just lazy, but people being encouraged to police themselves is always more rewarding (when it can be made to work, of course). We can only hope that with some further guidance, people will start listening to each other more and we can avoid this problem in the future.

Nothing more for today.

---

26^th of April 2018

Sometime in the afternoon there was an altercation between Nights and Tipsy that I thought might escalate to dangerous levels. It began with a decidedly #hangout-centric discussion where people were trying to describe each other in as few words as possible, or identify relevant character traits. In the midst of this, Tipsy decided to describe Nights as having “child-like intelligence”.

It should be easy to predict the outcome to that particular statement; Nights very quickly questioned the statement and rebuffed Tipsy for it, and at this point I expected the situation to be over. To my surprise, Tipsy doubled down and repeated it, which prompted very directed ire from Nights. This continued one or two more times--all of us watching were utterly bewildered.

The statement by itself is denigrating enough, but it comes in conjunction with a pattern that Nights has spoken out against recently. Sometime last week a discussion was opened about how he hated it when people call her naive or gullible (although to my recollection no one has really done this, at least not outright). I’m afraid that his general demeanor and the way people interact with her may lend itself to the impression that he is treated as less than an adult by people, which any reasonable person should understand is frustrating.

Further, I imagine one might understand that this ill-timed joke from Tipsy only served to fuel those particular flames. Already unhappy with his perceived treatment, Nights quickly grew angry over the offense. It was quite stunning--I can’t speak for the others but I had expected Tipsy to stop after Nights asked the first time. Nights grew quite irate and scathingly insisted that Tipsy was being sincere.

Finally the latter understood that no one was really having fun and stopped repeating the joke. Nights was confused and asked why Tipsy wouldn’t actually believe it after repeating it so many times. At this, Tipsy shoved her foot firmly into her mouth, saying: “that would actually be racist of me to think”. Everyone was stunned, it was just such a bizarrely uncharacteristic thing to come out her mouth.

Thankfully she clarified quickly by saying it was a language thing, which was infinitely more understandable than the implication otherwise. There was much rabble rousing about the the discussion as a whole. Tipsy herself said: “this entire conversation is me being autistic as fuck”, which I feel managed to break the tension sufficiently. It kind of illustrates to me how many of our problems may arise from simple miscommunications and misunderstandings, though. What an absurd progression of events.

Aside from this, there was an event in altgen that I felt was necessary to cover. There is a tendency to post dumb shit asking for reactions, such as “ten smiley faces and I’ll post some picture”, which inevitably gets people to react to the image. It’s attention grabbing of the worst sort, although sometimes it is applied as a meme sufficiently well.

The particular instance of this I want to cover is a post by McMayor Nik made back on the 13th of November 2017: “if this image gets 100 :dingus: dingus will be promoted to mod”. These sorts of posts are frequent enough not to illicit comment, except that out of nowhere Makin pinned that particular message. People took this as an explicit contract, and so began the multi-month journey of trying to help Dingus reach modhood.

Today, that journey came to an end. I’m impressed myself, but the madmen actually did it:

People had slowly been ramping up their excitement for this moment for a few days, so the moment the crossover happened altgen positively exploded. Makin pings were made, we posted a screencap in the modchat so Makin would specifically be aware of it. Unfortunately he has already gone to bed for the day, so we have to wait until tomorrow to see how this plays out. Excitement abounds.

Finally, an event of minor note: the movie Avengers: Infinity War is being released throughout the world this week. It’s being released in America on Friday the 27th, or tomorrow. Some places already have it out, and people like Minish have been able to go see it already. In the case of movies that are this hyped up, there is a strict death penalty for anyone who spoils the movie for other people.

This leads us to a bit of a conundrum. #western-media is specifically designated as a spoilers-allowed channel, but the vast majority of people still haven’t seen it. Ngame, acting as the pseudo for western- and eastern-media channels, is American and thus has had no opportunity to go see it.

Minish came in absolutely blasting spoilers for the movie, as would be understandable, but due to most people not having seen it yet we had to rule this unallowable until the movie comes out in America. Minish was a bit miffed about this, but I don’t think anyone could really be put off by the ruling since he has his own entire channel where he routinely discusses spoilers for stuff he’s doing. In the end I felt like it worked out well enough, but in the future we may need to tweak the rules for the media channels just a bit.

Nothing more for today.

---

27^th of April 2018

Appropriately, Makin made good on his promise to mod Dingus. As of 9:37 AM EDT, Dingus is now a full mod on the HSD. Altgenners have predictably gone wild; their boy made it. He is the champion, it’s him. Yet, this modding comes with a caveat: Makin made a second post saying that Dingus would be unmodded as soon as there were 10 dingus reactions to his post, which he then pinned.

Thus, Dingus’s modship is a timebomb, and there is no telling how quickly it may go off. Optimistically it seems as if there are far few people willing to react to Makin’s post. In other words, there is some solidarity going on here. Some of the people involved are actually rather rabid in their defense of Dingus, but I fear that this will only spur the dissent to action.

In the meantime, the second volume of the Hiveswap Friendsim is due to come out today. There is actually going to be an update to the base game at noon, and then at 3 PM EDT the second volume itself will be available to purchase and download. People are slowly getting excited over the prospect of more content.

However, at noon no update came. Confusion spread quickly and uneasily. Hours passed, and no update was forthcoming. Makin came out and said what everyone was already afraid of: “probably no game today at this rate”. Confusion turned to upset, and for some time the discussion centered around what might happen if this proved to be true.

Then around 3 PM, the update actually did come out. Grumblings were left behind as people very quickly scoured the small and inconsequential update. Within five minutes of the update being available, resources for the game were posted that revealed features of future installments; the intense pace at which the assets were torn apart and analyzed was honestly hilarious to me in a way. Leave it to Homestuck fans to utterly devour any and all content offered to them.

The game itself was not immediately available, and after a few more muttered consternations it was finally released sometime after 3 PM. The HSD was a little quieter for a few minutes while people booted up the game and began playing. As with the last one though, the silence didn’t last long; people posted their reactions in #friendsim, which was opened up again briefly to allow for spoilers. Also true of the first volume, most people finished inside of 15 to 20 minutes.

The reaction was more or less neutral. Makin was decidedly negative, describing it as boring or even mediocre. Others were more forgiving, such as Griever: “friendsim verdict: makin was exaggerating - it's not as good as vol 1 but it's still fun”. It seems as if this was the most prevalent reception towards it, which is about what I had hoped for based on the reception to the first volume.

The writing was enjoyable but so brief that it didn’t allow for much of an impression. It was unfortunate that such was the case, but I feel like there’s a principle of the summed whole at play here: as more Friendsim volumes are released, the overall length of the game will increase and its quality should increase somewhat. As with Hiveswap itself, there is hope that the fully released product will be of greater note than the individual parts.

A couple hours after this, at 5:22 PM EDT, the appointed time came: all of the students from America were largely out of school at that point, which meant altgen was chock full once again of the more unsavory element. The post by Makin reached the required 10 dingus reactions, at which point he was promptly pinged. Like an angel of death he swept through, confirming that the reactions were fulfilled.

Just shy of eight hours after he had ascended Dingus had his power taken from him, was cast out from the pantheon, and fell back to pseudo status. Everyone went back to not giving a fuck, except for those more rabid supporters that I had mentioned in altgen. The user responsible for the final reaction, a shitter named Derpeyman, was lambasted appropriately. Altgen has since resumed its base status of debauchery and shitposting, and the server goes on like nothing happened.

We will always remember, though.

On one of my excursions to #general today I got to play witness to someone clamoring for an unban. This wasn’t really that remarkable in and of itself; however, the way it played out was amusing to me. Ifnar is rather dutiful and speaks in #general often, which is far more effort than I feel I can relinquish myself, so kudos to him. As it is, this user named Snippy had been banned from #serious and was initiating a decidedly lopsided campaign to get himself back in.

Ifnar’s patience for listening to people is astounding to me sometimes--this Skippy fellow was honestly pretty rude just about the entire time, but Ifnar took it without so much as batting an eye, only deigning to respond when there was something he could earnestly and professionally give back to the conversation. I chimed in a few times, but since I trust him well and it was about his channel I only gave my opinion and let him decided what to do on his own.

I didn’t actually get to see the conclusion of this confrontation but it was enjoyable to watch while it was unfolding. A brief search for the user in question shows that his serious-ban role has been removed, meaning Ifnar saw fit to unban him. Considering the content of the discussion I witnessed, this was vaguely surprising; I wonder how long it will last, hopefully a while. It’s nice to see things turn out positively every so often.

Nothing more for today.

---

28^th of April 2018

For some reason, today there was some brief discussion about the eventual fate of online communities. There was some vague reminiscing of previous online communities, especially among the older people like myself. It’s easy to get lost in the nostalgia for older internet homes gone by, Sydlexia being a prime example as always.

However, I’ve noticed that the younger members of the community don’t really have an analog for this. Minish has been a member of a different community before, namely the Undertale wiki of all places, but he found the experience to be profoundly uncomfortable in retrospect and doesn’t like to speak of it for very long. Others may follow a similar pattern, or more interestingly have never been a part of such a thing at all. For many, this is the first place approaching any sort of regular online hangout for them.

One must wonder at the sort of responsibility this foists on us. Responsibility I guess is the wrong word for it: there is no strict responsibility on our part to take care of these people, but there is some moral imperative (at least on my part) to make the experience a positive one. The lifeblood of a place like this is in the people who care about participating and interacting with each other, and it’s a lot easier to motivate them to do so when they’re having a good time.

My experiences with this sort of thing are exclusively in smaller, more dedicated groups, so it’s hard for me to say what the overall pattern to expect from this would be. It was necessary to have an influx of energy in some form or another--be it new members or information--in order to sustain a group. Is that principle different for larger groups? Do we deteriorate more slowly the more people we have, or is it possible to decay faster when the group gets too big? Is there a proverbial sweetspot we should be striving for in order to maximize the efficiency of this process?

I’m getting too technical of course, but these things are interesting to consider. If I were more inclined, I would try to look up more in-depth information on this and see if there’s any research that’s been done on the topic. I would be a little surprised if there was any literature available, to be honest; it’s not exactly like people are lining up to conduct experiments on exceedingly niche internet communities⁸⁰. All the same though, the sociological implications of such a study would be fascinating.

In the meantime, I suppose we’ll have to content ourselves with what we’ve got. The server is rapidly approaching another milestone in usercount, which for some reason isn’t quite as exciting as it used to be (although that may be some hindsight bias). This has prompted some small discussion about the future in a more positive sense as well; people are openly thinking about what this place would look like if it were still somehow around a decade from now. Dingus kept it short and sweet with a message to himself in the future: “10 years from now me if you're reading this you're a bitch”. I’m sure future Dingus will enjoy being reminded of this.

Finally, we were discussing the HSD in terms of its raw structure. After some consideration, we settled on the idea that Discord is an interesting cross of a bunch of different platforms. There is a large degree of personalization available to people through the use of avatars and name colors, the ability to rapidly and easily change your name. The ability to personalize yourself is highly similar to that of a forum experience. However, Discord is a real time chat interface, with no delay as one waits for a response to come in. This latter feature is similar to IRC.

An interesting contrast, perhaps the polar opposite of our experience, is 4chan: the posting system is slow by design and there is virtually no customization available outside of tripfagging, which is openly disparaged when used. These differences explain some of the behavior that has arisen for us, such as relying on smaller reactions as opposed to full scale reaction images as they do on 4chan.

On 4chan reaction images are themselves a form of identity, where an entire post is defined by the reaction that has been signified. With us I don’t think that’s strictly possible; the identity of each person present is apparent and consistent as time goes by, which makes employment of reaction images kind of awkward. The inhouse reaction system that Discord has is far more discrete, while still letting people express some sort of visceral emotion.

None of this is strictly important, they’re more just my musings than anything else. I have no idea how many other people may have consciously considered this, and I wonder if it was a conscious decision on the part of the Discord devs to make the system work this way. I should stop dallying on the subject though, it’s probably not interesting in the slightest. The only other piece of news relevant to the HSD today is that Toast finally completed the shill list, making four to do so alongside Revlar, Minish, and Gitaxian. I’m not far behind though.

Nothing more for today.

---

29^th of April 2018

Perhaps in keeping with yesterday’s discussion about the fate of online communities, today witnessed the topic of older times in our own fandom. Given how contentious we can be there was unsurprisingly some conflict over particular details or the accuracy of recalling various events, but overall it was a pretty informative experience. The forums were not spoken of in any detail, but the subreddit’s history was touched upon.

Details about Makin’s involvement naturally surfaced, and it was revealed that he joined the Homestuck fandom as it was sometime back in 2010; there were some pretty open accusations from people saying that the fandom was better off without his involvement, but in the end he brushed this off. After some of the things I’ve witnessed here I can easily imagine Makin getting embroiled in or even manufacturing substantial drama, but at the end of the day I can’t really comment on stuff that I wasn’t around for. No one elaborated on the exact nature of past events, so I can’t even record them. It’s times like these that I really wish I had been around back then so I could record events more properly.

For awhile at night there was a pretty intense discussion about music. It is a common convention in the group to disregard each others opinions on artistic concepts as “poor taste”; without fail, people who disagree with each other will end up attacking the others comprehension. This follows for movies, video games, or any form of media really.

The problem is that it sometimes becomes hard to discern whether people are simply mocking you for having a different opinion or if they actually believe your opinions are bad. Makin is of course particularly fond of busting out “you just have bad taste” when people naysay him, which is clearly an example of the former, but sometimes I witness people actually trying to claim some sort of objective superiority in this way. It’s a uniquely frustrating behavior to come across because of how pretentious it is.

Thankfully it’s not typically the case from what I can see. Rather, taste is just used as a cheap joke in the context of larger overall discussions. Such is as it was today with music. It turned out to be something of a repeat of the food discussion I had with everyone some months ago: I have rather unconventional opinions on both food and music, which very quickly led to a dogpile from everyone questioning how I could possibly feel the way I do.

It began with a rather innocuous question about Kanye West, after which Toast, Barry, and myself started talking about rap. They’re both avid listeners and were trying to share the tracks they like most, but I don’t particularly care for it. This snowballed into a fracas where everyone was sharing music in an attempt to get each others’ opinions on various musical genres or particular songs. It was an interesting mix, but naturally some (like Revlar) were displeased with the admittedly ectopic conversation.

It’s important to note that Revlar’s displeasure was not in fact because it was taking place in the wrong channel, but he feels the nature of these discussions is fairly banal. Above all else it seems that he hates conversations based around subjective and especially trivial measures; he prefers to talk about things that can be couched in more substantiated terms.

Sure enough, most of the musical conversation was a cock waving contest at first, and it took a little bit of time for us to start discussing the actual merits of certain types of music over another. Though, after the conversation had shifted he seemed eager to share what he liked as well. It seems that getting him to share his opinion is just a matter of approaching him the right way. Then again, I guess that’s simply true of everyone.

Nothing more for today.

---

30^th of April 2018

Makin added a new work to the shill list called Transdimensional Brain Chip, or TBC. This work is pretty unconventional in the shill list for a variety of reasons. Of note, it’s a comic; this is unusual in the sense that Makin typically hates comics (Homestuck excepted) due to how they’re constructed. He views the panel scheme as a waste of space that could be used on words.

More important than the fact that it’s a comic is that it fucking sucks. TBC looks like it was written by a five year old and is festooned with grammatical errors and weird, awkward sentence structure. The premise is simplistic, the humor is intensely sophomoric, and the progression of the narrative is ridiculous. Everything about TBC is remarkably terrible without exception.

And that’s why I love it. I earnestly thought it was one of the more entertaining works of the shill list, although--as would easily be predicted--the response from other people was not nearly so positive. Many such as hb, WoC, Toast, MrNostalgic, and Rar absolutely hate the comic. Surprisingly Revlar defending it alongside me, and Makin is casually insulting people who complain about it as is expected of him.

In all, the work has been far more controversial than I would have expected. The consensus leans more in favor of people who think the comic is trash, and although I agree with that statement it doesn’t mean I dislike the work. There’s a sort of raw quality to it that I appreciate; it’s so unpolished that it feels visceral. By itself that wouldn’t mean much, but the work is extraordinarily funny to me. The immediate comparison that most people came up with was Beavis and Butthead, although anyone who’s familiar with the show would understand why that doesn’t mean everyone would enjoy it.

There’s not much else to say on the matter I suppose. There have been few shills as contentious as this one, although Ever 17 has certainly come close, especially in more recent conversations. Without going into too much detail, the conclusion most people come to is that the story is exceedingly slow at first, but then the ending makes the entire experience worth it. I disagree completely, but I suppose that’s not strictly important.

It’s neat to see how individual people all feel about the various works that Makin has tried to share with us. Some works like Worm and Worth the Candle are pretty universally agreed upon as being good, except for some isolated shitters like WoC. The reverse doesn’t seem to be true either: none of the works, with the possible exception of TBC, are universally hated. Then there is of course a wide range of those works in the middle that people don’t feel strongly about one way or the other, like The Northern Caves. In the end, I think we’re all just waiting for the next big work to come and sweep the HSD into a frenzy for a month or two.

Nothing more for today.

---

1^st of May 2018

With two conversations of real note today, I’ll begin with the bad one. There was a huge problem with Minish earlier in the day. I wasn’t around for it myself, but when I had time to check in on the computer there were something like 30 messages from Minish trying to describe the situation to me. After reading them through I went and poked around as gently as I could in mspa-lit, although people were not shy in providing me answers.

Olki helpfully provided some context: it all started with “some conversation about an anti-shill server, which minish created (?as a joke?)”, which Minish confirmed later was indeed a joke. Rather than deescalating though, Makin demanded Minish to take down the links and destroy the server through PMs. Minish ended up PMing the server to a few more people, allegedly by accident, and Makin ended up all-banning him (different from a server ban; all-ban prevents you from talking in any channel, a server ban physically removes you from the server).

The situation escalated further because Minish started arguing about this treatment openly. Makin threatened to ban Minish if he didn’t stop arguing, which only prompted the latter to argue all the more fiercely. Makin thus kicked Minish, and thus it was that he contacted me trying to explain the situation and ask for help.

The situation did gradually defuse from there. Olki explains: “discourse about minish being banned kept up for a good while, someone made a joke about making being (((big makin))) and that sparked nazi discourse / which I shut down by boring everyone to death with magic the gathering”. Part of me regrets not being there, as I wonder if I would have been able to help keep tempers down. The other part of me is glad I wasn’t there, as this entire debacle sounds so pointlessly frustrating that just thinking about it makes me feel more tired.

The net effect is that Minish decided to leave. We fully expected him to come back later in the evening, which he did, but it’s an exceedingly unpleasant development whenever someone as dedicated as Minish feels driven out. Normally I would be more angry that this entire crappy situation happened, but instead I just feel kind of confused. The escalation of it all was so horribly unnecessary, and the emotions have run so high, that it isn’t even entertaining to discuss.

Now that that’s out of the way, the other conversation (which I found much more interesting) was brief, but concerned an aspect of the server’s history that I wasn’t personally familiar with. I vaguely remember it being brought up in the past, but there used to be a channel called #courtroom in this server.

#courtroom is a pretty simple idea in theory: if someone breaks a rule in a big way or is generally being a shit meister of some sort, then they get banned from every channel except #courtroom. There, only they and Makin are allowed to speak and there are “proceedings” where the defendant is expected to explain their actions adequately. If the reasoning isn’t sufficient for why they did whatever got them in trouble, they are punished with a ban or something arbitrary, which can often be pretty funny.

This practice can actually be found in some other servers: the Khonjin Discord Server actually had one up until a month or two ago, and the way in which trials would go with Connor acting as judge, jury, and executioner were often enough to whip people in the general chats on that server into a manic, hilarious frenzy.

As time goes by, however, the practice is less and less common. A quick perusal of the other servers I’m part of doesn’t reveal any active #courtroom channels (some servers may have one but in such cases they’re typically defunct, not having been used in some time). Makin got rid of our #courtroom as a result of a myriad of complaints. When asked about it, he simply said: “it was considered "bullying"”. In all fairness, it probably was.

From here, though, the discussion turned back to more somber topics. I don’t know what it is about this week, but there has been a lot of attention paid towards concepts that are somewhat morbid for us. A couple days ago it was about how internet communities in general fade away, and today there was more of the same. If anything, it was far more explicit than expected; overt mentions of the eventual death of our server are typically rare, and yet it was a pretty open discussion of the possibility.

People like myself understand that it is illogical and unreasonable to expect a place like this to continue indefinitely, but we also don’t take that as a reason to be comfortable with the idea of it dying. It is something to be avoided if possible, even though the overwhelming evidence of our rational minds⁸¹ suggests that to escape the eventuality is in fact impossible.

To make matters worse, Phantos left the server around the time this conversation was happening. None of us discussed it too openly, but this development is deeply saddening. I don’t think anyone knows why he left either--if Rar hadn’t mentioned it I imagine we would have been oblivious to the development for a while yet.

He had been spending gradually less time in mspa-lit for some weeks now, talking in other channels like #general, #hangout, and #western-media, but the development is exceptionally concerning. It appears that he left far before the fiasco between Minish and Makin, so that’s not involved in making him leave, but it only makes me wonder what might have been responsible. I do look forward to him coming back, but even if he doesn’t I just hope that he’s alright.

This topic did not sit well with people for obvious reasons. Red actually came in trying to dispel the depressing topic, chastising me for wallowing in melancholy. It was kind of aggravating to have the conversation broken up by force, but I have to admit that we probably needed to move on. The question lingers on as always, but we’ve successfully suppressed it.

At the very least, in terms of the HSD it’s been suppressed. Makin actually spoke up later in the evening and said: “I feel like the homestuck fanbase is truly dying now”. This confused some of us until he clarified that he didn’t mean we were actually dropping off in membership or activity, but rather that discussion about Homestuck itself was starting to wane. We felt obligated to laugh at him for this: I said that if the measure of the fandom’s health was in terms of how much the source material is discussed, then Homestuck has truly been dying for a long time now.

He then tried to paint his comment as an attempt at reverse psychology to get us to talk more about the comic, but I wonder what prompted the observation in the first place. More positively, this does illustrate the use of having other material to talk about than just Homestuck itself. The shills list may get made fun of, but there has been a gradual shift in focus towards other works like Worm and Worth the Candle.

I imagine that as time goes by these alternative works will only grow in popularity among us, and has been discussed in the past we may transition into being a different kind of server to cope with the change. I hesitate to predict we would change into anything significantly different--I imagine that at our base we would always have a focus on Hussie’s work, unless he mysteriously started to suck incredibly bad at whatever he’s currently doing--but who knows what the future holds? Maybe we’ll rebrand as a fanfic-centric Discord community one of these days. I can certainly imagine worse fates, although I have to wonder what our community would look like then.

Nothing more for today.

---

2^nd of May 2018

A little discourse today that fell outside the norm, but was honestly pretty entertaining. It started with Niklink bringing up the Avengers: Infinity War box office, which have already broken many records and is expected to continue that trend. He and I enjoy discussing stuff like that occasionally, but then through some weird nonsense the conversation shifted through a few topics. After going through James Cameron’s Avatar we landed on the topic of western movies based off of anime series.

This is understandably a pretty niche topic to cover. It was pushed forward as a question by Goobatron, who wanted to know if there were any such movies made in the west that were solely based off of anime. Anyone who’s a fan of such things could tell you about a plethora of movies that came out recently based on anime series, like the Ghost in the Shell movie from 2017 or the often-cursed Dragonball Evolution movie from 2009 (both of which came up as examples).

Goobatron was not satisfied with these answers, however; he claimed that we didn’t understand what we were asking for, which prompted the ire of many who were present. After requesting clarification, Goob specified that he explicitly wanted western movies that were based on anime originals, not anything based off of a manga. In conjunction with some previous incidents in related conversations involving this topic and Goob, it all melted together into this amazing explosion as people started to blast him for his pedantry.

Tensei in particular was quite incisive, more than I expected from him. He was extremely annoyed that we were now locked into what was effectively a semantic discussion:

its a dumb distinction … now we are talking about whether or not anime adaptation is the right name / even though you knew what i meant / this is one of the dumbest things to focus on and youre a conversation killer

Which was honestly so vicious a response that I couldn’t help but laugh. Other people were quick to leap on Goob as well, so many that I actually started to feel bad for him (Griever summing up the conversation: “goob stop being so pretentious about japanese comic books”).

In the end the conversation was rescued somewhat, although there was a perceptible lag compared to what it might have been before the sidetracking. There were some additional hiccups that implied Goob simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about in this area, which prompted many to start ignoring him although he claimed not to know why people were so upset.

The rest of the evening was consumed with sillier topics, but it feels like a pall has been cast over the chat a little bit. It may just be my own sensitivities, but the tone seems to be more subdued in general lately. I’m still mulling over what exactly is responsible, or if the feeling is even accurate. I’m hoping that this apprehension is misplaced, as it has often proven in the past. As always, time will tell what happens.

Nothing more for today.

---

3^rd of May 2018

Concern about Phantos has arisen once again, as more and more people become aware of his absence. There have been a number of people asking about him, and many of the same who ask will try to reach out to him and see what’s going on. This has been rather heartwarming to see, but it also serves as a substantial reminder of the fact that he’s gone. The more people who realize he’s not around anymore, the more real it feels.

More people learning about this turn of events has encouraged people to look into probable causes for it. Before long, a discussion kicked off concerning Makin’s handling of the server and mspa-lit in particular. It was a distinct opportunity for those unhappy with the state of things to voice their concerns. The old gripes were fielded once more: Makin uses mspa-lit as a personal playground; the way that he discourages conversation also keeps people from joining in; the place feels cliquey, et cetera. Unfortunately, the age old problem is still true as well: given that these things are true, what can even be done about it?

Then of course there are those who disagree that any such problems exist, or that they matter. Toast in particular is vocal on this issue, obstinately against the idea that Makin’s behavior constitutes a real problem (important to note that he doesn’t deny it happens, only that it isn’t something people should worry over). Whether this is accurate or not can be debated all day, but the reality of the matter is that it doesn’t matter how much it’s discussed--Makin is unlikely to budge on this issue no matter what people say.

Instead, I’m opting to focus on the more positive side of all this. It felt, even if only for a moment, that older regulars who have since stopped talking for the most part came back for this conversation and more besides. Tori has been talking more often lately, Red shows up every day for at least a bit. More unconventional figures like WoC showed up in mspa-lit as well; his distaste for the channel could not keep him from seizing on an opportunity to criticize it in the open, but to my pleasant surprise he lapsed into normal conversation with the rest of us.

There’s also a new cabal developing and stabilizing; another generation of newcomers is making themselves apparent through people like Jun, tmtm, Reti, Multivac, and Cher (a fellow who joined near the end of March or so). Seeing this new group arise does a lot to assuage my doubts from yesterday: change is the natural state of things, and the winds of change are carried on the backs of these new people.

I worry a lot about the landscape of the HSD shifting as time goes by, but it’s going to happen no matter how I feel about it. I’m forced to wonder, for what must be the umpteenth time, what this place will look like in the future. A year from now, who will still be here and who will have moved on? Usually such thoughts fill me with a soft dread, but now I’m more curious than anything. Maybe we’ll see mspa-lit shift into something more positive and welcoming in the future.

Such is as it was tonight, I think. Even with all the negative developments lately, we were able to forget our collective woes in carousing and reminiscing, something that I feel a lot of us needed. I can’t remember most of what it is we talked about now, but the exact content of the discussions is less the point than the feeling of it all. If I had to give an example, there’s a video taken from Gachi that Dingus edited to be about Makin and me. It never fails to get a laugh out of people present when it comes up in conversation.

It’s a rather ethereal experience when I think about it, but there’s a substantial feeling of satisfaction in spending an evening talking about everything and nothing in particular with my friends here. Even with the troubles of the real world nipping at our heels and drama galore to deal with in this virtual one, it’s gratifying to know we can come here and have a nice time anyway. When I’m older and the details of this place have faded from my mind, I’ll still remember the times that we got to share a pleasant and golden afternoon with each other.

Nothing more for today.

---

4^th of May 2018

It feels like things are slowing down a bit lately. I think I got spoiled by the first half of April, perhaps; so much stuff happened in such a short period of time, and like any other time that the pace gets out of control it’s always a tad rough trying to adjust to a more normalized rate of development.

Then again, it may in fact be the wrong time of year. We’re nearing the end of the academic year for most schools, which means that finals are approaching. Indeed, many people on the HSD have brought up tests and projects due as a reason for their lack of activity. Unlike the last time this happened, I don’t feel panicked; it’s starting to resemble a predictable pattern, so I don’t feel quite so alarmed about the decline in activity.

If anything, things have gotten a bit cozy--it’s slower, but that’s not always a bad thing. I’ve been watching a couple movies with people like Nik, Ifnar, Cloudaria, Null, and a couple others. Similarly, the trifecta of myself, Rar, and Putnam has gotten together again for a marathon of King of the Hill (for which Toast, Null, and MrNostalgic joined us later in the evening). I can see this turning into a sort of tradition if we continue to enjoy it enough as time goes by.

There was a stir in the afternoon with a post from a member from WP, but it’s since been deleted and I’ve decided against explaining it any further detail besides that (even including the author’s name would be bordering contentious)--it’s for the best if I just refrain from talking about it at any length whatsoever, so I’ll skip straight to the reactions from people. With protestations over being involved in the event in question, it seemed to me that Makin was kind of pissed off about the whole affair; people were eager to put it behind them and ignore the post’s existence, but he railed against it for some minutes despite their spoken desires to move on.

I wondered why he was bothering, and some were quick to offer their explanations: Putnam was especially critical of the development, using some rather choice words that I don’t necessarily feel like repeating here (I’m sure one can imagine well enough what was said). Makin said something that stuck to me though: “I don't want to… have [the person who wrote the post] slander my friends again”, which caught me by surprise a bit.

Makin isn’t a sentimental guy, and hearing him explicitly refer to us as his friends is kind of unusual. I can’t accept the reasoning he offered at face value because of his very nature and how he’s presented himself in the past, but I guess I’m a sucker for this sort of a thing. It would be way too easy for him to manipulate me now I think about it: all he’s gotta do is tempt me with these promises of camaraderie and fellowship. I should probably stop being so easy to influence with this nonsense, but all I can say is I’m happy to see him using such language.

My line of thought is only going to get increasingly weird from here on out, I can already tell. Nothing more for today.

---

15^th of May 2018

I think it’s time to take a break.

The quality of discussion and the general events surrounding mspa-lit (in particular, not necessarily the HSD as a whole) have been kind of stagnating. The last set of notes that I have is from the 5th and 6th of this month, both of which are kind of upsetting to mull over. In the interest of clarity I’ll explain to some degree but the details are fuzzy or otherwise unpleasant to recall.

On the 5th minor stuff involves reorganization of the channels yet again, so that #science was separate from #coding-math-tech. This was later reversed because it completely destroyed activity in both channels, so now we have #science-math and #coding-tech, and I earnestly hope it stays that way so I’m not forced to report on it yet again.

The exact nature of the discourse I mentioned on the 4th will remain purposefully unclarified; I don’t feel like getting complaints over it more than necessary. That having been said, the effects of it have been weird and uncomfortable at best. During the worst of the proceedings, four members of mspa-lit were all gone from the server: Putnam, Tipsy, Minish, and Griever. Phantos is still completely missing and no one knows what might have happened to him, and then in the last week Griever, Putnam, and Tipsy all came back. Minish might be gone for good, although we’ll have to see.

For those days when most of them were gone it was intensely distressing, so much so that I’m forced to wonder for the umpteenth time if I’m placing too much emphasis and importance on my interactions with people here. Unlike in the past when I was able to firmly conclude “no”, I think that I have to agree with my conscience. The upset I experienced as a result of seeing these people gone—whom I consider extremely good friends in a way—kind of underlined the idea that I need to take a step back and reevaluate my priorities.

This discourse lasted for a number of days, and notably on the 6th amidst a fury of complaints and people refusing to relinquish the topic Makin completely hid mspa-lit from everyone, saying he would bring it back once everyone “appreciated it like they should” or some such. The assortment of people online at the time crowded into #hangout as is tradition when these things happen, although we very quickly attracted the ire of channel regulars there like Red and Kreuz.

The furor actually grew so great that Olki placed a strict moratorium on “litcourse” as he called it, and mandated that we all move to a different channel. We eventually complied with much grousing, and ended up Jun’s patreon channel that he opened recently. It was originally meant for discussing K-pop but it was ironically named #notmspalit at the time, so it felt like a natural attractor for those of us who were currently deposed.

For a little while there was a noticeable progression of activity that felt distinctly like mspa-lit from some months ago, when things weren’t quite so contentious and had fallen into a regular routine. It was actually kind of astonishing to witness: a certain je ne sais quoi had managed to penetrate the conversation and make everything feel alright again, even if only for a moment. Then of course the rumblings of a couple dozen people all upset at the current state of affairs took over the channel.

Talk of what to do thoroughly dictated the topic for the next several hours. There were several different factions at the start all trying to figure out what was wrong at a basal level, and what needed to be done. No one seemed to be able to agree about what was the causal factor behind all of our unrest and unhappiness, and then two main camps emerged. Predictably, the dividing line was about whether it was Makin’s fault or not, and as a direct result of that thought process was what should be done about it.

Many people briefly floated the idea of making a splinter server, but that’s a categorically stupid idea so no one actually bothered. Revlar shouted a lot about not treating Makin as the enemy, which strictly speaking he’s not; this did not stop a wide range of people from referring to Makin as “the problem” and subsequently coming up with ideas that necessitated his removal from the equation (whether it be removing his position somehow or just removing him from group participation). All of these suggestions were nonsense and generally tiresome, so of course nothing was actually done or agreed upon.

Such is how the night progressed until Makin himself came back online. He read through the backlogs and didn’t really address the more serious conversation about his behavior in favor of making pointed jokes at all of the more brash and cringey statements made by the hotheads that were involved in the discussion. I remember witnessing this and growing distinctly more aggravated as the night went on; to his credit, when he was done fooling around Makin took a moment to try and talk with me in a more serious capacity, although it was well past 4 AM EST and I was in no state to talk.

All of that was a week ago and thinking about it now still manages to make me tired. I was extremely saddened by the (admittedly temporary) loss of people like Putnam, Tipsy, and Minish. Griever ended up coming back so soon and specified that his departure was not really due to any specific circumstances so it didn’t really matter. Putnam and Tipsy both explicitly specified that they left because of Makin’s behavior, but they’re back now so I can’t complain too much aside from the usual. Minish was banned for breaking rules and then subsequently unbanned, but he’s still gone because he wants to focus on his own projects and because he feels disrespected here.

Makin mentioned something about being forced to act aloof in order to avoid people hitting on him, of all things. Normally I would take this as another of his ill-timed jokes but given the nature of the discussion and some of the shit I’ve personally witnessed during my time here, this is actually somewhat understandable. People seem magnetized to his unyielding personality, which has contributed significantly to the claims that he has a cult of personality surrounding him. It’s a complicated issue (as are they all) and ultimately I have no idea what to say or do about it.

That’s honestly how I’ve felt about most of the events proceeding from this week. They’re not worthy of writing about because they’re so minor or uninteresting, or because they’re too unwieldy and complex. It’s contributed to an overall oppressive atmosphere when it comes up, and--returning to the original assertion of this entry--I think it’s just time to take a break from writing for a while.

I’ve been considering taking small chunks of time where I just write notes and then write bigger updates periodically throughout the month. This hasn’t been such a bad observational method for the last week--enough has happened that I feel there’s anything at all substantial to write about, which I felt like describing here before I take a break.

Cerulean’s Aradiabot is undergoing some extensive updates. Right now it’s on version 3, but he’s been manically working on version 4: a complete overhaul of the base system meant to optimize it for use in a large number of servers and to make it more streamlined in appearance. Makin has been hassling him to put new features in v3 to assist with various parts of the server, like a math notation function for #science-math so the nerds can all write more aesthetically appealing equations.

This has led to some butting of heads between them where Ceru is afraid that adding more functions to v3 will cause it to destabilize and crash, and wants to just add them to v4. Makin insists that the current functionality problems are due to the large number of servers Aradiabot is on currently (somewhere around 1,300). Whatever the cause, Aradiabot’s efficiency will increase here in the future, which some of us are looking forward to.

Now that summer vacation is beginning for a lot of people on the server, there’s more time available for people to hang out and they want things to do. It’s been in talks for a while, but because of this we finally went ahead and started up a Minecraft server for people. This has brought no shortage of grumbling because it’s seen as a kind of pestilent game; it attracts many people who are young, bordering on preteen, and as such has garnered a pretty mixed reputation on the internet. Yet, after the server being up for a few days now it appears to have been a good idea and we have two: a regular one and then an extensively modified one courtesy of WoC, which we’re both pretty happy about. There’s no telling how long it’ll last (I’d be surprised if it lasted more than a month at most), but such is the nature of these things.

In lieu of my writing, there are a few people who have volunteered or otherwise asked to write in my stead, like Soup and Rar. People’s desire to see these details preserved is heartwarming, and it kind of pains me that I don’t feel like continuing in light of all the requests for the weekly summary. Yet, it would do no good to keep up like I have been lately. Tipsy described it succinctly, saying there was no point in continuing to describe the minutiae if the details have nothing of value in them, and especially not when I’m so tired of writing them anyway.

I’ll start back up sometime in the future, although it’s hard to say when. Just depends on what happens I suppose. Nothing more for now.

---

20^th of June 2018

I’ve just returned from my vacation. Unlike previous excursions I actually was somewhat disconnected from the group this time, only able to participate in brief spurts in my downtime. The first thing I did when I came back was, naturally, to see what notes if any people might have written down in the time I was away.

I guess I should have expected it, but I was greeted with “nothing”, literally. After some independent research it doesn’t seem as if much happened, so this isn’t a terrible loss, but it’s mildly annoying to know that there will always be blank spots in this record whenever I’m physically gone. The only development of true importance I can list off the top of my head is that Rar now wishes to be referred to as Tera (short for Teratosapphic), which I will do from now on. As it is, there is one thing I encountered in the group while vacationing that I wanted to touch on briefly.

I have not yet taken the time to describe a phenomenon that is a source of some contention for us: there is an artistic style infamously referred to as “calarts”. The style’s name is taken directly from the contraction of “California Institute of Arts”, which purportedly is a university where many modern cartoonists and animators have been educated.

There’s a detectable visual pattern that has arisen in modern cartoons, especially noticeable in the way teeth and the shape of the head of various characters are drawn. This style arguably made its debut with the release of Adventure Time back in 2010, and examples of its spread can be seen in such shows as Gravity Falls and The Amazing World of Gumball.

The extent and severity of this pattern is hotly debated, with some positing that it’s not a problem (or even not as prevalent as suggested), and others saying that it’s nothing short of a menace. I’ll leave it to the independent reader to discover more about this particular issue and come to their own conclusions on it, but the crux of the matter is that whenever such elements appear there is no shortage of jeering to accompany it. This is true to the extent that it’s a ubiquitous meme in places like /co/ on 4chan, or indeed on the HSD itself.

Makin in particular has been particularly acerbic on the matter, or at the very least he is overly fond of making fun of calarts wherever it makes itself apparent. His grating, excessive manner of poking fun at things has made this issue one of the many in which he tends to antagonize people too much and too often; for a time while I was gone I felt as if I’d catch him making fun of it no matter when I happened to step in. There seemed to be an entire week where he simply couldn’t let go of the topic.

Thankfully since I’ve returned he seems to have stopped, which is nothing short of a blessing—he often fails to recognize when the horse he’s beating has died, which only serves to aggravate others all the more. It is a particular mercy to those who don’t mind the calarts style (although it should be noted that I can’t think of anyone who is particularly fond of the style, only those who despise it and those who are ambivalent towards it).

In keeping with the trend of Makin annoying people to metaphorical death, I am disappointed to say that my return is marked also with the departure of someone whom I once said was indispensable to our group. This loss was heralded by a political “discussion” concerning the Trump administration’s newfound practice of putting immigrants—illegal or otherwise—into what are essentially internment camps.

It goes without saying that many of us, such as myself, Putnam, and MrNostalgic, thought this was an extremely important and pertinent topic that merited a serious conversation. It also goes without saying that there were a few who were intensely, almost insanely dedicated to perturbing that conversation in any way possible. At first it was mere interruption, but then people like Toast and Makin were dead-set on injecting as much skepticism into the issue as possible.

Ordinarily this would be fine, but later it became apparent that neither of them were informed to the barest extent on what the actual issue is! The least critical complaint I can offer of this behavior is that it was utterly insulting. After explaining the issue to them at painstaking-length, neither of them offered much comment and the conversation simply petered out, but by that point the damage was already done. In addition to trivializing the issue, we were informed that Cait found the progression of the topic to be too much and that she had left.

There are a few things to consider with this. In defense of the people perpetrating these interruptions, Cait already hadn’t spoken regularly on the server since the beginning of May, so it’s hard to really identify much of a change in daily conversation this might bring aside from no changes at all. However, in the more ideal sense this is still an extremely poor loss of membership.

Cait is de facto in charge of LOFAM, and her recent interactions with Viz involving attaching music to their trailer further solidified her as a person of significance and impact; more importantly, she’s a good friend and speaks sensibly. Conversational quality is typically higher whenever she participates, so whatever her recent level of activity the future potential for discussions is automatically lower now that she’s gone.

Her presence will be sorely missed, even if I can only speak for myself. I remember a few months ago we were having a particularly engaging conversation in #music, where we were discussing chiptunes. I’m typically dispassionate in music to the point of being apathetic, but such is one of the very few genres that I’m capable of truly enjoying sometimes. At the time I was discussing it with Cait and Tera, even going so far as to show them examples of work I’ve done in the past but unfailingly considered mediocre at best.

Despite my lamentations they were both very supportive of my efforts. It was from this conversation that I decided I wanted to work on making more music someday—Tera and I occasionally joke about how I should write a ditty of sorts as a “theme song” for the HSD. In reality I would never presume to make something like that as there are far more talented musicians here than I, but I like to recall that discussion; it’s not often that I get to discuss such things with others, and the exchange with those two is something I will fondly remember for a long time.

As it is, Cait’s departure underscores a fundamental shift in the nature of our group as the last year has gone by. In less than 365 days there has been a rather significant change in which people exactly use mspa-lit on a regular basis, and I feel compelled to take at least a cursory glance to see what exactly has changed. It would be worthwhile to reflect on who has left our fold and who has joined it. This document has been exhausting to maintain but it will accomplish what I wanted: the past will not be forgotten.

Speaking honestly, I don’t want to leave on such a poor note though: it’s not as if Cait has completely evaporated from our general pocket of the internet. She resides peacefully on Night’s server, which is quickly becoming an oasis for people who don’t necessarily wish to remain active in the HSD (or remain there at all) but still enjoy the company of the people there, other examples being ost, Sozzay, Ivy, and Yazshu⁸², among a host of others.

One might feel compelled to ask, “what is the reason that all of these people left the HSD even though they all like each other so much?” To anyone who’s actually read this document, I’m sure the answer will be obvious.

Nothing more for today.

---

21^st of June 2018

It’s the first day of summer. The end of spring is associated with all of its usual effects, particularly the cessation of school for a few months (depending on where one lives) and thus a marginal increase in daily activity. For us though, the end of spring is far more pregnant with meaning than it might otherwise be.

Those who have been matriculated into our fold probably already know where this is going: spring was the advertised season for when Hiveswap: Act 2 was set to come out. It was pretty clear to us even a couple months ago that it wasn’t going to be released, but there was still some faint hope left that it would miraculously appear near spring’s end.

Alas, such was not the case. Now the ultimate fate of Hiveswap is—once again—completely up in the air, and people seem to be more dispirited than ever. There are still some who are ruthlessly optimistic about the work, but even those like Sora who were entirely too charitable are now noticeably pessimistic on the matter; there was a tweet that Hiveswap Act 1 and Friendsim episodes 1-3 will participate in the Steam Summer Sale, where the only response as of this writing is Sora sardonically asking “cool where’s act 2”.

This attitude is also somewhat visible on Tumblr, which is what got my attention. Members of the HSD being pissed off at some new development is hardly unusual, but the Tumblr side of the Homestuck fandom is renowned for its stalwart optimism. Makin also noticed these posts, remarking: “the tumblr replies are more negative than us somehow / if WP manages to drive away fucking tumblr / homestuck has no hope”. There is of course the usual sea of likes and reblogs, so it may just be us focusing overly much on the negative parts we do happen to see; regardless, seeing any kind of criticism on the matter in that kind of place is an eye opener for me.

Importantly, this seems to really underline a shift in public perception of What Pumpkin. Before, positivity tended to come from those who were comfortable with the faces of WP, those who had the greatest public presence and had no qualms with interacting with the fanbase: people like James Roach fell under this category. However, if one recalls a previous entry of mine, practically the entirety of WP was gutted after the Viz takeover and most of these public figures were summarily dismissed.

This opened up WP to a lot of questions for those who were fine with the way it operated before. Now that the “face” of WP is gone, there is nothing to prevent those people from more harshly analyzing WP’s actions as a company; there is no human buffer to stop people from becoming discontent with the way it’s handled, and especially with the lack of explanation as to what’s happening with Hiveswap. It’s safe to say that this is basically a death knell for future WP operations..

In my opinion, it’s certain that WP will slowly be allowed to deteriorate and become a focus for the ire of the fanbase at large, so that Viz will have a fresh start and escape the piercing gaze of the fandom’s past. Whether this will work out in the long run remains to be seen, but regardless that appears to be the current state of things.

On an unrelated note: I mentioned that no one took notes while I was gone and I was barely around, but one thing I remembered today was that Makin was constantly changing #altgen’s name to random nonsense, especially various memes. Eventually I had enough and put a stop to it, putting it back to the original name. He was upset at this, claiming I ruined his “social experiment⁸³”, but left it unchanged again for some weeks. Today I noticed it’s been changed again to the “Joy” emoji, which is apropos enough in appearance for altgen that I feel fine with it.

Nothing more for today.

---

22^nd of June 2018

Today was hilariously disruptive, with most of us experiencing the short-lived but considerable tyranny of brapposting. For those of you unfamiliar with this, I’m sorry that I must ruin your innocent existence with a description of this utterly foul practice, which managed to take root in mspa-lit and thoroughly disgust us for a matter of hours.

Brapposting, or fartposting, refers explicitly to copypastas that were taken from a very specific cohort of fart fetishists, probably from the 4chan boards /fit/ or more likely /r9k/. In true 4chan form, after they began to associate more openly they started to devise some truly horrifying erotica, and brapposting is what came out. I’ll leave it to the reader to look for examples of this odious nonsense.

As is common of memes from 4chan, it made its way to the HSD eventually through people like WoC, Gnawms, and Toast. These three and Barry were all forcing it mercilessly in mspa-lit tonight, and it seemed impossible to make them stop. Finally, I had to ban them for the rest of the night. This is not completely unheard of, but banning four people together for more than five minutes is usually indicative of a more than minor disturbance. Usually forced memes aren’t quite so bad, but the subject material of this particular brand of copypasta is just completely unacceptable.

Before all of this though was a more generally lighthearted anecdote: Makin made a rare change to his profile picture, settling on a Bozo the Clown-esque figure with makeup in the style of Jared Leto’s Joker. Everyone immediately noticed and reacted with the expected amusement and bewilderment, turning the chat into a veritable fracas. Makin only said one thing of the event, however:

It’s not often that Makin changes his account in this manner, but whenever he does it’s often rather entertaining. It’s good to experience these moments of levity and silliness in the face of so much displeasure or tension between us.

Such tension appears to be more common in the last month or so, the exact reasons for which are difficult to touch upon. The lack of news on Hiveswap (or anything really) is certainly contributing to a general sense of malaise, and I fear that people are beginning to act out in an attempt to generate energy or activity of any kind.

Makin made a rather interesting observation in regards to the lack of news about Act 2, and no continued interaction from Viz on the 12^th of June: “I think WP kind of dropped the ball where it came to communicating with viz / and viz genuinely doesn't know about meme numbers or how we look at promised release dates”. Despite the early promises of a more fruitful relationship between Viz and the community it appears that things are more of the same, if not a little worse at this point.

It’s only been a few months since the takeover happened so it’s a little early to call it, but people are unhappy or--even worse--completely unengaged. It’s miraculous that the HSD continues to gather more members despite the lack of active interest in Homestuck-related properties at this point, and all we can hope for is a development that sparks more intense interest than these exceedingly transient Friendsims, which are themselves of questionable quality already.

Perhaps due to this and additional, not as yet identified factors, there appears to be a gradual shift in our group dynamics. There are pointed examples of this such as Cait’s departure, as well as people like Phantos, Minish, and ost. Yet, there have been newcomers to either fill the void left by their loss or to create new and interesting patterns of social interaction here, such as tmtmtl and a fellow named 8iscuit44 who showed up as recently as the last couple of weeks.

I mentioned before that I want to do a comparison of the old and the new, one year ago versus how things appear now, and now that I’ve had some time back I can see that there is a definite change in how things feel on a basal level. This change is more obvious thanks to the time I spent away--the difference between when I left a month ago and now is palpable, and serves to emphasize these larger shifts in our group’s structure.

There’s a pronounced difference in how we all interact with each other. In particular I feel like there is a more casual acceptance between myself and the other people present, where before it was more tense (which may have something to do with the fact that I was relaxing for the last month, but nonetheless is a significant difference). I’d like to delve a little deeper into this development and see what other observations I might glean.

Nothing more for today.

---

23^rd of June 2018

I’ve commented in the past about the slow emergence of a new culture in the NSFW server; this is highly desirable and I will occasionally peek in to see what people are saying or doing, although on many of the occasions I’ve popped in it’s been inactive and I can’t get a good read of the place.

There doesn’t appear to be any overt instances of cohesive grouping, but rather there’s a general recognition of people who have been active and talking for a while. Certain figures are more notable than others due to this activity, although there is no established cliche--yet. Time may change this, but for now the closest thing I can see is a role that Cerulean made for “high quality posters” that distinguishes certain individuals for providing lots of content, but I have no idea how important this is in the eyes of people who actually frequent the server.

While no one appears to be close per se, I’m pleased to be able to say that everyone is usually polite and friendly there. It’s a rare occasion when there’s a problem user on the NSFW server, although that is probably owed to the average (read as claimed) age of users there as opposed to the HSD itself, and also the far lower usercount (near 600 as of this writing). This having been said, there has been a marginal increase in the number of weird, creepy, or generally undesirable individuals there.

In a perverse way, this is probably a good sign for the NSFW server. The chances that you’ll encounter gross or antagonistic individuals in any server rises asymptotically towards 100% with every new member you add. While the vast majority of users may be fine, the general trend is that roughly 90% of all people on a given server will be completely inactive, and the remaining percentage will be 9% quality users and 1% shitters.

With this in mind, the presence of active problem users can serve as a signal that the server population is reaching critical mass of some sort. Usually it requires a response on the part of the people in charge, whether this be to simply ban the people in question or the recruitment of more mods to squelch people as they begin to act out.

The exact nature of how the situation is dealt with will vary across all different levels of activity and server population, but the principle remains the same that the appearance of these isolated shitters indicates server growth of some kind. Indeed, it serves as a hallmark of diversification, and of gradually building interest. When I check the logs or look through during periods where I’m typically inactive, I see a much larger quantity of activity than I’d expect. Qualitatively the server has a long way to go, but it’s getting there all the same.

Something else I’m vaguely surprised by is the exact extent to which Cerulean is active on the NSFW server. He engages with it in a serious and forthright manner that is actually quite refreshing to witness. While Makin’s approach with the main server is typically hands-off (as he regards NSFW content as fairly sordid), Ceru has specifically involved himself in the NSFW server enough to actually engage with its users in a consistent and constructive manner. I also see Ifnar using it in this fashion.

I’ve mentioned that there is no real established “group” there yet, but I do end up recognizing users if they speak there often enough. This includes a fellow named Dylan, and some HSD regulars like Kreuz and Skyplayer poke their heads in on occasion as well. It seems as if these more active members are developing a “NSFW content competency”, where they’re able to determine if a work was done by one artist or another based on its style alone. This amuses me greatly.

Nothing more for today.

---

27^th of June 2018

There was a lot of discussion about Homestuck itself today. One might question why I bother mentioning this, as it would be common sense that a dedicated Homestuck server spends most of its time talking about Homestuck. As time goes by, this is less and less the case. It’s not that we don’t care about Homestuck less than we did before necessarily (although for some people this is absolutely the case); it’s more that we’ve already discussed it death, and then revived it, and discussed it to death again ad nauseum.

Occasionally some new bent of discussion will make itself apparent, which we are typically quick to seize upon and dissect as thoroughly as possible (such behavior is evident with the Friendsims, although they’re not quite gripping or substantial enough to sate us). It’s safe to say that this pattern is beginning to take its toll on us--I can feel our collective sanity slipping away from us, slowly but surely.

Most internet communities are not so obsessed with their source material as we are, definitely not to the degree that we are. Whereas most fandoms are doomed to dwindle and fade away as time goes by without input, we may simply be resigned to madness instead. WAVE jokes: “There will be Homestuck movies in 2030-40, mark my words”, and other, similar jesting is not uncommon. These comments are particularly common in those dry periods where there is absolutely no news available to us whatsoever.

Coincidentally, the latest such drought experienced a very brief reprieve today with the discovery that advertising for the second Homestuck book had officially started, which Makin takes as a good sign: “... the advertising period is starting / news post soon with hiveswap info is my guess”, although whether this will come to pass is anyone’s guess.

If Makin’s prediction is correct, then it will be a much needed breath of fresh air for us. We’ve been stagnating heavily with the utter lack of updates, news, or interaction of any sort from Viz et al. There is fear that the next news to come out will be of Hiveswap’s cancellation, which would invoke spectacular amounts of unrest in the fandom at large.

Indeed, if it has actually been cancelled I imagine this possibility would keep the company from announcing it officially at all. On the other hand, perhaps a stirred and angry fanbase would be better than one that has been allowed to sink into complete apathy. Whichever happens to be more optimal, I personally hope we get some word of anything soon.

Nothing more for today.

---

28^th of June 2018

There was an extensive conversation between myself, Putnam, Tensei, and a smattering of others about Elder Scrolls lore. This sort of discussion isn’t exactly common, but it’s also not rare; Putnam has an unbelievable proclivity for imbibing and retaining this information, of which there is an outrageous amount. We tease him about this on occasion, but without fail it simply spawns the very discussion we were mocking him for. We’ve since learned not to do this unless we earnestly want to invite the topic.

I make it sound unpleasant perhaps, but it’s actually somewhat refreshing. The lore of the Elder Scrolls games is so dense that it’s very difficult to run out of things to talk about, and the ideas themselves are interesting or cool enough so as to be engaging. I’m honestly surprised we don’t talk about it more often--I must admit that it’s very exhausting to discuss at length though.

WoC often joins us for these discussions as well, which falls under a weird category of “games and/or literature”, although since we’re not really talking about gameplay elements it usually fits more appropriately under mspa-lit’s purview. As it is, one or more of us are usually able to provide some insight into the matter for those less engaged, and Putnam is typically fit as acting scholar; he can steer conversations away from baseless conjecture or fact check people if something is disputed.

Once we’ve had our fill of these conversations though, it’s not uncommon for us to start taking the piss so to speak. Rather than actually asking questions, we end up favoring distractions or silly nonsense (“the pacific rim part was ironic”, I recall Tensei saying near the end of today’s discussion). Due to this or perhaps due to the general inscrutability of the topic (it is a very limited cadre of people who ever wish to talk about it extensively), it always manages to end on a pleasant enough note.

Unrelatedly important is an uptick in discussion about the person named simply “user5”. For a long while we were generally unsure whether they were a completely new person or if it was kill40000 come back from the dead. After I asked about this explicitly today, Gitaxian commented: “He specifically mocked me when I thought they were separate people / Spent like 5 minutes alternating accounts and PMing me”, and thus the mystery was solved.

User5 just like kill40000 before has been an utterly bizarre presence on the server. His habit of challenging people in all manner of video games has carried over from before, and he has even presented a game for others called “Hell’s New World”, which to all appearances is a bastardization of Unreal Tournament with graphics ripped straight from World of Warcraft.

Naturally, it was immediately popular with us. I haven’t played it myself, but people like Tensei were very quick to give it a shot, even describing it as being very fun. User5 said about the game: “when u install hells new world the point is to kill a bunch of ppl as much as u can and try to pwn”. So, really, that should give you a sufficient idea of what it’s about.

Nothing more for today.

---

30^th of June 2018

There was an update to Cool and New Web Comic today after a considerable hiatus lasting from basically the beginning of the year. It actually updated with a couple of panels while I was on vacation, on the 12th this month (as I’ve mentioned previously, a very important day for the fandom for narrative reasons).

The update is not very long, but it holds promise of what’s to come. It makes sense that it would come around this time, thanks to the fact that school is out for almost everyone in the USA right now. It’s likely that o has more freedom to release updates at this point, and with the increasing complexity of his updates it makes sense that they would require correspondingly greater time and work.

CANWC itself has suffered from a shift in opinion lately. It may have been contributed to by the significant length of the hiatus, but it feels like people have become more critical of it lately. I myself still enjoy much of it, but find it easier and easier to point to things in the more recent updates that I find to be unfortunate technical developments. Other people say the same, or--even more negatively--claim that CANWC never deserved the recognition it got in the first place. Others still simply fear that it will fail much like Homestuck did, unable to fulfill the promises it already laid out in earlier parts of the story.

Outside of this, there was a fascinating conversation I had with Makin and Tensei over a game called E.Y.E.: Divine Cybermancy and others like it. Such games apparently belong to a somewhat obscure classification, a genre known as “eurojank”. Eurojank refers to video games that are--as the name implies--typically produced in Europe. The -jank suffix refers to the fact that these games commonly emphasize gameplay over graphic design, such that the games will look unclean but have very nuanced or complex controls. E.Y.E. is just one such example of this, other examples cited include the first two Witcher games (less so the second), and one that Tensei is fond of recommending with the grandiose title Dark Messiah of Might and Magic.

Aside from the conversation itself simply being interesting and informative, it was exemplary of a particular pattern I’ve noticed in Tensei and Makin talking together. I’ve gathered after a while that they have a somewhat similar sense of humor; they share a curious camaraderie where they invoke these seeming meme words, often with a point of origin in 4chan (the terms themselves may be perfectly legitimate, it’s just that I’ve only ever encountered them there).

An example of this is the word “kino”, which is German for “cinema”. It’s used on 4chan to refer to high quality content or art, especially in relation to TV shows or movies (Seinfeld would be labeled as kino, depending on who you’re talking to). Revlar and Putnam are also responsible for engaging in this behavior, with words such as “clowncore” to refer to material with clown motifs in it. Every time another such term is dragged out, it brings the conversation perilously close to being derailed because it all becomes rather silly.

Nothing more for today.

---

4^th of July 2018

Shortly after midnight on the east coast, Independence Day began. Beginning last year, it’s tradition to give WoC, being arguably the most patriotic member of our cohort, his very own channel for the day. The name of the channel changes throughout the day and is typically over-the-top, but I created it at 12:24 AM with the relatively modest name #freedom-day.

WoC typically mandates that all people speak in caps in his channel, otherwise he “can’t hear” us. As a rule, pictures of bald eagles or other stereotypically American things like hamburgers are spammed in excess. Further, anti-communist memes are the rule of the day. The ban role itself is itself named “COMMIE” in red, and people who “don’t speak loudly enough” or who post in favor of economic frameworks other than capitalism--whether it’s ironic or genuine--are “deported” from the channel⁸⁴.

I went to bed while the name was still #freedom-day and awoke to the channel being renamed to the emojis for burger, eagle, clapping, and water gun, in that order. WoC pinned a couple of actually patriotic and responsible rules early in the night, and the discussion, with some rare exceptions, has been amicable since. Such niceties do not extend to “THOSE COMMIE BASTARDS”, of course.

Despite the ongoing joke, all of this prompted a rather interesting discussion in mspa-lit. WoC posted in capslock the entire time, but was otherwise coherent and serious in his delegation of what being patriotic means, especially since there’s currently such an enormous disconnect between how citizens of the US may feel about their country versus their government.

His assertions came in the form of a Mark Twain quote: “Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”, which most people present were easily able to agree upon. Following this was a discussion about how, despite the government itself being unworthy of praise, America as a cultural landscape has plenty to be proud of in terms of what it makes and how most of its people behave (“AMERICANS ARE UNIRONICALLY THE FRIENDLIEST NATIONALITY IVE EVER MET; ALTHOUGH IVE NEVER BEEN IN ASIA AUSTRALIA OR AFRICA SO I CANT SPEAK FIR [sic] THOSE CONTINENTS”).

Another staple of Independence Day here is people changing their names to various historical leaders. The most common, of course, are American leaders--especially presidents and those present at the signing of the Declaration of Independence (WoC is currently Thomas Jefferson, I’m Benjamin Franklin, Sea Hitler is John F. Kennedy, etc) but there are also some foreign leaders in the mix.

There are even some resistance members, at the forefront of which appears to be Tera. It has taken Che Guevera’s name, and remained staunchly anti-American in all of the things it says today, which is perfectly fine. The conversation which rose around this--even involving WoC-- was perfectly polite and even somewhat productive, which was very pleasant to see. I imagine Tera will be somewhat scarce for the rest of the day to avoid the no-doubt aggravating America-posting, but as long as we get through the day without something dramatic then I’ll be happy enough.

The only other thing worthy of note was this absolutely ridiculous discourse about consciousness. At the point I’m writing from I can no longer remember the exact details of the conversation other than who was primarily involved (tmtm and Revlar on opposite sides mostly), and I honestly have no desire to revisit it. It was protracted so heavily that I left the channel for almost two hours and it was still in full swing by the time I came back. This can only be described as excessive.

Despite that hiccup, I felt like Independence Day went very smoothly this year. I think I speak for a number of people when I say I’m pleased with the proceedings, and I can only hope that next year is even better.

Nothing more for today.

---

5^th of July 2018

There’s a convention being held in Los Angeles called Anime Expo, which true to its name is an exposition for popular anime that people are looking forward to. As would be expected, Viz is also present at this event and had their own panel today. As a result, many of us decided to look into the panel, which was livestreamed earlier today.

There wasn’t a lot of excitement surrounding the event, I think most of us are too cynical for that at this point. However, there was a faint hope that they’ll have some news for us. At the very least, we were looking forward to a mention of Homestuck in some regard. This was eventually delivered to us, although we had to sit through the rest of the panel for it first.

It was actually quite an experience; I’m usually absent for these sorts of conferences or happenings, so the fact that I was able to participate this time was nice. It began with news completely unrelated to us (“we're so desperate for info we're watching a fucking sailor moon panel”, commented Makin), and although there was a mention of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures that we were all earnestly excited for, it was still something of a chore.

Usually these events get turned into impromptu roasts, where anyone who has the misfortune of being on screen is made fun of exhaustively. This was made all the more easy by the person who was guiding the panel, a man with a flamboyant orange mohawk who spoke in the most excited tones (to put it in a kind way).

As soon as he began talking, everyone present began to rip on him without mercy. It was grating listening to this fellow at first, but by the end of the panel he had grown on most of us, Makin included (which surprised me somewhat). I have to admit that he did inject a lot of energy into the panel, even if it was cringe-inducing at certain points.

Our time to shine came about 45 minutes through the presentation, where they mentioned the new Homestuck books and asked questions about it in what was decidedly a lackadaisical manner. I guess we couldn’t expect too much, but the very minute the panel ended people either threw up their hands in defeat or were incensed.

Above all, though, I think WAVE’s contribution was most apropos. Today’s event was yet another nail in what might eventually prove to be the fandom’s coffin, but WAVE isn’t one to pass by an opportunity for levity. A meme to the very end, after the panel was finished he simply recalled Suicide Squad: “So that's it, huh? What are we, some kinda disappointed fanbase?”

Nothing more for today.

---

6^th of July 2018

Today was turbulent over disproportionately simple matters. Usually I would be more upset, but I feel like I’m losing my steam to actually take offense when dumb nonsense happens here. Makin hid mspa-lit no less than three times, and on the last occasion he completely removed the place such that no one can access it until tomorrow.

The exact reasons it turned out this way are due to altgen’s involvement. There’s been a user in the channel named Alset who has been hanging around and was banned from #general some time ago by Ifnar, for “speaking nonsense” even after being told to stop. This nebulous occurrence aside, no one in altgen appeared to like this fellow very much because they seemed fond of babbling loosely about all manner of topics and passing it off as philosophical ponderings. Altgen was probably the worst possible place to entertain such delusions.

As a result, they were systematically pushing Alset out by “suggesting” that they go to other channels, especially mspa-lit. After being told to do this enough times, Alset finally appeared there. Not content with this, a number of altgenners actually followed them. This is where things began to get out of hand.

It was cordial enough at first, the sudden appearance of new people taking some off guard but not exactly unwelcome. In all I recall about 6 people including Alset themselves from altgen at any one time. Half were on topic and the other half were, naturally, shitposting heavily. Makin saw this and panicked, shutting the channel down for a few minutes to make the shitposting stop.

Of course, he should have known better. He let the channel back up and no time was wasted before more shitposting resumed. He froze the channel longer that time, and it seemed that things had successfully settled down when we came back. Almost insidiously, though, the shitposting came back and some channel regulars even were participating, including myself at points. This was when Makin got fed up⁸⁵ and shut the channel down for the evening.

I was exceedingly pissed at the heavy-handed response to what was basically lighthearted nonsense, but I’ve been through this song and dance enough times to know that nothing good would come out of protesting the matter. We all resolved to go to #hangout as is standard procedure when these things happen, and pass the time there.

People like Tensei openly mocked those trying to organize any sort of actual response to the channel being hidden (“yall are gonna be back in mspalt / once its back”). Tensions began to run high between native hangout users and us visitors; we all felt confused and cramped. Altgen was not fit to simply pass the time idly, though, and there were a number of them who were openly decrying their poor reputation and treatment. Most of us in hangout were more or less fine with the proceedings because it was at least partially deserved, and in a general sense not that unexpected from Makin.

Still, the extent of the heavy response was unusual even for his typical brand of capriciousness. I was afraid that he was upset for something unrelated and taking it out on us, but his explanation in the morning was sensible enough. I’m kind of glad I didn’t waste much effort or energy being indignant about it all, but it’s still vaguely annoying that this happened at all.

Part of my agitation lies in the fact that it was assuredly a disproportionate response. I always hate when Makin overreacts because he’s personally upset by something, or because of a misinterpretation. Certainly, the final conversation was not worthy of shutting down the channel for the evening.

It was absolutely sophomoric, don’t get me wrong about that: for some reason, a NSFW server user named Redglare was mentioned, who is infamous for having that fart fetish I described a few entries ago. At this point, with the word “fart”, the conversation had already been lost. It was followed shortly thereafter by someone calling out another NSFW server user named Dylan, whom was described as “The Butt Fucker”. The way it was phrased made me laugh, but Makin was not amused: “the third time i opened it, now regulars were shitposting together with altgenners / i gave up and closed it for the night”. And so it was that we were cast out until the morning.

Some tried to frame it as Makin being completely intolerant of altgenners to the point of hysteria, and pass off Alset’s involvement as negligible. I did speak out against this, although by the time I got there the damage was already done. Thankfully, altgen’s got the collective memory of a goldfish so this didn’t amount to much. There was no real damage other than me being perpetually accosted by people demanding answers as to what happened.

Hopefully by morning this will no longer be a problem. Nothing more for today.

---

7^th of July 2018

As predicted, the channel is back without much ado. There isn’t much of a reason to prolong discussion of this event because it was, in the end, completely unremarkable in every way. Thus, I will elect to move on and talk about something completely different. That something is a discussion about the term “normies”, which is actually an extremely important cultural topic that has cropped up more and more in the last few years.

“Normies” is a condescending term that has taken the place of “sheeple”, referring to individuals who don’t think for themselves and are commonly understood to mindlessly consume popular media without any real consideration. The more extreme, 4chan-specific form would be “normalfag”. Obviously, I don’t appreciate the use of these terms in unironic contexts because they’re shamelessly arrogant and incorrect labels about 90% of the time. This doesn’t stop a lot of us from using the term “normies” on a nigh daily basis, because in the end I don’t think anyone can be assed to really care. Not to mention, it’s a funny word to say.

An example that can be provided would perhaps be Bowman. He’s decidedly not a normie artist to us because he is not popular (forgive me for saying so)--by all metrics he’s a rather obscure artist. Someone who has dug deep enough to discover his works probably has a lot of experience listening to music and will have more interesting opinions for the sort of snobs who genuinely distinguish between people who are and aren’t normies.

Moving on from this, today we had a situation with $trider where he’s been acting out increasingly badly in #altgen, and elevating himself onto a pedestal of sorts. This kicked off a discussion in the modchat about how we should be handling our users when they become problematic like this. I stupidly made a comment about how $trider is a regular with established history, so rather than jumping the gun and banning him we should take time to talk with him.

WoC rightfully parsed this as a form of favoritism, and was fiercely adamant that all users should be treated equally regardless. I attempted to clarify that I don’t think anyone should be treated preferentially either, but simply that banning people over more slight offenses is inappropriate and an oversight of our responsibility as figures of authority. He did acquiesce to this, but still advocated that $trider should be banned for being a dick regardless.

Among comments from others, Deus decided to craft a reminder post for altgen wherein she tells them to go to other channels and make friends there instead of using altgen as a homebase--we’ve done this in the past, but it’s useful to reiterate the “shitposting first, conversation second” rule to avoid the creation of cliches and hugboxes.

Hours after this conversation, Makin showed up suddenly and made a comment that the entire conversation above was “stupid”, and may or may not have been joking about initiating another reckoning already. It was--as usual--impossible to tell whether he was joking or not, so naturally some people leapt on him. Olki in particular was incensed over the mere possibility of punitive measures over what was clearly a conversation about how to improve the server. Thankfully, this argument did not last long, which suggests to me that it was indeed a joke.

Other than that, nothing of real importance occurred. There was some increased tension between most people and rS, which is not exactly surprising at this point. I’m afraid that at the rate he goes on about Makin, the end of his tenure here is going to end very poorly, and soon. We’ll just have to see how it plays out.

Nothing more for today.

---

9^th of July 2018

Very early in the morning today, there was a sudden revival: around 3:30 AM EST, Ost and Minish came back almost simultaneously for a visit. There was a very engaging and importantly civil conversation that followed this, with some catching up between friends; everyone present was rather pleased to see them come by, although it was quickly clear that they would not exactly be staying.

I’m struggling to remember details at this point, but the conversation shifted to talk about why people still use this place if they disagree with what Makin does. An obvious but important maxim developed in my mind while this discussion proceeded: while it’s evident that most people dislike many of the things that he is infamous for, myself obviously not excluded, the simple fact of the matter is that we don’t mind it quite enough for us to leave.

There is a certain threshold that most people in mspa-lit are willing to withstand, and once it’s crossed they leave. This may be temporary or permanent, but such is the reality of the place. Those that remain must necessarily be tolerant of his behavior, even if they are not particularly fond of it. Anything other than these two possibilities is silly and unsustainable.

That’s pretty much it for today’s proceedings. With that, I’d like to point out that it has officially been one entire year since I started writing this document. On the 9^th of July in 2017 I began surreptitiously keeping records of what was happening in an attempt to more fully remind myself of what’s been going on and keep from forgetting important or amusing events. After a couple of months I decided to share it with other people, and while it’s hit considerable snags or opposition at times I think it’s safe to say that the document has been at least vaguely successful in this task.

With an entire year of this under my belt, I wanted to do some serious reflection on whether I want to keep doing this or not. Things have changed so much from just a year ago, to the point that the server is completely unrecognizable in certain respects. The userbase has changed a lot: we have almost doubled the number of people as when I first began writing, from just over 7,200 people to now almost 12,000. The mod team went through a tumultuous restructuring and scores of people who were once regulars here are now gone, for one reason or another. Personally, I feel like I’ve become far more jaded to the general proceedings of this place than I used to be. The difference in sheer optimism and idealism from back then to now is frankly astonishing when compared directly, even if all the steps along the way make sense.

Thinking about it all is kind of tiresome, but less in an agonizing way and more just that it’s daunting to keep it all in mind. This community is just as important to me as it was when I started writing, if not more so. While I sincerely regret the loss of people that I consider my friends, there are many people still here who I consider just as great of friends. It’s been a very interesting year, and I know that I would never forgive myself if I forgot everything about it one day.

So, I guess it’s time to ramp up my efforts again. I’ve been stagnating a little--I wanted to start recording multiple aspects of the fandom and made a little progress with that, but it’s time to more consciously pursue details about the fanventure community, and other related places. I’m excited for what possibilities lay in the future, although it’s worth mentioning that I’m afraid for some of those possibilities as well.

Regardless of what actually happens, I’ve firmly decided that I’ll be here to keep record of it. With luck, knowledge of this place will not fade away through neglect and apathy. I’m happy to have the opportunity to keep the memory of this server alive, even if it is extraordinarily silly in the grand scheme of things. It will eventually come to pass someday that the server will end and we will all move on with our lives--if I remain as I am now then I’ll be around to personally witness it. But, it doesn’t do to dwell on that reality until it actually happens.

Those who have left are sorely missed⁸⁶, by myself and others--I sincerely feel that losing each and every one of them strikes a deep blow to our community. Yet, the people still here are also good friends, and I am indisputably happier for having met them. Each day that I get to come here and just talk with people about nothing and everything in particular is another day that I get to enjoy. With how rare it can be to make a genuine, positive connection with other people, is that ever an opportunity one should squander? ⁸⁷

I certainly don’t think so. Nothing more for today, but let’s see what tomorrow brings.

---

10^th of July 2018

We had a visit from a historied member of the server tonight. I’ve mentioned him before: ViceroyofMonteCristo (simply referred to as Viceroy, or even just Vice) frequently disappears for large stretches of time from our fold. Every so often he’ll pop his head in, such as today. Our conversation offered me some insight into what he’s like, and what he’s interested in.

Vice first joined “the day before Altgenstuck started”, so probably the 12th of September 2016. I’m not privy to the details, but Vice established himself as an altgen regular fairly quickly (Sky commented: “> frost, dickle, viceroy, ceru / ahh the old gang” when the topic came up), being shown in Altgenstuck itself (however briefly) only three months later in December. This was in the fabled “old #altgen”, which had a significantly different environment as compared to the channel now.

Despite the gap in culture there are still some commonalities between the two timepoints, especially in the crass nature of the humor. Vice was not impervious to this, displaying an appropriately sophomoric palette. This attitude does not seem to have gone away completely, yet feels more mature now somehow--perhaps that he is more experienced. In true altgen fashion, while visiting we had a rather protracted conversation about Youtube Poop Music Videos (YTP music videos, or just YTPMV). Be warned: a very extensive treatment of this tangent follows.

I’ve already described YTPs at length in a previous entry, with such titles as Fesh Pince or Hank of the Hill being exemplary of the concept. A further subgenre involving music emerged a little over a decade ago as well, although is arguably less well known than more typical YTPs. I’ve been getting into them only as recently as a couple months ago, but the history of YTPMVs is surprisingly rich, considering how weird the exact brand of entertainment is.

Anyone unfamiliar who might be interested in looking at some would do well to listen to TheFrenchCake’s yearly compilations, beginning in 2012. Simple in concept, YTPMVs involve replacing the sounds in a song with material that comes from a different source (an excellent example of this would be Mowtendoo’s Super Spice Bros 2 or especially Rainbow Trololol, arguably some of the most well known YTP music videos). There are some less organized compilations from years before then as well. It should be noted that what is commonly regarded as the first YTPMV is an original song instead of an arrangement of an existing one--a less common occurrence--and popped up in 2007. After watching all of these a few times, I’ve noticed various patterns in the kinds of memes that are used most often each year.

Generally speaking, these trends track well with general usage of the same memes outside of the music scene; when something first explodes in popularity, it will also have music videos made about it on the side for a brief time. However, there are a few unique sources that are more prominent primarily or only in YTPMVs. Certain sources like Jack Black’s performance on Sesame Street and Snoop Dogg’s Drop It Like It’s Hot have been around longest, but have correspondingly endured the most, remaining as common in modern day YTPMVs as they were five or six years ago; Gachimuchi also fits in this category, among a plethora of others.

Other source materials, such as Team Fortress 2, have gradually become less popular content for remixing over the years. Others still are more difficult to understand: anime of all sorts have cropped up repeatedly over the years but is somewhat inconsistent in presence and style, and--possibly the most bizarre source I’m aware of--Delay Lama only ever became massively popular in countries like Japan (anime was naturally a more popular remixing material there as well). Mixing of two or more memes together into larger or more ambitious projects is also very common.

A few of these videos are collaborative efforts between as many as a dozen people, but most of them are rendered by one artist each. As one would expect, there are a few names that have become prominent through their extensive additions to the genre: the previously-mentioned Mowtendoo is one such name, among others like syrkl (formerly known as BlueKhezu) or Rlcemaster3.

These three individuals and more besides have been around for years; while the scene has generally slowed down it’s revealed a core of the more dedicated vidsmiths, alongside a smattering of new blood each year. Naturally as time goes by their skill increases and the average quality of each YTPMV has increased dramatically, but the quantity of them has decreased just as much due to fewer people actually generating content. The reason for this isn’t immediately clear, but I fear that in a matter of a few years YTPMV will probably be engaged in by so few people that no real interest will remain.

I’m sure anyone reading this must wonder why on earth we would care at all about this (indeed, Tmtmtl30 at the time commented: “i don't understand how you are so passionate about something so specific and inherently ridiculous”). All I can say is, the very fact that it’s so specific and ridiculous is part of the excitement. My interest in YTPMVs is similar to my interest in writing this entire document, because the phenomena I’m describing are so intensely esoteric.

The HSD’s community and the YTPMV community are similar in various ways: the exact spirit and cadence of what’s going on can’t be faithfully replicated in artificial circumstances, and they’ll both rely on the passion of those who were involved to keep the memory alive. That having been said, it’s mercifully easier to keep a series of videos intact and floating around for anyone to see. I have hope that, even when interest wanes, all of the YTPMV content itself will be readily available for anyone who wants to take a peek years down the road.

With that overly indulgent explanation now past, I just want to express that this is the nature of the discussion that Vice and I had. We talked about TheFrenchCake’s compilations, exchanged some interesting entries (some of which I hadn’t seen yet), and just had a generally informative and fascinating discussion. Even if the subject material itself is bewilderingly pointless or stupid, it was refreshing to encounter someone else passionate about the bizarre and obscure.

After shooting the shit for a while, Vice then receded into mists from whence he came, never to be seen again until he randomly shows up a few months from now. Far less do I understand the thoughts of people who only sporadically show up here--it feels like a very weird thing to only entertain coming here randomly once in a while. Yet, he seems to be the sort of person whose whims take him where they will. I can hardly be upset about it; whenever he shows up it’s a good enough time had by any present.

Nothing more for today. ⁸⁸

---

12^th of July 2018

After the recent incident where Makin shut down mspa-lit three times in one day, there have been a number of discussions among the mods of how to keep it from happening again. If it were a more amusing circumstance then we wouldn’t be going to such lengths to prevent it from reoccurring, but overall it’s just very agitating to experience.

The suggested methods for handling this have all been boiled down to one common idea, which is “reduce shitposting in mspa-lit”. This is simple in concept and a few people are going to appreciate it, but we’re also going to piss off a lot of others. Revlar in particular has been very vocal about reducing the allowed amount of shitposting in mspa-lit, calling it out as “toxic waste choking the channel” (which is probably the most charitable description he’s offered thus far). Sometimes I must agree; as much as it pains me to admit, if it weren’t for Makin’s personal ire I don’t think this would even be discussed.

I’ve touched on this subject before, but the fact is that people continue to use the channel in spite of Makin’s inconsistent enforcement or even routine abuse of his own instated rules. This gives him the impression that he’s invulnerable--he’s stated explicitly, multiple times: “if people come back to the channel after all’s said and done, then i must not be doing anything wrong”. It’s clear that this was meant as a joke on the surface, but after knowing him for some time I’m afraid that he must also earnestly believe it on some level.

I used to be more idealistic about it--even leading conversations about how to make sure he properly understands that people don’t like what he’s doing--but it’s come to nothing so many times now that I’ve just developed a generally cynical attitude on the matter. Why should I bother trying to lead a party against his malpractice if no one else wants to commit? It’d be just short of hanging myself⁸⁹.

No, the reality of the matter is that he’s perfectly content to do whatever he wants regardless of how other people perceive his actions. The only recourse we have as individuals is to appeal to his better nature; the problem with that is he’s really good at logically justifying whatever his behavior happens to be, even if it’s very clearly wrong behavior (or flawed logic) to everyone else. I’m not sure how much of this is simple, childlike impishness that reduces it to a game for him, and how much of it is something that could be construed as genuinely sinister⁹⁰.

The point of this tangent is basically that the mod team is stuck enforcing his whims, lest we get removed for insubordination. Not to mention that, with one or two exceptions, none of us are particularly fond of having mspa-lit taken down at any time (I would say that some are ambivalent to it, except that mspa-lit going down often results in chaos whenever we flood into different places). There’s nothing for it but to keep him off our backs and enforce these things arbitrarily.

All of this goes over very poorly with the other users, and assuredly will continue to be a problem in future confrontations. As an example of the discussions that crop up in the face of this paradoxical behavior, part of “shitposting” includes a taboo on most sexually-natured discussion that might happen in mspa-lit. Casual furry-related discussion is a good example of the sort of thing that Makin despises witnessing, and arguably the biggest perpetrator of such topics is Gnawms.

After our mod discussions I felt like it would be appropriate to give Gnawms a heads up that he shouldn’t do that anymore, because we’d be cracking down more on the behavior. I like having him around⁹¹, so it wouldn’t do for him to get banned for something that was ostensibly acceptable behavior before. Perhaps I brought it up too brashly or unexpectedly, or something, but regardless of why, the discussion did not proceed well.

Obviously people like Revlar were delighted to hear that we would be trying to actually stop this in the future (if somewhat skeptical of the carrythrough). Gnawms himself wasn’t certain why we had decided to bring this up with him, thinking that the heads up was more in the way of a warning or something similar. Tmt was genuinely distressed or confused by the change in rules, and alongside him people like WAVE, Carlarc, and one other I can’t remember were banned after they started shitposting (fiercely I might add) in protest.

What followed was a very exhausting exchange where Gnawms touched on the heart of the issue: as I said previously, Makin’s rulings are inconsistent and kind of nonsensical, almost to the point of being unenforceable without being incredibly unfair. Gnawms advocated for relaxing the rules whenever Makin isn’t around and sucking it up when he is around, but half measures like that get the channel hidden anyway when he comes back and freaks out over the proceedings while he was away.

After a while I stopped trying to speak against this; I’ve reached a breaking point where I’ve become too tired of cornering myself and explaining Makin’s position for him (something I’ve lamented extensively in the past). I don’t know why I feel the need to try and shield him from this criticism or defend his position when I don’t even agree with it. If I had to say, I’d guess it’s in the interest of good faith. Regardless, I think I’m done overextending myself on that --if he wants something to change he can face the heat from his decisions himself.

Of course, I’ve said this multiple times in the past already and not a lot has come from it. I really have to reconsider the carry-through on my deliberations. Nothing more for today.

---

13^th of July 2018

In addition to the general upset of these rule changes, today was another instance of behavior from Makin that was particularly upsetting to encounter. He’s been engaging in a practice called “gatekeeping”: for the uninformed, this is the process of systematically discouraging or denying so-termed “outsiders” from joining a group for arbitrary and often stupid reasons⁹² (if it wasn’t obvious from my description, this is categorically a bad thing to do). This is different from simply “being selective”, which is done for beneficial or sensible reasons.

Often the line between gatekeeping and selectivity is difficult to clearly establish: personal biases may turn what is an otherwise dependable selection process into gatekeeping, but there are also clear cut examples where the gatekeeping is unnecessary and malevolent. It would be very inappropriate of me to suggest that what Makin’s doing is the latter--while I think he’s misguided in how he’s doing it, the ultimate goal he’s striving for is actually worthwhile.

Mspa lit treads the same delicate balance that all online communities do. I’ve described this before, where a given group needs to maintain a steady influx of new members in order to 1) counteract the steady loss of old members and 2) maintain an adequate amount of energy in conversations. The first point is an obvious one, but even if a group never loses any members it’s extremely prone to stagnation once all obvious topics have been thoroughly explored.

The HSD and especially mspa-lit are a little less susceptible to this because of the story that initially brought us all here. The tone and complexity of the subject matter itself, the typical behavior of the people who enjoy it, or perhaps a combination of both, have made us vaguely resistant to the type of malaise that commonly infects a community once the initial rush is over. However, the point stands that you want to try and encourage newer people to join in and prevent things from decaying over time.

Makin does in fact have a point in what he does, however. While I’m concerned with deterioration through inactivity, he’s primarily concerned with deterioration in quality. The shitposting discussion from yesterday is clear evidence of this (more cynically, it’s him simply trying to have his cake and eat it too, but the principle here applies): shitposting is, by nature, not a useful or particularly interesting addition to the conversation at hand.

Sometimes shitposting can be really inventive and amusing, and realistically if people can accomplish that then it isn’t really caustic to group discussion (it’s still disruptive, but as Gnawms pointed out even natural topic changes are necessarily disruptive). In effect, the new rules are less important towards the notion of “shitposting”, which can in fact be of some quality, as opposed to “low-effort posting”, which is categorically bad.

At the end of the day, Makin reasonably does not want the channel to be overrun by people who are fine with low-effort posting. After considering it for a while, I find it hard to imagine why anyone would disagree with that principle. You can argue against the notion that “all shitposting is bad” easily, but low-effort posting is an absolute blight that can’t be defended under scrutiny.

With this explanation, which I’ve tried my hardest to make fair, I can now explain why Makin’s behavior rankles with me. Making a “no low-effort posting” mandate would fall under “being selective” and would be completely reasonable, but a blanket ban on shitposting--especially when Makin does it himself--is not fair or reasonable, and thus falls under “gatekeeping”.

To further this, Makin’s process for “allowing” new people into our fold is something of a farce. Under the guise of spurring meaningful conversation, it’s fairly common for him to deny entry to people who haven’t read a “sufficient shill”, typically one of the longer ones like Ever17, HPMOR, WTC, or Worm. $trider is the most recent person to be denied based on this perceived inadequacy, who has read multiple shills but none of the “important ones”, apparently.

My fear, which has more or less already been realized, is that Makin is using this excuse to exclude specific people that he simply doesn’t like. Aforementioned $trider is one such example, where he’s made an earnest attempt to engage appropriately whenever he pops by in mspa-lit and has read a hefty amount of shills already (but, as one might predict, not one of the “sufficient” shills I mentioned). Makin thus discourages him from using mspa-lit and has explicitly said he doesn’t want him using the channel.

To reiterate: discouraging low-effort posting is completely reasonable and a good idea overall, but this has gone beyond that and reached into the territory of discrimination⁹³. I’ll avoid going into details yet again about why I’m bothered by Makin’s behavior; at this point it should be completely obvious. Our only hope collectively is that he could decide to stop being so mercurial, but I’m definitely not going to hold my breath. Instead, I should take the time to explain another way this all might have been avoided.

In a previous entry I’ve described the culture and mechanics of 4chan at some length, especially their pronounced hostility to outsiders real or perceived (this parallel between the website and Makin is actually really obvious now that I think about it). People who ask for information are immediately torn apart; the common criticism provided in such situations--usually administered implicitly, but sometimes explicitly if the participants happen to feel generous--is to wait and watch conversations on 4chan for a while before actually engaging in them. This can be summed up by the historically famous phrase “lurk moar”.

What I’m suggesting for mspa-lit is something similar. Many people see the place and want to participate because it rightly seems like a place filled with people on good terms discussing anything that fits their fancy. Yet, there are little intricacies to interacting with people there that are difficult to express verbally. Experience is the only way to become familiar with those conversational rules, and unfortunately most people gain that experience the hard way: running the gauntlet, and butting heads with people when our social mores are inevitably violated.

The better way, probably done already by those who are more patient or observant, is to wait and watch for a while. Mistakes, obviously, will still be made even when people try to do this, but it would overall be far less agitating for everyone involved.

Then again, suggesting this advice here is probably pointless--anyone who might care about reading this document is probably already a regular user in mspa-lit and subsequently knows how to behave in the channel. In theory, anyway. For those of you who happen not to fit in that category, please be mindful.

Nothing more for today.

---

15^th of July 2018

This actually started a few days ago, but Makin unveiled a new extension that he was working on for the Homestuck website. Entitled “Homestuck Companion”, he made it available for Google Chrome and Firefox. It adds some basic but sorely needed functionality to the main website, such as being able to control what page you’re on with the arrow keys (mspfa has had this ability for literal years, and it not being available on homestuck.com has always puzzled me somewhat).

More impressive, however, is that it also takes commentary from the books and adds them in a separate box beneath the actual content of the page. The utility of this is pretty straightforward but not to be understated: the commentary in the books adds a lot to the experience of reading, and offers some wonderful insight into Hussie’s writing (occasionally, anyway. More often it is a source for additional jokes, which are no less desirable).

Naturally, alongside the commentary for Homestuck he’s also included that of Problem Sleuth. As I understand it, Bambosh is physically transcribing the commentary from the book to spreadsheets online, where Makin and I have been organizing it to make sure that all comments are matched with the right pages. It’s been somewhat of a trial at points, but Problem Sleuth is nearing completion and then we’ll essentially be caught up on it until the next Homestuck book comes out.

Makin is opting not to release commentary for the newest book for a while yet, to encourage people to actually buy the physical books first. This seems fair, although vaguely flawed I suppose: the initial hype is indeed worthy of consideration, but regardless of when someone encounters the story, they’re going to want the commentary. Even once the excitement of a new book has passed, readers old and new will want that immediate gratification of additional comments to read and will inevitably turn to the extension. Restricting their access for a matter of months doesn’t strike me as particularly effective, but I guess I don’t care enough to nitpick this minor detail.

Regardless of the long term effects of this, in the short term it’s nice to have something to work on that seems imminently useful. The benefits of adding commentary for viewing online is very obviously helpful, and I’m glad for the opportunity to do something that people will more than likely enjoy. I’ll almost be sad to see it complete, but maybe this will open up the gates for more projects in the future.

In fact, Makin mentioned recently that it seems like content producers are coming back into prominence. This journal is being maintained again, he’s working on his commentary project, and then fanventure creators like Griever and Nights are doubling down on their stories or pursuing more ambitious storytelling goals. It’s an exciting time to be part of the fandom with this flurry of activity. I can only hope that it persists⁹⁴, or that something even more exciting occurs (dare I say, an official MSPA update of some kind?).

Nothing more for today.

---

16^th of July 2018

Today was marked by the forced removal of yet another member of our fold. The way it unfolded was so outlandish and stupid that I’m actually having trouble wrapping my mind around it, even several hours later. There were so many ways it could have been stopped before it spiraled out of control, yet we utterly and completely failed in every way. It’s honestly mind boggling how complex the awfulness is.

Sometime in the early afternoon, Makin started posting screenshots from the old MSPA forums. Naturally this piqued the interest of some, and a smattering of people asked where he found the screenshots. Tetra especially was curious, and repeated the question ad nauseum. Makin either ignored or didn’t see these requests, and while most people took the hint and stopped bothering, Tetra started to grow irate.

I want to make something absolutely clear at this point in the explanation: Makin did not start this confrontation and is in no way responsible for how it began⁹⁵. I have my own problems with how he handled other parts of this debacle, but it would be extremely unfair to insinuate that he was at fault for beginning the charade. The takeaway from what I’m saying is: Tetra perceived Makin’s lack of response as some sort of targeted malice and used it to launch a tirade against him. While just the initial outburst could have been vaguely understandable, he proceeded to whine about things in a way that was confusing and extremely irritating for an extended period of time.

It honestly grew to the point that everyone involved in the discussion, myself included, was so frustrated with Tetra that we weren’t even bothering to actually interface with him. His arguments were confused at best and completely baseless at worst, and we made no bones about telling him so. At a certain point the conversation had stopped being about discussing the matter and had turned into messing with Tetra for having obviously shitty opinions.

The conversation was thus completely unremarkable at first, but eventually Olki and I realized it had gone too far. We tried to clean it up by freezing the channel and/or tempbanning people who were exacerbating the issue. I also suggested banning Tetra so he could cool down, but Makin removed my ability to stop the channel and promised to undo any bans that we issued, so that we were essentially powerless to stop the conversation (Makin explicitly stated that he wanted the conversation to continue because he found it amusing). In this way, the argument continued to escalate without any control.

Eventually, Tetra became so upset that he made an exceptionally inappropriate comment (“im gonna take 2000 mg of latuda and take the nap of a lifetime”). There was much discussion over the nature of this comment: whether or not it alluded to suicide, if it was genuine or not, etc. Tetra later stated through DMs that it was indeed a joke, although I don’t find that particularly convincing. However, it doesn’t really matter whether it was serious or not; the statement was absolutely inappropriate to make in such a conversation.

At this point Makin finally realized something was wrong and, appropriately, banned Tetra for the perceived threat. This spurred even more discussion about whether it deserved to be a permanent ban or not. I initially argued in favor of a non-permanent ban, but soon afterwards it was discovered that Tetra had no less than two or three alts that he had gone to great lengths to conceal from us; thanks to some anonymous tips, we promptly banned all of the accounts and at that point all good will anyone had for Tetra was effectively gone.

For those who are confused, the Cliff’s Notes version of the events involve a brief summary of who is at fault for what, exactly⁹⁶.

Tetra is arguably the most to blame, and is responsible for: starting the argument in the first place, whining long past its expiration date, and then committing the gravest sin of the discussion with the disastrous comment at the end;

Everyone involved in the discussion, including myself, are at fault for: communicating poorly and even generally egging on Tetra throughout the duration of the conversation;

And Makin is at fault for: specifically removing the ability to halt the conversation and even encouraging it to continue when it should have been stopped, all because he found it “amusing”.

I despise the fact that I have to innumerate these points in such a laborious fashion, but after the conversation was over Makin exhaustively denied any wrongdoing on his part and--perhaps jokingly, perhaps not--suggested that I was simply “pushing an agenda” and using this occasion as fuel.

Following that particular accusation I was very upset, and most of all confused. I wasn’t sure whether I was going crazy with my perceptions, so I decided to speak about it with other witnesses to the event. After being reassured that my conclusions were in fact reasonable, I can’t help but feel I was being gaslighted.

To be clear, I don’t mean to suggest that Makin was doing anything like that, at least not on purpose, but rather I feel he’s literally incapable of taking the blame for things at others’ behest. Unless he has already convinced himself of something, there is practically no way to change his mind on any given matter. It’s a horribly frustrating feature of his person, and one that everyone under him is naturally a victim of; whether this is a true fault of his personality or an extension of his neverending pranks is up to speculation.

Nearly all problems concerning Makin can be reduced to either this insurmountable stubbornness, or his aversion to being held responsible--often enough it is a mix of both, where he does not want to accept consequences regarding his position and actions, and obstinately refuses all suggestions otherwise. The way things stand now, nothing can really be done about this; it is thus that anyone who wishes to remain here follows the principle I outlined in a previous entry: they must necessarily be tolerant enough of his actions to stay despite them, or leave.

Or, to return to the subject at hand, they are expelled⁹⁷. A big problem I have with how today ended was how quickly and--most of all--how comprehensively Makin’s attitude changed when it became clear to him that something was actually wrong. Very shortly after Tetra made the suicide comment, he mentioned he was upset about this development because Tetra actually contributed to discussion, meaning it would be a loss of activity. Yet, the very next thing I recall from Makin was complete dismissal.

Logically speaking this turn in opinion makes sense, but it betrays something about Makin’s underlying personality to me. That shift in opinion from “desirable individual” to “undesirable” was too quick and easy for comfort. It suggests a quality of his psyche that is deeply troubling to consider.

To be precise, I worry greatly that Makin purposely avoids developing any sort of meaningful attachments to the people that participate in this group. Whenever someone is banned or leaves, no matter who it is, he manages to rationalize it in some twisted way or find some sort of obtuse reasoning for why it’s inconsequential; sometimes he’ll even remark that it’s a good thing⁹⁸. This topic has come up before, but today’s events serve as yet another reminder of a fundamental truth in dealing with Makin: no one here is actually close to him, and at the end of the day everyone here is expendable to him.

He’s said the latter himself, so I don’t know why I fool myself into thinking it might not be the case. I suppose I just find it disappointing in light of all of the time we spend here; I understand that the internet necessarily implies a lesser connection than with people you meet in real life, but it does not completely rob our encounters of all their quality. For me personally, after spending so much time working under him, talking with him, and engaging in such projects together as this writing and the new commentary extension, is it still inappropriate to expect some semblance of friendship to form⁹⁹? Or at the very least, some kind of legitimate camaraderie besides none at all?

There is undoubtedly some overreaction on my part to muse on all of this to such lengths. Yet, when I’m forced to consider everything in tandem I’m forced to conclude that it’s simply not possible to trust him in the ways I’m describing. Maybe that’s the conclusion he would prefer everyone to arrive at, but if that’s true then interfacing with him outside of professional contexts is a waste of time and effort.

In the interest of fairness, Tensei brought up a very important point after everything was said and done that helps make more sense of Makin’s reaction. He mentioned that you don’t really want people in the server who are willing to make vague and desperate threats (even if joking), and especially not people who keep multiple alts around.

This is all completely true of course, but in this particular scenario it feels like some sort of hindsight bias. It’s sensible to treat the alt accounts as a separate matter, which Tetra would be banned for alone. However, the entire reason we found out about the alt accounts is because Tetra was banned for making that particular comment, which people are still debating as to whether it merited an actual ban. Further, it was an extremely out of character comment (the first time he’s mentioned anything like this in all the time he’s been here), requiring him to be under great duress.

There’s two things I’m trying to illustrate by laying this all out: first is that this behavior is really unconventional for Tetra, so throwing him under the bus so quickly feels scummy and inhumane; second is that, based on the first point, the way this was handled was exceptionally injust. I’m bothered by how this all turned out because it’s a pretty hefty dismissal of due process, although I guess I shouldn’t be surprised after the incident with rS.

I imagine at least a few of the people reading this are asking, “Who gives a shit about due process? It’s just an internet chatroom, it’s not a federal court case.” To that, all I can say is: I don’t know, I guess I care, even if no one else does. Going back to what I said about becoming friends with other people, this all just sort of underscores how quickly the people in this channel are willing to turn on each other when things are amiss. If we can’t trust the people we like and care about to be fair when things go badly, why should we bother investing time or effort into all of this nonsense?

Sure, Tetra deserved some kind of punishment, and the alts demonstrate that he shouldn’t really be allowed here. Is the way we got to that conclusion fair? After considering it for a while, all I can think is “No, absolutely not.” The discussion should have been halted somehow before it got to the point where an established regular--who even in previous outbursts had no real history of making such outrageous comments--got to the point where he felt he had to act out. It’s akin to blaming a schoolkid for imploding when the teachers start jeering alongside the actual bully.

It’s not like we haven’t banned Tetra temporarily in the past so he could calm down before proceeding with talking to him anyway, that was practically standard procedure. To me, the more disturbing part of all this is how casually Makin accepted this outcome. To use an admittedly ingracious analogy it’s like he considers us all his playthings, and when one of us doesn’t act exactly the way he wants he doesn’t think much more of it than throwing a broken toy in the garbage.

I’ve spent too much time hashing this out¹⁰⁰. The overall point is that the way things were handled with Tetra is an utter disappointment, and now that it’s over it can never be undone. Through our collective carelessness we ousted someone who otherwise might have been just fine with some more care (discounting the alts, obviously). For most it seems this is all fine for now, when people generally dislike who got the short end of the stick. However, what if this happens again and the person on the chopping block isn’t so easy to rationalize as a simple shitter?

To be honest, I’m not sure why I’m trying so hard to explore this issue. Writing this entry is almost surely going to bring trouble my way (just thinking about people complaining over this entry has already given me an enormous headache). To make it worse, all of this writing has been for the sake of a person that most people were ambivalent about at best. I’m sure a large number of people reading this must be confused as to why I’m raking myself over the coals so thoroughly for such a seemingly minor occurrence. I’m almost starting to wonder that myself, but in the end I just can’t be okay with how things were handled.

The only comfort I can really take from today is that Minish has decided to come back. We lost a regular but regained an old (and, if you’ll pardon the confusing turnabout, better quality) one instead. If this was all some sort of cosmic joke then I guess, in the end, it was funny enough. I’m not about to complain about having Minish back, he was sorely missed by many and it’ll be nice to have his eager commentary once again.

Nothing more for today.

---

18^th of July 2018

There was a discussion early this morning about the #science-math and #coding-tech channels. I can’t quite remember how it started, but we were drawing comparisons between all of the main channels in the server. #coding-tech and #science-math serve fairly similar purposes, although there is a pronounced bias concerning when a related topic actually gets moved to the designated channel.

Before when it was only #coding-tech, we were perfectly content to have math and science discussions in mspa-lit. This was more or less reasonable, although there was no real qualification for why such discussions went there apart from “most of us are into that kind of shit”. At some point, it became evident that the math-related discussions that Putnam, Nat, and a few others were having were overwhelming the channel at times. Thus, #science-math was created as a containment channel for their dense conversations.

I don’t typically stray into #coding-tech or #science-math, and whenever I do the channels appear completely dead. After doing a quick comparison I found that #science-math only has about 11,000 messages total while #coding-tech has nearly 200,000. When I brought this up, Tera and Nights were quick to check me, explaining that #coding-tech has been around many months longer than #science-math.

I was suggesting that mspa-lit subsume math and science conversation back into itself because of channel clutter. However, between the justification for keeping it around from Nights and Tera, and Makin’s own denial (phrased simply as “cry more Drew”), nothing was changed. This kicked off some brief conversation about other, similar channels that could be compared; the most obvious example was #western- and #eastern-media, which surprisingly have both seen almost 100,000 messages since being made. Last time they were split it was disastrous, but perhaps this particular branding is more conducive.

More interesting to me, personally, was the following conversation. The Discord search function is good enough for basic purposes, but it lacks resolution in a lot of ways. Hours later, after I had gone to sleep and completely forgotten about my request, Difarem and Cerulean both got involved in the discussion at some point and were conferring with each other about how to present this data to the rest of us. The statistics are more or less available, they just needed to find ways to give it to us.

Which, eventually, they did. Difarem provided two different graphs, with the activity for #science-math and #coding-tech and how they compare over time. It was really nice to see the more in-depth data for each channel--it would be possible to obtain the information manually, but tedious. Difarem and Ceru made it a far easier prospect with their work, which is exciting to me.

I asked if we could run statistics on server activity for each channel going back to the server’s creation, which would have been a far more demanding request. The details are starting to grow fuzzy in my mind; if I recall, Difarem stated it was definitely possible but outside of the realm of his capabilities right now. This is completely reasonable, but the fact that the option is available at all still great. I wonder what patterns in user activity exist over the two years this server has been around? I’m sure some are obvious, like an increase during the summer and decrease in winter, but there are probably many others that are less clear. I’m eager for the opportunity to learn more about this.

Maybe I do have a problem; who else on earth reasonably cares about any of this nonsense? It might be a good time to reevaluate my priorities, or something. As it is, nothing more for today.

---

19^th of July 2018

Today during the afternoon, a new user named VerdeLuna came in and quickly made their way over to mspa-lit, asking about “literature” in general. This immediately set off alarms in peoples’ heads, especially Revlar and Nights. They conferred for a bit, and as time went by almost everyone present in the channel caught on. Tmtm was initially resistant and chose to err on the side of caution, but with some well-timed baiting it became evident beyond a shadow of a doubt that VerdeLuna was another Tetra alt.

I’m really afraid of the possibility that we now have another user that’ll habitually create alts to try and steal their way back onto the server. The NEO situation itself, while quiet for some time now, was a monstrous headache when it wasn’t just annoying. Obviously in a server of this size it’s hard to avoid the odd user who will become like this, but it’s categorically undesirable for plain reasons. I guess the realistic solution is not to worry that much about it, because there’s not a really effective way to stop it permanently.

I’m more personally embarrassed about this because of everything I wrote on the 16th of this month. I went to such great lengths to speak up for due process and in the end all I’ve got to show for it is someone who is clearly not suited for our community, abusing the system because things didn’t turn out the way they wanted¹⁰¹.

Like I said before, perhaps this is all a clear sign that I need to stop caring so much. All of my grumbling and posturing about “doing the right thing” seems more and more wasted with each passing incident like this. Or, more likely, perhaps I just need to reevaluate which incidents I fight over and which I don’t--choose my battles more wisely, I suppose. It may be hindsight bias, but in retrospect this was all doomed to be a waste of my time--that doesn’t really rob other, actually valid problems of their significance. Just gotta be smarter about it in the future.

Somehow, it wasn’t all bad tonight either. The VerdeLuna alt, once effectively outed, proved to be something of a source of entertainment for us. Revlar knew almost from the get go but was being decidedly unsubtle about the entire affair, which opened him up to a lot of fire from people like Tmtm. When he was vindicated, it turned into something of a circus--aside from the fact that we have a clearly inscrutable person perpetrating this farce, it was honestly a pretty jovial occasion.

I also took the time to reveal to the mod team (and to those reading this in the future) that I created an alt some months ago by the name of Amicus¹⁰² and used it to conduct a small experiment. I wanted to see if it was easy or difficult to avoid detection, although I told Tera about it at the time (I didn’t want to be a complete unknown; this would have tipped the scale from simple, cheeky shenanigans to something a tad more sinister).

In light of this business with Tetra, I decided it would be worthwhile to bust out the alternate account once more before getting rid of the account for good. I was amused when people naturally picked up on it, ascribing it to yet another Tetra alt. However, while this was occurring and especially while writing it down, I realize that this is all rather inappropriate. Tetra probably feeds off of this attention, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s influencing him to keep coming back.

No, I think that this will be the end of my discussing the matter. I already put out something of a moratorium on the subject in the HSD proper--people are to report to the mods immediately if they notice any strange activity, and not draw attention to it. Further, this is the last I will ever mention Tetra barring some sort of extraordinary circumstance. I don’t want to encourage him to obsess over us, trying to get noticed and validate his efforts. If he’s to come back it’ll be on our terms, but otherwise it’s time to move on with his life and forget about us.

I worry how difficult that must be. I certainly can’t imagine having to suddenly abandon this place at this time. Yet, it’s a reality that we must all face someday. Maybe it’ll be easier once the time actually comes, with no other recourse available to us, but it is still an exceedingly unpleasant thing to think about for now. Hopefully the time where it will come to bear is still far away.

Nothing more for today.

---

20^th of July 2018

After the last week of on-and-off disappointments, today was a much needed respite. It is, in the American dating system, 7/20. This corresponds to arguably one of the most famous memes of our cohort, being Michael Bowman’s Credit Score video.

I’ve mentioned before that Bowman and Stutzman have a series of humorous videos on Bowman’s Youtube channel, but this one video practically dwarfs the others in terms of notoriety. In a parody of credit score checking services, Bowman repeatedly, laboriously says variations for ten minutes of the phrase “I’m thinking of a number between my buttocks. Do you know what it is? It’s my credit score, and it happens to be 720. The higher my credit score, the better chance I have at saving a lot of money.” The video itself has had an immeasurable influence on his popularity in our group.

Any song from CANMT that references Bowman will undoubtedly feature audio taken from this video, and there are a few emotes on the HSD that are kept in honor of it. This popularity is why Makin decided to host a community stream today (also serving as a decent break in the lull between the 12th of June and the 25th of October). All things considered, it was a well-timed event.

I state this more for record-keeping purposes than anything else, but we ended up watching Ready Player One and The Fifth Element. The former was decidedly lesser in quality, but was suited for a streaming environment where lots of excitement can be generated quickly (although some scenes were cliche enough that I could see some people being turned off from it). The latter was a better film in and of itself, but was not as easy for a large audience to engage in. This is, interestingly, in keeping with The Fifth Element’s history--upon release it was massively polarizing among both critics and general audiences, although the weirdness of it helped in this particular scenario.

After the movies were done came the real meat of the event in the form of a new CANMT album. Simply titled “Homestuck Vol 11”, it was an enormous success; the songs were all actually good music, very funny, or both. The progression of the stream itself contributed to the experience, even: one of the songs was clearly labeled “Unfinished… DO NOT PUBLISH”, which a number of streamgoers were quick to point out. Yet, upon closer inspection, the track art itself was also an unfinished variant! It was so fitting that they decided to go ahead and release it all anyway, and what was there of the song was quality.

I don’t think there was a single unenjoyable part to the entire album, really. I’ve described the old and gold meme The Baby is You in a previous entry, and one of the songs on Vol 11 is intended as a sequel. Much like the original, it is a monstrous, hilarious track that was the result of many combined talents and hard work: Griever wrote the script, Tipsy, Mines, Ost, and a couple others from CANMT voice acted, and the overall result is a stunning display of the creative talents that the community has to offer.

The reception from those who developed the album and those who attended the stream has been very positive: it may not quite be the best CANMT has ever had, but it was still phenomenal (Mines: “honestly best canmt album now that I've listened to it”; Ost:“i dont know if its the best”; Difarem: “yeah it honestly cant compare to gunshow singalong”). The Baby is 2 in particular is almost guaranteed to go down as an instant classic, to us even if no one else.

Vol 11 has kind of illustrated to me how far CANMT has come as an organization. While much younger than LOFAM, CANMT has already solidified itself as nothing short of a musical institution for us. They serve different purposes (the former being devoted to more serious music while the latter is far more lighthearted), and CANMT in particular is visibly active to the point that I’m astonished by their collective energy and creativity. These two groups can be easily counted among the best things to come out of the Homestuck fandom, both through their determination and their quality. I speak for more than just myself when I say we look forward to what the future brings for them.

It would be remiss of me not to comment on how Makin constantly and horrendously fucked up the project as it went¹⁰³, by annoying the living shit out of the contributors and generally harassing them. Except, that isn’t really true; Makin did in fact pester the contributors significantly, but on the whole it was a rather positive influence. Three people mentioned to me alone that they wouldn’t have finished their longer contributions without him constantly hounding them to get to work.

Mines mentioned: “the funniest part was how pissed he was when it took cookie like a week and a half to finish the last 30 seconds of his 1 minute song / especially when cookie was like ‘I'll finish really soon dw’ the entire time”. This is in conjunction with his roles on LOFAM and CANMT, the commentary project, and even just me writing this document in general. I don’t condone him doing this if he’s not actually on the given project, but otherwise he’s not so bad at holding the whip.

This revelation also lends itself to an unfortunate truth of content production on the internet. For every successfully completed project there are undoubtedly a hundred thousand more that are begun, but never finished. There is no shortage of creative individuals who want to leave a piece of themselves out there for the world to see, but there are far fewer with the gumption to actually complete their work. In a scenario like that, someone with Makin’s personage is ideal.

To be clear, and to get in my quota of bad-mouthing Makin (I can already picture him typing “Cry more!” as he reads this), I do not think that the behavior I’m describing is well suited for dealing with people on a more casual basis. Makin is a callous individual who cares little for personal plights and excuses--if anything, such things will only make him mock you more for the trouble. However, in the attitude of a cruel drill sergeant or an especially annoying boss, there is nothing quite so good a motivator as a superior you love to hate and prove wrong. I have to give Makin credit for these things: he’s good at being a shithead, and he’s damn good at making people carry through with their ambitions.

Nothing more for today.

---

31^st of July 2018

There was an extremely dense set of discourse over the term “trap” again. I described the term at length the last time this was an issue, so I’ll avoid the protracted explanation this time around. I can think of few other terms that have generated quite this much discussion, positive or negative. It was not easy getting to the meat of it either--there were a lot of people clamoring for the conversation to die before it could even begin (understandably, in retrospect), and then once we seemed to finally be getting there it was haltering and bad faith.

It amazes me to say it in hindsight, but that conversation lasted for nearly three hours. I played no small part in trying to promote the topic, under the guise of promoting better understanding between people. I’m worried that all it actually succeeded in doing was increasing tensions unnecessarily and not actually accomplishing anything of value. I might even have made negative progress in this regard. Suffice it to say that the proceedings were overall fairly disappointing.

If it were a simple matter of disagreement then I wouldn’t care about the lack of understanding--this is hardly an uncommon outcome to our discussions. However, when it comes to subject material that’s this contentious, it’s not just a matter of scholarly debate. Tera has repeatedly affirmed both in the past and concurrently that even seeing the term makes it upset. On a logical level I would imagine that discomfort is worth exploring, to try and help it become more at ease with just encountering the term, let alone discussing it. But on a more empathetic basis, is that the right thing to do?

Of course, part of the problem is that I get caught up in these deliberations so much that I end up failing to do much of anything (a habit that gets me called wishy-washy by Makin and others, among far less gracious terms). Yet, it’s more effective than the outright harmful practices that they might put in, so I can take comfort in that at least. Maybe one of these days I’ll find the motivation to actually define a solid set of moral rules instead of simply disagreeing with the shitty ones I see.

Outside of this debacle, it would be remiss of me not to cover the latest work of entertainment to take mspa-lit by storm. La-Mulana is a Japanese indie game in the style of classic puzzle-exploration-adventure games. Infamous for its extreme difficulty and complicated puzzles, the creators opened up a crowdfunding effort to create a sequel back in January 2014 and were successful. Four years and some change later, the Kickstarter has been consummated and the sequel released successfully.

Makin and Tensei are both enormous fans of the original due to the puzzle element. Perhaps as one might predict, they’ve been cavorting on 4chan’s video game board /v/, where daily threads on the new game show up. Most of the people in the 4chan threads have been loosely cooperating to try and finish the game as quickly as possible, which sounds like a truly fascinating experience.

Unfortunately, they’ve also been talking about La-Mulana 2 extensively on the HSD as well--some would say they’ve been doing this excessively. For something like three days now, they’ve posted about nothing except for La-Mulana 2 from the time they get on to the time they log off. I would complain more viciously about this except that most people present have gotten used to it by now and simply talk around them.

Others, though, have taken to the topic themselves. Difarem (now going by DeltaPsi), Toast, and Minish have all started playing the original themselves. Others like tmtml30 have expressed their interest, although I can’t say they intend to actually play it any time soon. I own the game but tried playing it some months ago while I was still streaming for friends on the HSD, and I didn’t enjoy the puzzle format¹⁰⁴ nearly as much as would be required to get anywhere; suitably, people like myself are starting to get just a little tired of seeing it posted so much.

Aside from this, later in the day there was something of an altercation in mod chat between me and Toast. It stemmed from Toast posting a screenshot or complaining verbally about Olki keymashing gratuitously in #hangout, asking for us to implement a strict “no keymashing” rule. It’s actually vaguely interesting that he brought up the concept of keymashing, as we’ve seen its use gradually increase over the last few months.

Phrasing it like that feels a tad misleading, because at any given time there are only a select few people who legitimately keymash on a regular basis. Nights is one such culprit, as well as Sozzay and a handful of others. In these cases, keymashing practically becomes part of their vocabulary or verbiage. In the hands of most it is a completely generic and unhelpful contribution to the discussion, yet they tend to use it in such styled or specific manners that it has become a recognizable speaking pattern. The problem is when people engage in it excessively (a truth that could be said for most activities).

On a surface level, a ban on keymashing might make sense because it’s visibly and obviously unintelligible. Toast’s suggestion could be considered perfectly reasonable, but after thinking about it for some time I denied it. Altgen rules seem applicable here: rather than blanketbanning the activity, it would be more prudent to simply warn or punish people for doing it too much. Thankfully, most of the other mods present agreed with this outcome.

Unfortunately, this kicked off the more heated discussion between Toast and I. Toast was trying to assert that pseudo mods should have the ability to ban each other without limit. Pseudo mods, of course, have the power to ban each other within their own channels (the example that got passed around for the duration of the discussion was: “WoC can ban Toast in #gaming because that’s WoC’s channel, but can Toast ban Olki in #hangout even though it’s Olki’s channel?”). To my dismay, the dispute quickly grew.

Toast insisted that he should be able to ban pseudos in their own channels if they’re breaking the rules, which I vehemently disagreed with. After some back and forth for half an hour or so, Makin finally witnessed the discussion and gave his stereotypically unhelpful input: “woc decides”. I was flabbergasted at this as usual but he was completely immovable, only repeating that and “can’t block the woc” multiple times. He eventually went to bed and I abandoned the conversation to wait for WoC’s opinion, even though there was no reason for accepting his word in particular on the matter.

When WoC finally did arrive, he gave the answer I did but also provided solid reasoning as to why. There’s a hierarchy to modship on the server: pseudos have power in their respective channels but on a base level they’re equal to each other. They deal with threats principally in their own channels, or rarely in other channels if there’s an emergency like a raid or other situation that requires immediate attention (or if the native pseudo specifically requests help or is noticeably absent).

Banning a foreign pseudo in their own channel makes complete sense since their power would be greater there, and there’s less expectation for the foreign pseudo to behave properly (although that expectation is still more present than for non mods). However, if it gets to the point where a pseudo needs to be banned from their own channel, (Toast’s suggesting Olki keymashing in #hangout as such an occasion), then that’s indicative of a far more serious problem that the mods themselves need to address.

Toast seemed at least vaguely peeved by this assessment and quickly absconded from the conversation. I have to admit my frustration that he was pushing so hard on the topic, but I hope he’s not upset about it or anything. It feels like things have been a little more tense than usual here, and I’m not eager to exacerbate any tensions that might linger. Perhaps I need to be redouble my efforts to stay on top of things here.

Nothing more for today.

---

4^th of August 2018

There was a vaguely unpleasant mixup on the subreddit, of small consequence in the short term but perhaps more in the long scheme of things. A thread advertising the New Alternia Discord Server was posted, which obviously wasn’t going to be allowed to remain under any circumstances. Makin removed the thread and banned what he thought was the author (more commonly referred to as the original poster, or OP), but got the wrong person--SmolMuffin ended up being collateral damage.

Naturally they brought it up to me on Discord. Although I quickly grew agitated with her transparent attempts to influence me, I was already working on figuring out the problem. I confirmed that Makin banned the wrong person and got SmolMuffin unbanned, actually banned the OP of the post in question, and was left with the question, “what rule actually states that we can’t advertise different servers?” After a brief check, none of the official rules on the subreddit mentions that people can’t advertise their servers.

After a little haranguing Makin agreed to put up a new rule so people would stop asking about this particular detail. He was resistant at first, but the promise of being able to shut people down more quickly when asked about this was probably too alluring. There is some concern that people will see it as dictatorial, but I wonder who’s familiar with this community who doesn’t already see it that way. Nonetheless, I imagine there will be some ramifications somewhere down the line for establishing the hard rule.

Unrelatedly, after enduring yet more of La-Mulana talk in the chat, a number of people including myself broke down and decided to play it. In my case I’m playing it again, and I regret to say that I still can’t bring myself to care about it¹⁰⁵ enough to get that far. I had resolved to make it at least part of the way without help and was successful to an extent--I actually quite enjoy the aesthetics and what little story there is, but I just can’t stomach the puzzles.

I subsequently started using a walkthrough in order to progress, and that changed the game from horribly frustrating to mildly enjoyable. When it was being discussed yesterday, I mentioned some very specific things that prompted Toast to ask if I was indeed using a walkthrough. I made the mistake of saying yes; the next hour or so was merciless flagellation from Toast and Makin, practically crucifying me for “being a casual” and “not actually playing the game”, among an assortment of other diatribes.

I really should have expected the outcome, and as soon as it began I realized my error. At first I was able to handle it just fine, but then with each passing insult I felt myself growing actually upset, more and more. It was vaguely humiliating, and it’s always more difficult to face when it’s more than one person poking fun at you at a time. I don’t know if they were legitimately trying to make me feel bad or if they were just going hard with jokes as they usually do, but it set me in an utterly foul mood for the rest of the day.

It’s difficult to overstate just how agitated I was at it all. On my way home from work I was thinking extensively about why I even bothered coming to the Discord anymore, or why I cared. I felt an intense unease the entire evening and avoided speaking in the chat, eventually going to bed disgruntled. I simply hoped that my mood would improve by the next day.

Miraculously, it did. After mulling it over for a while today, I realized that the jokes from yesterday literally don’t matter in the grand scheme of things¹⁰⁶. It’s amazing how deeply they nettled me at the time, but in retrospect none of it really bothers me that much. It’s increasingly difficult to understand just why I was so upset at their simple mockery.

I keep coming to the realization that this behavior is probably just how they interact with people that they’re friendly with, if anything. No matter how many times I make that connection it manages to jar me a little bit each time--it’s such a radically different way from how I interface with people that it’s kind of hard to accept. This all reminded me of a conversation from a few days ago where Tensei, Makin, and myself were all talking about friendship on the internet.

To keep a long story short, Makin and Tensei are of a party that treat friendship as a more special thing. They see fit to disparage the overtly affectionate displays we sometimes see in the HSD, which were solely responsible for the creation of #social. I understand their position and even agree slightly, but they perceive it as illegitimate or counterfeit--I only consider it naive most of the time. When someone is using it for deceptive purposes, I feel like that turns it into a different issue entirely.

This topic actually ended up cropping up once more tonight, where we rehashed the idea with each other. Tensei repeated his assertion from the other night, commenting that “actions speak louder than words”. He indicated that being nice to each other is a cheap and easy way for people to interact on the internet, which is true. However, as others in the conversation pointed out, the reverse is also true: being mean-spirited is also cheap and easy, if not more so.

The problem is that there’s an enormous degree of confusion when you get people who act genuinely and people who are fine with deception in the same conversation (to be clear, I don’t mean the evil brand of deception in this case, but the same manner of casually messing with each other). I hate to play into the centrist stereotype, but as usual I feel like the answer lies somewhere in the middle of these two perspectives. We often behave or speak in the objective sense, as if there’s a real answer to our quandaries and discussions. The correct answer is more that it depends on who you’re talking to.

Funnily enough, I think that a good litmus test of friendship with people comes in the form of the opposite of their preferred form of interaction. This is only speculation on my part, but consider the following: for someone like Tensei, who feels that lighthearted deception with people you’re only acquainted with is natural, openness and speaking on a more personal basis is reserved for people he considers true friends; conversely, for someone like Oda or Olki, kindness and personal frankness is a given and it is in fact more difficult to engage in that casual mockery with people who aren’t close friends.

So it is that, like most things, this is just a matter of perspective and personal preference. I’m sure people will find fault with my assessment, but realistically I don’t know how there could be some kind of “true answer” to the question. The world is a complicated place, made even more so by human interaction--it’s easy to say that one thing is optimal, but every single time there’ll be a variable that isn’t accounted for, or some kind of illogic at play. I guess the best solution is not to worry that much about it if it can be avoided.

Really, even though we didn’t end up agreeing by the end of it, the conversation proceeded in such a way that I don’t think anyone was getting heated or upset about it. I almost felt compelled to continue with it, pursuing this intense feeling of engagement that I can’t remember experiencing for a long time now. The topic ended up going on into the early hours of the morning, finally ending around 5:30 AM of the 5th or so.

The conversation itself being relatively mundane, I think there’s a particularly fascinating quality to how it was handled that feels increasingly rare these days. When I was younger and habitated the Sydlexia IRC room instead of this enormous Discord server, there were many days where I would stay up until the rising sun because I was having such a good time just talking with the others in the group. This feeling doesn’t happen but once every few months now, but when it does it’s nothing short of magical.

Times like these serve as an effective reminder of why I enjoy being here so much. It’s worth chasing that feeling, because it does still exist. The spirit of the old internet chatroom has waned significantly, but pulses occasionally. In keeping with the conversation of today and before, I think I’m content with considering most of the people I talk to in mspa-lit my friends. Not bosom buddies, like Tensei and Makin feel the term should refer to, but I appreciate them and enjoy their presence enough that I hope this can all continue indefinitely. What more do I need than that?

Nothing more for today.

---

8^th of August 2018

Of note today, there was a Nintendo news broadcast--known as Nintendo Direct--concerning the upcoming game Super Smash Brothers Ultimate. For those who might possibly not be in the know, Super Smash Brothers (SSB) is an ensemble fighting game containing characters across an immense number of Nintendo-owned franchises. SSB as a series is something that’s talked about periodically in mspa-lit and the HSD as a whole, with people such as myself and Putnam and a swathe of others being fans.

SSB has come up frequently in the past in mspa-lit, usually in one of two ways: typically it’s Putnam, myself, and a token few others talking about our favorite characters and the competitive scene for it in a lighthearted manner; the other way it gets handled typically evolves out of the prior scenario, when someone like Makin overhears what we’re discussing and comes to wreak havoc.

Makin and an assortment of others, such as Tensei and Nights, are fond of other fighting games such as Skullgirls and Guilty Gear. These two examples are more in keeping with the traditional style of fighting games¹⁰⁷, while something like Super Smash Brothers deviates from that formula. Most people don’t bother with this distinction, but Makin likes to hone in on this particular facet and use it as some sort of basis to invalidate or otherwise make fun of Smash players. I assume he thinks it’s funny, otherwise I have no idea why he would bother bringing it up so much.

Regardless, today in particular there was a Nintendo Direct about the upcoming title. Even people who have no real interest in SSB themselves watched the broadcast, and it was immeasurably successful at inducing hype. By chance I decided to take a look on the /v/ board of 4chan to see what was being said. I noticed a lot of behaviors that reminded me of Twitch chats for highly-populated streams, but when I brought this up in mspa-lit I was shut down quickly by 4chan regulars (“stickied threads are absolute cancer compared to regular threads”, Tensei remarked).

This eventually progressed into a similar discussion about the similarities of 4chan versus Reddit. Some people present (although I forget who) were inclined to say that 4chan is an inherently better internet platform, while others naturally disagreed. None of the evidence provided was particularly convincing, although the biases were shamefully obvious in some cases. Makin in particular seems to display the more impish behavioral traits of a common 4chan troll, when he’s so inclined.

This behavior was laboriously dragged out over the course of the SSB discussion as well. A common point of contention that was settled long ago is whether Super Smash Brothers Ultimate is to be considered a port (software taken from one console to another) or if it was a genuinely new game. Makin swears on his life that Ultimate is a port and not a new game, even after being shown a litany of evidence that mark it as something new.

It used to be more amusing when it was a fresh idea, but now it’s simply frustrating--this topic in particular is emblematic of his tendency to take jokes too far for no real reason. Or at least, I hope it’s a joke. There’s only two possibilities with a discussion like this, in the end: either he’s fooling around excessively and needs to learn some self-control, or he sincerely believes what he’s saying. If the latter is true, then it’s just one more piece of evidence that goes in the “Makin doesn’t actually know shit about anything” pile that’s been gradually building up over the years.

Yet, the maxim I outlined in a recent entry still holds true here: anyone who stays here must at least be tolerant of his nonsense, otherwise they would just leave. I definitely find it aggravating, some times more than others, but it hasn’t been quite so bad as to make me want to leave yet. Whether it may be classed as deception or charisma, Makin is definitely effective at deflecting the more negative aspects of talking with him.

Nothing more for today.

---

9^th of August 2018

I’ve noticed a significant drop-off in my activity these last few weeks, which can be owed to a multitude of things. Speaking to the external locus¹⁰⁸, I was being overwhelmed by responsibilities I had to keep in real life, which there’s nothing anyone can really do about. On the inside however, I felt myself starting to get bored with checking in and keeping an eye on things when it seems that nothing changes. Today I decided to forego the hands-off, vaguely lurking behavior and actually engage myself again.

The difference was immediately palpable; dropping into a conversation after its begun is far more of a problem than I had initially thought. It’s easy to think that you have knowledge of what’s going on, but seeing others try to flop their way into a discussion that’s already been in progress is extremely obvious when you see it happen enough times--I believe this practice has graciously come to be known as Putnamming, which I’m not sure if Putnam finds amusing or frustrating.

Ironically, Putnam and I discussed the act of restricting who can participate in a given conversation the other day. Historically I’m not a proponent of this idea, but he offered the perspective that it’s actually a net benefit to do this. That statement was borne out of a conversation where Makin and a token couple others, including Revlar, were hefting around weighty and relatively esoteric philosophical terminology.

I was initially annoyed by this, as was Oda or Olki, because it significantly hindered other people's’ ability to engage and understand what was being discussed. Yet, what Putnam is true conceptually: more and more lately, I’ve understood that the confusion inherent in a discussion geometrically increases with the number of participants. A conversation between myself and one other person is usually a straightforward and perfectly amicable occurrence--then someone will join in and it becomes just a little bit more confusing, and then a fourth, and a fifth, and by the time you get to seven or eight people the entire conversation has degenerated into a complete mess.

To be clear, I still innately despise the idea of prohibiting people from joining in a given topic, at least on an arbitrary basis. However, for the sake of an actually productive conversation I find myself increasingly agreeing that it seems necessary to do so. If nothing else, restricting jokes and shitposts seems like it would be effective enough in keeping a discussion from going off the rails.

Some effort has been dedicated to this in recent weeks, with varying degrees of success. Typically people will grouch or question the reminder and then move on, but occasionally someone gets particularly incensed over the perceived injustice (Gnawms especially comes to mind with this). It is sluggish and largely ineffective at this point, but all it takes to set a trend is time. Our efforts are already paying some dividends; a token few members seem to have taken the warnings to heart and are preemptively destroying conversations that would have been highly interruptive anyway.

In this way, today progressed amiably; our fair share of theatrics occurred as normal, but without the accompanying frustration. Over the last several months I’ve found myself progressively more agitated with Makin’s chicanery--today he was as rowdy as ever at certain points, but staying engaged was weirdly helpful in reducing the general upset of witnessing his buffoonery.

I guess it’s safe to say that knowing where the jokes come from and being used to his demeanor in general really softens the impact of his more goofy bullshit. It’s still annoying to the nth degree, but less aggressively so. I’m not certain if the increase in quality was only perceived on my part or was more objective in nature, but today has been fairly comfy as a result: varied topics have come and gone smoothly, and some actual, light-hearted, and thorough discussion was permitted to happen.

It’s such a pleasant change of pace that even though it didn’t yield anything really substantial I felt compelled to write it down nonetheless. It reminds me that one needs to actually put time and effort into participating or else they’ll simply grow uncomfortable and bored with the proceedings. This brings me back around to the previous idea of this entry: gatekeeping may be one extreme end of the social scale, but permitting anything and everything is the other extreme end and just as ineffectual--some sort of standard must be kept if quality and consistency is desired. My worry over people wanting to join and not being allowed to may have been overblown in retrospect; going forward, it’ll be good to keep this in mind.

---

11^th of August 2018

It’s been a pretty quiet day, but there are some interesting quirks at play that I’d like to point out: first and foremost, Makin has been offline more frequently in the last few days. Whenever he has such enigmatic plans as require him to be away, he designates one of the mods (either at random or pointedly) to be in charge while he’s away.

This time he chose Nights and, as is customary, we’ve begun heckling him lightly about his temporarily uplifted status. Such heckling doesn’t extend too far beyond faint teasing, as it mostly involves deliberately pointing out small¹⁰⁹ mistakes in a far exaggerated manner. This could be said to extend from a complaint that’s been levied against Makin in the past concerning his status as a Discord Partner.

I’ve mentioned this concept in passing before: Discord as a whole has a promotional deal where, if the server you own is large and active enough, you receive a few perks. The HSD is more than adequate to qualify for this in conjunction with the subreddit, although the benefits of being partnered aren’t that glamorous (the most exciting for most people is probably receiving a Discord hoodie). Yet, his partnered status tends to open himself up for criticism from people who don’t seem to really understand what being partnered means.

It’s been a severe problem in the past where people will try to run Makin’s behavior into the ground (more than is necessary, anyway) by claiming that his attitude is unprofessional. While this is certainly true, it actually has no bearing on his partnered status unless he’s actually violating Discord’s Terms of Service or what have you. This doesn’t stop some from using it as an angle of attack.

The oldest recorded instance of this is from Maxmikester, who in the confrontation at the end of last year said: “... this is behavior unbecoming of a discord partner...” That specific phrase has since been catapulted into popularity, mostly being repeated as a joke in mspa-lit and altgen. Occasionally someone like Tetra will use it unironically to express their unhappiness, which functions much the same way that pouring gasoline on a fire does.

To bring this around to the original topic, it’s common and great fun to make fun of the mod Makin places in charge of things by repeating that phrase ad nauseum at the slightest provocation. I was subject to this and other in-jokes (“You’ll never become the server owner at this rate!” is one specifically reserved for me) when I was placed in charge a couple months ago. They always feel a tad embarrassing in the thick of things, but in retrospect it’s all in good fun of course.

Later in the night around 2 AM EST, the chat remained unusually active. This was probably due to the topic at hand, surrounding on mathematical topics of various sorts. There’s a distinct cabal of people who are all involved with math at higher levels than most people, such as virtuNat and Ost. This includes people who dabble or are generally interested in higher-order math like Cty, Mines, Putnam, and Tmtmtl.

Historically, members of this group of people or anyone engaging in these heavily math-laden conversation tend to be really persistent or even disruptive, which is why #science-math was created to hold them. We’re supposed to move the conversations as they arise, but I had no motivation to do so this time; mspa-lit has been diverted so many times in its conversational underpinnings that I felt no reason for it, certainly not in the doldrums of the late night hours.

I’m not particularly fond of complex math myself, but watching their conversation proceed uninterrupted was amusing and even outright enjoyable at times. I was unable to participate myself, so I simply lurked and watched them divert into multiple tangents as time went by. The conversation naturally disintegrated after a few iterations of this pattern. Notably for me, the entire time that the topic was in progress there was a distinct feeling of coziness to it. The topic seemed to take on the most satisfying and friendliest form possible, with lots of actually helpful information being spread around punctuated with some light-hearted ribbing.

I would say that turning to this more cerebral topic may be due to school coming back soon--a matter of weeks or less for most now--but speaking honestly I’m sure that math taking over mspa-lit has happened dozens of times now at all times of the year. Regardless, school coming back is almost assuredly going to affect the activity of the server, although in what way I can’t be certain yet.

Nothing more for today.

---

15^th of August 2018

There’s been a noticeable increase in raids over the last couple of months. Nothing has hurt quite as much since the Fuckbot and child porn raids of early 2017; we still experienced some small-scale raids, but comparatively speaking they’ve all been extremely trivial since the two I named. The word that comes to mind is “pathetic”, first and foremost. Even regular users have commented on this, where the scale and intensity of all raids is a disappointment compared to what’s come before.

Then for a very long stretch of time, there was nothing. I think there was a period of nearly half a year or maybe even more where not a single raid was had. This is exempting instances where one person in particular came and caused a disturbance--unless it’s particularly spammy it hardly feels like a raid when there’s only one malefactor. Then, for whatever reason, we started having a long string of proper raids starting a couple months ago.

From an administrative perspective, all of these raids have thankfully been easy to deal with and of little consequence. It does little for entertainment value, though; when the first one came by we were all almost excited in some perverse way. Finally, an end to the monotony we had suffered for so long! Yet, it quickly became apparent that it was going to be more of the same weaksauce tripe from before. Now the only word that feels fitting is “boring”.

Then again, that’s probably for the best. We have had one or two of these recent raids that approached a middling competence, and it’s easy to forget that some people are actually quite bothered when the raider uses imagery that isn’t just spamming nonsense, or doing mass pings. I think the biggest one we’ve had in the last month has been a group of five to six people spamming porn and gore (a classic example of what one might consider a proper raid), but I wasn’t around for it myself.

On a miscellaneous note, I feel like commenting on a behavior that’s been growing progressively more intense as time goes by. VirtuNat has always been somewhat temperamental, but it’s gotten rather excessive in the last month or so. There is an on-going, playful-but-openly hateful dynamic between her and some others, especially myself: she is fond of mocking people to the extreme, to the point where I’ve had to repeatedly warn her about it.

This pattern has gotten much worse lately, with her casual barbs becoming cruel; they extend beyond a simple mannerism into something more sinister, and it worries me. She’s mentioned repeatedly that she has a crucial engineering exam coming up, something that’ll define the very future of her career. With that in mind it makes more sense to me that she seems so upset, but it’s hard to reconcile that when she’s so openly vicious. I’m waiting to see if she improves at all once she’s taken it; all I can hope is that her stress goes away once it’s done, and that her mood will improve.

Nothing more for today.

---

16^th of August 2018

There was more trap discourse today. The first and most appropriate reaction to have would be mild irritation, perhaps accompanied by a light sigh or even muttering the words “Really? Why even write about this again?” Yet, there was an outrageous twist to it all today that makes it completely worth mentioning.

The discourse was set in motion by a random user named “dennis was so wasted i mean damn”; I wasn’t around for the initial confrontation so I didn’t see it happen, but this user was promptly banned so it must have been at least vaguely awful. Yet, the damage was done by the time this user was disposed of: the conversation was in full swing, and everyone who’s experienced it recently was growing steadily more annoyed.

As could be predicted, Putnam appeared to be the main force behind not using the term, while Revlar and Makin were the main advocates against banning it. Other people such as myself, WoC, Toast, and Oda were all variously involved, although I got the impression that aside from the main three people were at least trying to keep their distance.

However, the paradigm was violently interrupted at 11:45 PM EST when another random user named HomestuckLover came. They posted a single bewildering message:

alright putnam im sorry for anything i said and i know it's bad what i did. if you unban me i will apologize to you in person and stop making alts and not get Reddit involved in this.

And then they were hit by the banhammer almost immediately. All conversation immediately stopped as people asked, “What the fuck was that?” I posted the entirety of the message again for posterity’s sake, and the sheer absurdity of it managed to completely decouple all stress or tension from the argument at hand.

Amidst great mockery and laughter, both sides started making small concessions to each other (for example, Putnam remarking: “i should probably note that i recognize that this is basically two people on the same side arguing over how extremist we have to be”), which was astounding and oddly heartening to witness. Shortly after this, the conversation ended up dissolving into other things naturally, such as life in the countryside and later the topic of artificial meat.

Then, about half an hour later at 12:12 PM EST, the promised Reddit thread miraculously appeared. It might extend beyond simple mockery to recite the post in its entirety, but I can’t resist:

A friend of mine with the name of "dennis was so wasted i mean damn" was recently banned from the Homestuck discord without reason other than a single mod got upset by something he said. He was in either altgen or some other channel and says he's sorry for any rules that he broke.

That friend of mine is a big fan of Homestuck and he's very upset that this happened, but rules are rules so i get that.

Also I myself am not a big fan of Homestuck which is why this is the first post on this subreddit. Sorry he didn't have a reddit so that he couldn't post it here himself (also, new account rule).

It’s so pathetically silly that it’s almost delicious. Carlarc managed to get in a solitary response (“this is so sad”) before the post was removed, for which he actually caught flak from the OP later in the night.

Regardless, the rest of the night was quite pleasant after that incredible interference. The instigator sounds really young to me, and I have my doubts that they’ll be a recurring problem in the future. It sucks to be the butt of a joke like that, but I’m sure everyone has at least a couple of those moments they hate to look back on. It’s almost like a rite of passage on the internet: you commit a few glorious fuck ups for all but yourself to enjoy, and you learn not to do it again as you get older. Such is the way of the internet.

Such was the good mood that we decided to watch not one, but two movies. Continuing the tradition of showing Nights popular movies that he’s never seen before, we watched Raiders of the Lost Ark. After the Star Wars marathon we brainstormed about what other titles are as influential, and Indiana Jones was among the most commonly suggested ideas.

I was afraid that Nights wouldn’t enjoy it for whatever reason, but my fears were completely undeserved: he had a wonderful time, despite it being outrageously late for him. Tensei remarked at one point about “meme moments”, of which there were plenty in Raiders. This kicked off a protracted discussion about when we’re going to do the next one--with Nights going on vacation it’ll assuredly be a while--and some treatment of the topic of the fourth movie (“What fourth movie?”).

We’ll have to make sure to distribute the movies over a reasonable time frame so we don’t suffer from such intense burnout again--we’ve gone through the cycle enough times to know that’ll eventually bounce back, but going without any movies for several months is insufferably boring. Admittedly, we didn’t exhibit very good self-control tonight.

After a mildly disappointing game of Quiplash (which I’ll return to later), it was discovered that Cty has never seen cult-classic The Room. I’ve mentioned this movie before but never described it: without going into too much detail, it was an earnest attempt at a romantic drama by the eccentric Tommy Wiseau. It is universally hailed as one of the worst movies ever made and has accrued a significant following, often being shown in local theaters around the United States and even in the rest of the world.

Naturally, there are some fans of the movie in our fold. We actually watched it during a community stream earlier this year, along with related The Disaster Artist. Yet, due to the fact that Cty has never seen it, we decided to pull the movie up once again. Aside from Con Air, I believe The Room is the movie that we’ve gotten the most mileage out as a group by far. We even made plans to watch it again in the maybe-near future. At some point we may burn ourselves out on that too, but for now its value is intact.

Returning to Quiplash however, MrNostalgic set up the game for a number of us later in the evening. It was an ad hoc gathering and the game experienced some technical difficulties, which provoked my irritation more than I thought it would. Then, Cty began tearing into the admittedly frequent low-effort jokes that were being supplied. Eventually I lost my patience and yelled at him for it, which I fear would have ruined the night for many people if not for The Room afterwards.

Cty and I talked briefly about this, but there wasn’t a lot of time to flesh out the discussion as much as we need to. I’ve repeatedly felt that his way of wording things is agonizing and arrogant, but he asserts that he’s attempting to engage in good faith at all times. I’m not sure why this conversational difficulty exists, but regardless we’ll need to sit down and hash it out sometime soon. He seems to be a reasonable individual, so hopefully it goes smoothly.

Nothing more for today.

---

17^th of August 2018

Today is marked by the release of the tenth installment of the Hiveswap Friendsim. Anyone who hasn’t been paying the closest attention, like myself, is probably wondering: “How are there already ten of these fucking things?” To that, I can only say that we have eight more of these to go before we’re actually done.

There is some vague speculation regarding the future installments: the 12th volume happens to coincide with the anniversary of the release of Hiveswap: Act One, so a few such as Skyplayer are optimistic that we may receive a newspost on that day. Most people, however, have achieved a level of cynicism that precludes such positivity.

I’ve probably mentioned in this document before, but I’ve long abandoned hope that Hiveswap is still being worked on at all. If I happen to be wrong, that would be excellent news; otherwise, the combination of no forthcoming news and the thorough disposal of WhatPumpkin team members paints a fairly gruesome picture for the future of the game. It seems likely that Viz has shelved the property, if not outright abandoned it.

The Friendsims are contrary in this regard. Our understanding is that WP Studios are handling the Friendsims and possibly Hiveswap itself still, but since the team has been gutted we have basically no idea who’s in charge or what’s planned for the future. The Friendsims being handled so fluidly and regularly gives the appearance of preparing for something later, which the more eager would tell you is the release of Hiveswap: Act Two. The rest of us are too tired of being disappointed to even contemplate that idea.

At any rate, all of that is speculation and therefore worthless. Today’s Friendsim is more valuable to discuss because it features a couple of characters that have proven to be somewhat popular in the fandom. One of them is a walking anime stereotype which people like for obvious reasons, and the other has a uniquely complicated history in Hiveswap’s development.

Some years ago, Hiveswap had a drastically different appearance from what Act One eventually came to be. For example, information given to us by WP Studios showed images of a 3D game instead of the 2D game we now have. Some characters were also markedly different: while the characters who directly appear in the game were largely unchanged, some of the planned side characters underwent drastic changes by release. One such example is the infamous Beekeeper.

Out of all of the character designs from before the game was properly released, the Beekeeper was probably the most talked about. The name was fan-given, and was an obvious choice from her design. The reason she existed at all was that developers were allowed to work with models of their own fan characters while the game was being made. The reason any of this matters is because the character’s representative symbol was revealed to us directly through porn of her drawn by the author.

Naturally, this drew a lot of attention from the community, much of which was almost certainly uncomfortable. Bear in mind that all of this happened over three years ago now back in March of 2015, so many of the details are fuzzy. This has been exacerbated by an astonishing loss of the pertinent information related to this event (to be perfectly clear, this is NOT to suggest any systematic ill-intent on the part of WP Studios or Viz; I am only describing that the details are now much more difficult to find than they were originally).

Understandably the community’s response was pronounced, although I would be hard pressed to say that it was negative. Indeed, the top rated comment on the original thread discussing this (from which the image in question has been deleted) treated this as an almost expected development. It was jokingly considered part of the natural progression of the internet, and I feel that the reception the Beekeeper got in comparison to the other side characters at the time says something about all of this as well.

Personally, all of this is making me wax nostalgic for the fandom as it was back then, or at least as my largely uninvolved and forgetful brain makes me think it was. There has been an undeniable decrease in hype as the years go by and we’re continuously disappointed by the lack of news or substantial content. As mentioned in a previous entry, the Friendsims are nice but not adequate replacement for what we had before, or even what we were led to believe would be the future of the property.

We have truly entered a harsh cultural doldrum, and now the question is if the fandom as a whole will survive to see the end of it or if it will last perpetually; everyday it feels as if general activity decreases. Yet, a substantial lick of evidence in favor of survival is that the overall user count of the subreddit and the Discord only ever rise; once we start to see a net loss in members then it will be the time to truly panic.

Nothing more for today.

---

18^th of August 2018

There was a special occasion today, which was important more on a personal basis than for the community at large. WoC and I live close enough to each other that we decided to meet up and grab some food. We had been planning to do so as early as last year, at which point we were trying to turn it into an informal moderator meet up between myself, WoC, Sea Hitler, Ngame, and Wheals.

This didn’t pan out due to poor planning and ill timing, but the idea lurked in our minds afterwards. Finally, WoC and I had enough of the endless putting off and decided to get it done already. A picture we took of the occasion was appropriately posted in #hangout, where one user commented that WoC looked like “a crackhead” and another thought we both looked high. I guess this is the price we pay for daring to show our faces on an internet message board full of uncaring and cynical bastards.

Which wasn’t that high of a price, all things considered. The meetup was highly enjoyable, and it was exciting to finally meat I mean meet another HSD regular for the first time. I have some faint hope that a more proper mod meetup might happen in the future. We were discussing food the other night and it was mutually agreed upon by all parties--even in jest--that we would gladly get together for a BBQ. There’s nothing quite like a good steak or hamburgers to entice people. Yet, in reality this will almost certainly never happen; I would be immensely surprised if more than three or four people from the HSD were ever to be found in the same location on purpose.

More related to mspa-lit as a whole, I want to comment on the steady emergence of the term “boomer”. On a surface level this word relates directly to Baby Boomers, the generation of people born in the USA directly after World War II up until 1965. To briefly establish the terminology, “Generation X” refers to those who came just after baby boomers, then Millenials (less popularly referred to as Generation Y, as I found out in conversation today) and then the youngest cohort people have cared to identify is simply known as Generation Z right now.

It’s not far-fetched to say that the majority of people you’ll find using the internet are fairly young, with most people being millenials or gen Z, but with some gen X individuals hanging around. Everyone on the HSD is almost guaranteed to be a millenial--the oldest person that comes to mind is Tensei, who would both be categorized and self-identifies as such. Phantos is the only person I can think of who was older, and he probably also fits into that category.

As one examines the progression of the millenial generation, there’s a noticeable, increasing trend of people who consciously disparage baby boomers for their role in the world and how they’ve treated it. The common consensus is that baby boomers have solidly created a worse world for their children and grandchildren. This sentiment is even more apparent in generation Z individuals, although the exact nature of their disposition is obviously somewhat different (less pointed and more flippant in my experience, for whatever that’s worth).

Back to the main point, the term “boomer” has been popping up more frequently as of late. The most obvious meaning to anyone with even a basic grasp of US history would be to assume it refers to baby boomers and their stereotypical manners. While this is somewhat the case, the truth is more bizarre: Tensei described the origin of the term today, relating that it came from cryptocurrency circles.

Near the end of last year and into the beginning of this one, cryptocurrencies--most commonly referring to Bitcoin (BTC), but also altcoins like Litecoin in some cases--skyrocketed to prices that were nothing short of outrageous. For those who might be unfamiliar, BTC is a virtual currency (don’t worry about the in-depth details of this, it’s not important for this exploration of the topic. If you’re interested in learning more, this article from the NY Times is a good starting point).

At its height, the exchange rate was just short of an incomprehensible $20,000 for one BTC, which launched a frenzy of people trying to cash in on the idea. In what can only be described as a modern day gold rush, the price of computer parts, especially GPUs, went through the roof as they were bought en masse to try and start large farms for mining cryptocoins.

While the price was so massively inflated, news started to increase reporting on BTC and other cryptocurrencies enough that older people wanted to get into it, usually under ill-advised circumstances. Putnam describes that his own grandmother attempted to get in on the craze, but was so horribly under-informed that she had no idea what she was doing or what was optimal (he laboriously dissuaded her from doing this, if memory serves). While I may be missing some details, it is under these conditions that the word “boomer” came into popular usage on the internet; it now generally refers to someone who is horribly out of touch trying to cash in on something that’s new and unfamiliar to them.

This term has predictably transformed some in its usage; on 4chan (and to some extent here), it’s starting to refer simply to people who exhibit tendencies that are stereotypically associated with actual baby boomers. Tensei remarks: “its about older millennials that are starting to be out of touch and doing stereotypically boomer things / like owning a house and mowing a lawn”. Toast further explains: “boomer is a mindset”, which a person can fall into regardless of age.

The whole conversation was kind of a disjointed mess, but it did help to underscore a fundamental truth that I haven’t really bothered to consider before: we’re all getting older. Even just two years ago when I joined the server, I feel as if the core demographic was different. Now, most of the regulars I can point to are probably not millenials, but fall into generation Z. The only channel where this wouldn’t explicitly be true is mspa-lit, and even that’s changing with the arrival of people like tmtmtl and Tera, among a litany of others.

I mentioned very recently this cycle where new users obtain self-consciousness, and realize their previous behaviors were embarrassing or undesirable. The course of today’s discussion has made me reflect on my own progression through the internet, and while the landscape is radically different from what it was ten or fifteen years ago people are still experiencing the same patterns of development.

I wonder if this is something that we’ll go through in perpetuity, and if so, how will it affect the general consciousness of the public? Will it lead to any behavioral shifts as people more commonly have their entire life’s proceedings on display? Would such a shift be for better or worse? More immediately important for someone like me, but how will the style and manner of a typical online community change as the years go by? It’s a lot to consider, especially in light of how far we’ve come already.

Nothing more for today.

-

20^th of August 2018

Makin’s absence continues. He pops in often enough so that it’s not utterly alarming, and he’s successfully delegating tasks to us so that things continue to get done. However, it stands that he’s gone a majority of the time for most of the last week or so. As is appropriate for his mysterious ways he’s avoided elaborating on the reason for the disappearance. I assume it’s a school function or a business trip of some kind, but far be it from me to gremlin him on the issue.

In truth, there’s a tiny tickle at the back of my mind that worries about him¹¹⁰. I’ve felt myself being more curt and openly dismissive of him in the last month or so, having grown used to his particular flavor of behavior and recognizing certain patterns. I’ve also noticed a greater degree of dogpiling happening whenever he messes up; while he certainly puts on a tough enough act, I’m sure it would be sufficiently dispiriting to anyone after enough time.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but my intentions are expressly not to make him feel bad about things in general--that’s the sort punishment an incompetent grade school teacher tries to hand out to children, and I respect him way too much for that. Getting him to admit fault is near impossible but he’s not a categorically evil person. I feel like people get wrapped up in their vendettas against him too much when really he’s just trying to have a good time in the only way he knows how.

This isn’t to say that he’s free of guilt: often he does in fact fuck things up and he should be held accountable, but people get way too obsessed with administering some kind of justice (usually ending up being twisted into something that is itself injust). Often enough it just becomes an enormous mess, and opens up the way for Makin to gain more amusement amidst the den of chaos.

I forget what my point with all of this is. Goodness knows I’ve retread the topic enough times to write an entire book (ha ha). I guess I’m just getting kind of tired, or bored even--I’ve heard a number of others echo the sentiment even. His chicanery used to be infuriating or sometimes successfully amusing, but it’s a very old trick at this point. I’m also furthered in my disillusionment of this idea by the presence of people who genuinely fit into the description of his “cult of personality”.

I used to handwave such ideas off, but after a while of participating in these discussions it’s become clear that such a thing does in fact exist. We were talking about this very thing a couple nights ago when hstanon was visiting. Both Toast and hst are both very prominent examples of people that fit this idea.

It’s worth mentioning that “cult of personality” is a real term that has a specific meaning: it refers to when a political regime or even a single politician uses propaganda and manipulative techniques to get the people to support and revere them as heroic or valiant figures. Some of those ideas apply here, but obviously there are differences to account for. I’m not sure who first used the term “cult of personality” to refer to Makin’s entourage, but a more accurate term would be star-struck.

Both Toast and hst, among others, have described Makin as being “fascinating and charismatic”, which is textbook for star-struck behavior. Their appreciation for him is--while not quite innocent--certainly not founded in maliciousness. It’s not really a matter of “Makin can do no wrong”; I would absolutely trust Toast to speak his conscience if he feels Makin has gone too far in something, we simply disagree on where that line of “too far” is.

For this reason, the cult of personality label has always struck me as facetious when applied to our circle. Those who are openly displeased with Makin’s behavior tend to use a more flagrantly vicious word anyway: they’re fond of calling people like Toast and hst outright sycophants. While I can grow very frustrated with their defense of Makin’s nonsense, the mere thought of genuinely insulting them in this way makes my blood boil.

Speaking personally, I feel that a not-insignificant contribution to my worry is that I’ve been going a little too hard lately. Not in an objective sense, probably; I would be surprised if anything I do or say genuinely hurts Makin’s feelings, and indeed most other people. However, my trenchant attitude of late is unconventional for me, and that’s what matters really matters. I can’t be quite as hard on people, I like to tease out their potential in more supportive ways if at all. That might be less effective, but so be it--all I can do is try to strike the most efficient balance of positivity with motivation.

Continuing with the idea of fairness, most of what Makin does is only negative depending on perspective, rather than being universally condemnable¹¹¹. The most recent example would be a suggestions thread that he opened up on the subreddit a few days ago. He’s openly asked people what they think should be done to improve the subreddit; people with a more positive perspective will perceive this as him actually caring for the community; cynics will interpret this as trying to curry favor and maintain a grip on this piece of the fandom.

In a vacuum, it would be silly to assume the worst of this kind of action. Naturally we don’t live in a vacuum and there is an extensive history of situations where Makin has acted less than favorably. However, the point I’m trying to make is that people will try to extrapolate unfairly from those experiences; sometimes it seems as if people are trying to turn Makin’s negativity into some sort of a priori thing where it doesn’t deserve to be.

To be absolutely clear (even though I’m sure I’ve said it enough times now), he does in fact deserve to be called out for the things he does wrong. There is no shortage of people willing to do this, including myself. However, if the point of justice is to be respected, then it is inappropriate to automatically paint his actions as malicious in every possible situation. The fact that I feel the need to reiterate this so often should probably illustrate that there’s a problem with how people talk to each other here--too often, we end up at each other’s throats over simple miscommunications or grudges.

Nothing more for today.

---

21st of August 2018

Revisiting the topic of the subreddit thread for improvement, it’s actually been the better part of a week since Makin’s post went up. His prolonged absence makes it difficult to carry out anything substantial. After some comments suggesting that we get rid of extremely low-effort posts, Makin asked us to create a poll to assess how the subreddit as a whole feels about that idea. Normally he would do it himself without hesitation, but I guess his business consumes too much of his time.

The low-effort posts have been something of a problem for a long time now; I described snowclones some time ago, commonly understood in our community as “when one shitpost gets a lot of attention, which leads to others trying to make the same shitpost with slight variations ad nauseum”. Notable examples of this behavior include “X is a valid character name” posts, which utterly dominated the subreddit for a good couple of weeks at least a while back, or any manner of slight visual/textual tweaks that catch for unknown reasons.

Arguably worse than snowclones are utter low-effort posts. Forgetting shitposts even, low-effort trashposts are distinguished by the fact that they are completely unenjoyable and thus have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Examples of this include people posting completely random and pointless pictures where they happen to see a meme number, which is only slightly above a blank photo in entertainment value. Such posts have been the focus of complaints for a while.

It seems the people generally agree that snowclones and especially low-effort posts are bad, but some people commented with dissenting remarks, saying that they actually liked them (Shadok even went so far as to call them the heart of the subreddit). This seems suspect to me, but such were among the only comments to appear on the thread. The difficulty is, as always, trying to figure out how to make the greatest number of people happy with these conflicting viewpoints.

The subreddit has actually had a tool for a while that allows one to avoid seeing shitposts. In light of this, the complaints about excessive shitposting make less sense to me; it’s very likely that they aren’t aware of this option, but I’m sure there are plenty who would be upset even with that knowledge. We might try to turn shitpost-filtering on by default and let people opt-in to see them, but that presents its own difficulties.

The most straightforward way of dealing with shitposts would be to handle them manually, but sometimes the shitpost volume is so high that it becomes exhausting, or borderline impossible on occasion. The mod team as a whole is going to have to talk about this for a bit to get a halfway decent plan going, otherwise we’re going to be returning to this issue the next time a joke gets repeated slightly too much or every time we see a random “413” post. I can already feel the migraine developing.

Unrelated, but the subject of the Homestuck and Hiveswap Amino (HHA) chat came up today. It’s been discussed in hushed whispers before, but today we took proper stock of them for the first time. Amino is a relatively new social media platform (recently as in started in January of 2014, anyway) that has been gradually coming into prominence lately. It functions like Reddit in that there are partitioned communities dedicated to a specific subject each. The difference is that, while Reddit communities are usually highly structured, once you’re inside an Amino community there’s no real organization to speak of, which is closer to Tumblr in style.

If this sounds like a weird or even bad idea to you, then you’re not alone. Amino has swiftly garnered a reputation for being used by children. When I say things like that, I’m typically referring to young teenagers or even 11 and 12 year olds, but in this case I mean actual children. People seeming as young as six years old use Amino on a regular basis, and this comes with all of the problems that any reasonable person would expect by grouping tens of thousands of little kids in a largely unstructured environment.

That isn’t an exaggeration: the HHA group as of this writing has just over 50,000 members. The figure is mind boggling to consider, and when we discovered this today we were immediately filled with repulsion. When the mere idea of contacting them for fun was brought up by some schmuck, even Makin could not resist weighing in: “AMINO IS GREAT BECAUSE IT SELF CONTAINS / do not bring them here”. For once, I don’t think even a single person disagreed with him.

The discussion that actually prompted Amino’s mention involves a serious bit of misinformation that sprung up there earlier today: a post on the website seemed to be confusing the age-old altercation between WP Studios and The Odd Gentleman, which I’ve described in the entry from the 12th of July 2017. The post in question seemed to be suggesting that Viz Media had effectively stolen $700,000 from Hussie that was meant to be used for making Hiveswap. Or at least, that’s what we think the post says; it’s not actually too clear what it’s trying to say sometimes.

Upon further reflection, the existence of the HHA is actually pretty fascinating when examined with a perspective that also includes the history of the subreddit and Tumblr Homestuck communities. The subreddit and Tumblr portions of the Homestuck fandom have almost always been aware of each other, and there is an extensive (if sometimes subtle) culture that has arisen amidst conflicts or interactions between the two. A similar phenomenon was visible with the 4chan community, although--with a few historied exceptions--it was always a bit more detached due to the forced anonymity.

Returning to the present, the HHA is interesting because it’s developed in absence of that dynamic. There is no established history between the HHA and basically any other extant Homestuck group; it’s a little like stumbling on an undiscovered civilization that’s risen in complete isolation. Obviously the focus of the Amino is in line with ours for the most part, but their social mores and customs are almost completely untouched by any other Homestuck community. This effect is even more pronounced due to the fact that these are primarily very young children who have probably had little contact with internet communities in general.

The size of it is completely daunting as well. I’m sure 50,000 users is a paltry number compared to the height of the fandom, but in the latter stages of the fandom’s decline it’s nothing to sneeze at. The question now is how long it’ll last: will the HHA stick it out over the years and become the newest, established piece of the fandom? Or are its members in a phase, just waiting to grow out of it and forget about all of this in a year or two? Given their age my money would be on the latter outcome, but we won’t know for sure until it happens.

Finally, this is unrelated to Homestuck itself but relevant to our interests as a community: Stefán Karl Stefánsson, the Icelandic actor who is arguably most famous for his portrayal of the villain Robbie Rotten on the kid’s show Lazy Town died today. The character and show were somewhat known to the internet but largely not notable up until a couple of years ago. There is one episode of the show from 2014, featuring a song called We Are Number One, that ascended into meme legend by being remixed on Youtube.

The earliest remix to gain popularity was by SilvaGunner--himself an important figure--appearing in mid September 2016. In October of the same year, Stefan revealed that he had developed cancer. I can’t recall if he set it up himself or if it was organized independently, but a fundraiser was started so that he could afford surgery to remove the tumor. In response to this, a glut of new memes and remixes were created that launched him into immense popularity.

Starting in November 2016, the We Are Number One song absolutely exploded. Over the course of the next year it became known on a ridiculous scale: a meme has reached maximal saturation when it can be detected in even the most surface levels of the internet, like Facebook and Twitter. We Are Number One didn’t just enter those places, it smashed through the wall to get there. There was hardly a person around that didn’t know about the song, to the point that even magazine articles were mentioning it.

Stefan himself became renowned through it, with him consciously and purposefully accepting praise from internet communities for his role and thanking them for their help in his fight against cancer. This only endeared him further; eventually in 2017 he announced he was in remission, which was quite literally celebrated by everyone who cared even remotely for the fellow.

Unfortunately, as it is wont to do, the cancer returned earlier this year. Finally, Stefan passed away today at the age of 43. As his improvement was celebrated, so to was his death mourned. It’s been some time so it wasn’t quite as intense, but no one has quite forgotten about Stefan. The news broke and spread in record time to basically every community I care to think of, the HSD being no exception.

This calls to mind the similarly tragic death of Billy Herrington earlier this year. Both Makin and Tmtm explicitly called this to mind, lamenting that we’ve lost two icons in one year. I remarked that the news of their passing was treated about as well as could possibly be hoped under the circumstances:

the death of billy herrington was kind of like how memes should be / short lived but intense and filled with positive energy / nobody dragged on about the death of aniki / i can only hope that stefan receives the same treatment that billy did / memes stagnate and become rotten when they're forced for too long / let them die gracefully and with love

The man will be remembered for a long time: he managed to entertain and make a lot of people happy, and was beloved by many people for it. We can only hope that he was happy too.

Rest in peace Stefan Karl Stefansson. Nothing more for today.

---

22nd of August 2018

Makin has been around a bit more today, but still sporadic. I’ve taken it upon myself to carry through with the new rule on the subreddit, and I notice that I feel more comfortable making changes without his constant oversight. I’m having a fun time actually engaging with people a little bit and commenting on posts instead of quickly dredging through the subreddit like I usually do.

I’m not sure what’s different, or why I’m enjoying this more than before. As far as I can tell the subreddit hasn’t increased in quality (if anything it’s worse, as the new rule would indicate). It does appear to be somewhat faster this last week, although that may be because I’m able to check on it less often due to classes resuming. There might simply be more time for posts to accumulate while I’m away, so it gives the impression of greater activity. I’m pretty sure someone keeps statistics for this, I’ll have to find out soon.

The feeling of quickness, unfortunately, does not extend to the HSD: it has been a criminally slow day. Just like myself, school is starting back up this week for many people. On the one hand it’s afforded me the chance to get lots of things done, but coming back after a few hours to see only about half a dozen things posted is weirdly dispiriting.

Later in the night things picked up a bit thankfully: out of nowhere Tera mentioned a story from back when Anervaria was starting out as the art-pseudo. This was nearly two years ago, before I had arrived at the HSD. Apparently Aner was being harassed in voicechat by members of a fanventure called Artstuck (which predictably is about the then-regulars of #art).

Makin personally told them to cut it out or he would “be angerey” about it. They didn’t stop, although they were posting something inappropriate (I’ve received conflicting reports on exactly what), so WoC eventually chased them out of the channel by banning a few of the malefactors. Hearing this story put so bluntly was a frankly surreal experience: I’m reminded of how wildly different the cultural landscape of the HSD is now from how it was back when I joined.

It’s not unlike the general path of the internet as a whole, when I think about it: the wild west of our past is long over, and things are now pretty well-settled for the most part. There are few occasions where the place may be described as “turbulent” anymore, and there are major established channels to visit while others typically run dry except for a few scattered regulars. Overall, there isn’t a lot of horizontal or vertical mobility; while it seems we’re in a halcyon period, there is also the threat of stagnation if this continues for too long. I can already feel it creeping at the edges of the community just a little bit.

A brief note on a small but notable idiosyncrasy. For some reason three of our users all have the same prefix to their name: Anervaria, Marquis (formerly known as Tainted Angel), and Erieolae are all tagged with “Bitch Pussy Master”, for reasons that are utterly unknown to me. I initially assumed that it was only Marquis who had this title, and indeed many in mspa-lit had taken to calling her “BPM” for short. However, all three of them had the title today during the story above. When I asked, Aner only said: “We’re like a Pokemon legendary trio”. Utterly baffling.

Nothing more for today.

---

24^th of August 2018

I spent most of yesterday and some of today finishing up on the new subreddit rule. I feel like it’s important to interface with users and help them understand to the greatest degree possible what’s going on; to this end I created a discussion post, answered everyone’s questions, and so on. All in the name of making sure the transition into the new rule would go smoothly and that no one would be too upset.

As planned the new rule did go into effect today, but after checking around on the community guidelines I noticed that there was a rule in place already that stipulated all of these things we wanted to do in the first place. It was at least an amusing realization, and we can always use a little reminder from time to time. I’ve noticed a marginal uptick in the quality of subreddit for my trouble anyway.

That having been said, a post on the subreddit this morning was an edit of a highly NSFW image of a Homestuck character. It was only marginally changed so that it revolves around Subway imagery, and if it had been even slightly more NSFW then we would have had to delete it. With this one in particular there was no real harm done, but we proactively warded against the no doubt dozens of snowclones people were making of slightly edited porn. This reminds me of an intractable problem: the users will always do their best to push the line or find ways around it. It’s only a matter of time until this becomes a problem again.

More related to the HSD itself, it feels as if the level of activity has been rising somewhat over the last few days. Unfortunately I’ve been less able to participate, and have accordingly been intensely bored. In this state of mind I started getting interested in the idea of quantifying the “regularity” of a user, or how often they speak as a measure against the rest of the community.

When I had the chance, I posited the question: “what percentage of the conversation at minimum does someone need to take up in order to be considered a regular?” I guessed that given a set period of time, such as one week, 1% of messages is the threshold where people start to be considered a regular on even an unconscious level. Makin agreed with this estimate, and then Tensei appropriately brought up the problem that it’s not about quantity, but rather about quality of engagement.

I then realized that it was probably a terrible idea to bring up an idea like that, especially after I started to notice people trying to quantify their own involvement. While the idea of a regularity leaderboard as a function of “number of messages user has sent divided by total messages in the channel” is entertaining in theory, I imagine that it would quickly lead to annoying behavior in order to maximize peoples involvement. I don’t think I’ll bring up such ideas in the future.

A rare bit of news: today we had an update with the SBAHJ Book 2 Kickstarter. A proof of concept book is out, and so it may be reasonably assumed that our protracted wait is nearly over. The book itself looks exactly like the glorious piece of shit that it should, and I’ve noticed a few people beginning to express regret at not having funded the Kickstarter.

People such as Makin are extremely quick to shit on Kickstarter projects as being “complete scams”, which is certainly true in most situations. However, his prognosis on this particular project was almost assuredly wrong¹¹² (I only say almost because the physical product is not in my hands yet, although I’m increasingly having faith that it will be). I thus retain the right to laugh at him and all the other non-believers when they’re missing out on this marvelous abortion of human ingenuity.

Nothing more for today.

---

25^th of August 2018

There was an extended conversation with User5 in mspa-lit today. He was actually in here a few nights ago talking about his own personal server, mentioning that he has a channel/other server dedicated to messing with people. About two months ago, WoC mentioned to me that he’s already on that server himself. Called “The Stone Cube” (at least back then, the name may be different now), he has described the members there as being “ferociously intelligent but they hide it really well”. I’m not quite sure I agree from the screenshots he sent me.

That having been said, User5’s speaking style isn’t quite as bad as it seems at first glance. It is stylistically discombobulating and very bizarre to read, but once you get past the general confusion of the wording itself the meaning of what he’s saying is rather easy to discern. The discussion today revolved around this dubious article Makin had linked (subject matter intentionally left vague to avoid misrepresentation).

User5 hopped into the ensuing conversation with his own perspective on it. And while it was naturally weird to read, but his opinion was solidly identifiable and I don’t think anyone had problems conversing with him. The topic switched around some and we started talking about the nature of Homestuck’s narrative and mechanics; User5 led a particularly animated brainstorming session where the main characters of a fanfic would not be inexperienced teenagers who are friends with each other, but competent and fully grown, dangerous men who hate each other’s guts.

As one might imagine the conversation itself was interesting, but more fascinating to me was how a few of the people engaged with him on the topic. Toast and Tmtml were both especially prominent in this regard: Tmtmtl is prone to being flippant and disengaged from the actual topic at hand, but she seemed absolutely entertained by the proceedings (User5 repeatedly mentioning that Tmtm was good at putting the things User5 wanted to say into words, the two seem to share interests or at least a common sense of humor).

All of this is also true of Toast, but it went beyond simply participating in the subject matter to emulating User5’s very manner of speaking: Toast usually speaks with full words, but shortly after User5 showed up and especially during the course of this topic Toast began using initialisms or contracting words in a similar manner: “bigot u like cant prove wrong bc everything is in his head” is an example sentence from Toast during this conversation. He continues to speak with straightforward ideas but the text itself has been warped.

I’m fascinated at how people respond to figures that they perceive as charismatic: first Makin’s behavior and now User5’s have both proven to be rather influential with a few specific people. I wonder if the full extent of this impressionability is limited to a specific subset of people or if anyone could be influenced by a sufficiently charismatic individual--I imagine the latter is more true, especially if the person in question shares similar traits to those being affected (such as sense of humor or philosophical outlook).

This aside, later in the day Makin, Tensei, and WoC were all viewing a Dota 2 tournament stream and liveblogging with each other about it. There was literally nothing special about this occurrence, I just felt like writing it down because they seemed to be having an especially nice time shooting the shit together. In fact, I mentioned in the channel that I was glad they were talking and Makin asked me if I was drunk. The bluntness of it made me laugh; I’m sure he finds it weird that I would comment on people enjoying their time together--or indeed, maybe he finds it strange that I care at all.

A minor last note for today: some time ago there was an infamous altgen user named Shirk, who at one point tried to “start a revolution” over some spammers being altgen-banned. Deus commented: “It got so bad shitler wound up permabanning shirk and his lieutenant”. Predictably they were quite irate over being banned, and have since been trying to seek revenge in variously impotent ways.

Today, the apparent scheme was in the Minecraft server, which has been consistently inactive for weeks now. Deus logged in or was informed by one of the Minecraft server mods that someone had left signs up at the spawn area that simply said “Deus is gay” repeatedly. Far from being disturbing or even mildly annoying, it was actually somewhat amusing. Deus further adds: “Hilariously the account that's dropping those signs at spawn is called "DeusIsGay"”, and points out that it’s not unlikely that someone spent money in order to pull this off, which is one of the pettiest and most extensive revenge plots we’ve ever seen, weak though it is.

Nothing more for today.

---

27^th of August 2018

Continuing with the trend of increasing prominence, User5 paid for his own channel on the Patreon, making #bastards-and-monsters. It’s an ad hoc art channel, with people drawing--unsurprisingly--“bastards or monsters”, which are defined on an arbitrary and often random basis (the most important rule seems to be that they must be “bad ass”). Users can “fight each other” with their art, which consists of taking someone else’s drawing and making an addition or editing it, often with violent themes. This is reminiscent of old 4chan drawthreads, where the OP would start with a very simple image with one element in it, and then the participants would edit it or respond in whatever way they deemed suitable.

Not much came out of this at first; it was certainly amusing to witness, and there’s about as much User5 gold as one could reasonably expect there, such as:

And so on. I stopped paying attention there as time went on, although it seemed to retain plenty of activity as the hours went by.

The exact moment that things changed was abrupt, but not immediately obvious. I was cleaning up after a minor raid in #general and had tabbed into mspa-lit to see what was going on. It was plodding along normally enough, and then all of a sudden the chat exploded: nine or ten different people all at once started exclaiming at something, and I couldn’t tell at all what they were talking about. Then I looked at the server icon, and it had changed to the cover from Halo 2. Suitably, the server name had also changed: “halo sucks! ur banned from halo!” The subsequent pandemonium was second only to the Rapture in intensity.

Away from the absolute din, it was revealed to me what exactly had happened: User5 had actually paid enough on the Patreon to also change the server icon and name for 24 hours, so naturally this was what he chose. When people started to figure it out, there was a bit of a mix in reception: most people like Nat, Reti, Cty, LRS, and a host of others found the change hilarious, with a few even resolving to download some strange games per User5's request to challenge him for glory.

Others were not so pleased. Ifnar in particular was a huge voice of dissent, making no bones about his irritation in mod chat: “... I've always spoken out against the patreon influencing this server, have I not.” I admit that this idea rankles me somewhat as well, but most users seemed to be taking it well enough: an argument against this sort of policy was that it would alienate most people who are using this place as a Homestuck server exclusively, but there have been remarkably few departures as of an hour since the icon switch. This may change throughout the night, but it seems to hardly be working against us.

Indeed, the opposite seems to be true speaking purely from an activity-perspective. Ifnar steadfastly refused to govern #general due to his disagreements with this, so Sea Hitler volunteered instead (as he should have been doing anyway). Shitler then commented later: “general is active again thank god for user5”. After peeking in there myself, it doesn’t seem as if the increase of participation is going to be long-lived, but it is a welcome breath of fresh air after the weeks and months of slowness.

As it is, Ifnar was not the only one who was upset by the change. Ceru was very blunt in his assessment: “why the fuck are we whoring out the server on patreon”, although it was pointed out that his dissent is a tad late. Makin retorted: “this goal literally has existed since the patreon was created”, and then brought up Ceru’s patreon for funding Aradiabot to try and illustrate hypocrisy.

The reverse criticism did not stick: Ceru rightfully defended his Patreon, stating simply that running Aradiabot actually costs money. “just wait,” Makin said in reply, “I have things planned / the next official announcement, shit will happen”. After clarifying that he meant the next update from Hussie on homestuck.com, there wasn’t much to be said; I can’t speak for anyone else, but from my position the chance that any such thing will ever be seen again is highly unlikely. Nevertheless, my curiosity has been piqued; who knows what insanity Makin must have in store for such an occasion?

Returning to the main topic: hilariously, User5 seems to have opened his own recursive Patreon in order to fund his channel. Aside from putting to rest the User5-kill40000 mystery for any who might still have doubted they were the same person, it is also flagrantly against the rules--anyone who’s been around for more than a month would probably be aware of Makin’s “no personal profit” decree. He can’t exactly make the Patreon go down now that it’s up, although I didn’t see any links to it from User5 himself--Carlarc is the one who alerted most of us to its existence. Regardless, it seems Makin tacitly approves this move.

I did take it upon myself to check the user count as time went by. The icon and name change went into effect with approximately 11,455 people on the server, and at the time of writing (approximately 12 hours give or take a couple) we stand at 11,425. The user counts have fluctuated strangely over the last couple of weeks so it’s hard to tell if this loss should be alarming relative to our pace of growth.

However, a more prudent point is that literally over 90% of the accounts that have left never spoke once in this server, regardless of when they joined (one such account had joined only a few days after the server’s creation, in March of 2016). Of those accounts that did say anything, none of them had spoken in several months. When the first such user left after the icon change, Makin used the lack of contribution to justify the loss. This doesn’t seem completely unreasonable to me, but it also smacks of disdain that others will find contemptible, I’m sure.

The rest of the day passed without much to comment on--the HSD, aside from brief flurries when people would come on and discover the icon change for the first time, remained quiet. I spent most of the time in channels and servers that I was less familiar with, trying to get a better idea of what they’re like.

I didn’t find too much that caught my attention. #homestuck seems to have an entrenched group, but I couldn’t see very much personal interaction or familiarity between the people there for instance. The lack of a solid dynamic between people necessarily inhibits the formation of a proper community, and after enough time with no external input, this ushers in death.

Not to beat on a long dead horse, but this is what bothers me about how Makin treats mspa-lit. If a community is to survive without new content coming in, it must look to the relationships between the people in it. He strives to keep things from becoming too interpersonal, and we’ve had conversations where many of us are chided for considering others our friends too easily.

Yet, in the case of mspa-lit, what else could we call it? Homestuck has been effectively dead for two years. Makin’s stated policy for this group--reducing interpersonal interaction wherever possible--is inherently in conflict with the fact that our being friends with each other is the main reason we stick around. All of us originally came here to talk about Homestuck, and now that it’s gone we keep talking to each other anyway. Why else would we do that except that we enjoy each others’ company, and would go so far as to name each other “friend”?

Attempts to demonstrate otherwise are misguided at best and delusional at worst. I don’t mean all of this as some attempt to condemn Makin, mind; I’ve mentioned before that I suspect he’s a huge softie underneath the ludicrously callous exterior. Despite his posturing, I’m sure he would at least be somewhat upset if this group ceased to exist.

The idea that this should not be our primary mode of social interaction comes up often enough; I imagine he has plenty in real life to keep him occupied should something happen to this group, as do most of us. Yet, why waste a perfectly good thing? Internet communities where most of the people actually enjoy being together may not exactly be rare, but Makin is not foolish enough to squander one--especially not when he can exert so much influence in it¹¹³.

It was with this particular brand of thought that I proceeded through the rest of the evening. Things picked up later in the night as they are wont to do: there was a little alcohol discourse here and there on Putnam’s part, as well as other tense topics that seemed to spring up unexpectedly like the oft-discussed prospect of immortality (particularly contentious on the part of SolarSail). Yet, even when the conversation seemed to get heated, I couldn’t help but be relaxed: rather than worrying over potential destabilization of the group, I perceived it as long-time companions comfortably ribbing each other over well-understood idiosyncrasies or obsessions.

Of course it wasn’t all sunshine and daisies; emotions run high when more sensitive topics are brought up. Yet, beneath it all was a strange sense of understanding and acceptance for the things we discuss. With only one or two exceptions such as Nat, no one was intentionally trying to fuck things up for everyone else. Everyone present, old and new, was engaging in good faith, and that alone made for a satisfying evening.

This sort of conversation is what I initially started writing this document for: the potential is limitless, and there is a mutual respect that permeates everything. For the kind of community that we are, this is our lightning in a bottle--it is almost impossible to recreate on purpose, but when it happens it is nothing short of enthralling. Perhaps I’m drastically overthinking the matter, but I can’t help but think that my interest in the place has been substantially reinvigorated. I actively look forward to tomorrow for the first time in a long while.

Nothing more for today.

---

28^th of August 2018

After some observations over the last couple of days, I’m pleased to say that Nat’s behavior has improved significantly. She still berates people but it lacks the ferocity that was present recently. In comparison, the insults she delivers now are vaguely cute; it’s the difference between a full grown tiger randomly mauling someone to death and a kitten swiping at a person’s hand when it gets too close. I’m just glad that her mood is so much improved, she seemed absolutely miserable for a while there.

Today was rather interesting: at the beginning of it all, User5 further cemented his participation in mspa-lit, surprising some people who weren’t already aware of his propensity for actually making sense underneath the word soup. It’s increasingly clear that his enthusiasm for badassery is simply a veneer hiding someone with actually deep and complex opinions about things. He’s actually pretty interesting to talk to, between his outlandish claims (like “getting rich off bitcoin” for one) and the more down to earth comments, such as what we had today.

User5 spurred a rather engaging discussion about our motivations in life; even Makin was participating in good faith at first, mentioning that he if he could do things over he would probably go into aerospace engineering or something that he’d be “helping humanity in any cool rational ways”. Predictably it devolved into mocking each other for our career paths, as it usually does. This is a very common topic: Makin will endlessly taunt me for my choice of study while consistently getting details wrong, sometimes on purpose I suspect. I’ve only recently started to return fire when he does this.

On this note, I feel it’s necessary to point out a fine nuance to what he actually does in these conversations. At this point, I feel comfortable saying that it’s not an attempt to make anyone feel bad about what they do; I’ve witnessed this line of conversation enough times that it’s clear that he’s completely joking the entire time, recognizing and dismissing incorrect details in his “arguments” with little effort and other, similar behaviors.

However, something he probably does without realizing it is make these jokes over and over again until they are nothing short of annoying. Makin can indeed be funny, but he doesn’t seem to understand when he’s beating a dead horse. I left to do my work for something like half an hour, and when I came back he was still on the same topic and lashing out with the same tired quips. This isn’t unique to the discussion of our jobs, either--it’s an irritatingly common tactic of his.

He would be better off if he learned when it was time to retire his jokes; I seriously believe that it would cure about 85% of his social blunders. However, when I start mulling over this idea I have to remind myself that Makin joking around is less to make other people laugh and more so he can amuse himself. He finds it enjoyable to stir the pot and is perfectly content to blame others when they get upset about all of it. I guess the logical conclusion of this line of thought is that it’s an enormous waste of time trying to convince him to do otherwise. Indeed, trying to stop it will probably only make him do it more, and that frustrating reality is why people leave mspa-lit more than anything else.

Considering it further is pointless; I’ve rehashed that particular idea enough times as is. More pertinent and to his credit, Makin did open up another survey today, this time for the HSD instead of the subreddit. These are typically much faster and more entertaining than surveys on the subreddit (indeed, the HSD surveys are typically more entertaining than anything on the subreddit these days). With an everyone ping in #announcements, the HSD was briefly spurred into a higher level of activity.

As is customary, #survey was resurrected from the abyss to serve its masters once more. A quick perusal of the channel showed that the last time #survey was used is eleven months ago, near the end of September 2017 apparently. I could have sworn it was much more recent than that, but I digress. The channel was absolutely filled to the brim with all manner of shitters from altgen.

#survey has no ban role of its own, so we tied it to the mspa-lit and altgen channels such that anyone banned from one of those two channels will be unable to participate in the survey discussion. The effect on the conversation was swift and unmistakable, with Makin commenting: “channel quality improved instantly”. There was still the unmistakable altgen residue, though, with people trying to piss on basically every development. Little could be done about this.

I distinctly remember that the last time a survey was held, the results were rather disappointing: there was very little material to effectively lampoon, so Makin simply closed it and nothing more was said on the matter. “Anemic” this time was not, with Makin posting snippets and screenshots from the survey results directly into #announcements for prime roasting material.

He systematically went through each question and posted most or all of the responses that he felt were funny enough or that he could riff off of, and even provided a legitimate response a few times. Most of the comments appeared to be generically uninformed, unhelpful, or outright bad, but some made for good material. One suggestion was to put User5’s new channel above all the rest, which Makin did: similarly, he also followed another comment that said to rename altgen to #egg-hell. Naturally, both of these changes were reversed at the end of the survey.

There were even a few that warranted a proper comment: for example, someone wanted a channel for other stories by Hussie, but the unfortunate reality is that no real demand for such a channel exists (“look I really wish there was demand for this but there really isn't, it'd just be me posting over and over again about how good problem sleuth is”).

Ever present were comments about the exclusivity of mspa-lit, which were either entirely ignored or mocked into oblivion. At this point I think it’s worth mentioning that mspa-lit has been called #read-shills for so long that it has effectively taken root in the larger consciousness of this server; mspa-lit was never called that in the survey, it was exclusively referred to as shills or something similar. I think this is categorically a bad thing--what kind of fucking name is #read-shills? What does that even mean to a newcomer? There’s no mystery or attractive quality to the name, it’s actually mildly off-putting. Then again, that’s probably just how Makin prefers it. I would consider switching to that name in this document if it wasn’t so vile¹¹⁴.

Returning to the main topic, very interesting for me personally were associated stats from the survey. Makin asked questions and the questionnaire automatically created some nice graphs for us to look at. There were 321 total responses, for transparency’s sake (not the best sample size but not terrible either). For historical purposes, I’ve included the survey results in the Related Materials under Appendix D: Survey Results - August 2018.

One of the more exciting things he’s revealed is a plan to initiate a server-wide reread of Homestuck, to take place over the course of two months. This was something the subreddit already did previously, although I didn’t know of that until today. It would work on the basis of having so many pages to be read per day, and then everyone participating discusses the developments in the pages that day. I’m actually pretty interested in this idea, as it should reinvigorate interest for at least a little bit; I anticipate a large percentage of drop off as the effort proceeds though. We may start with a significant number of people, but by the end there will probably be only a dozen or so at most.

In totality, the survey was pretty successful. There are some people who lament the quality of the discussion channel (notably Hb, who simply commented: “#survey sucked”). A few like Marquis came on too late, verbally expressing regret that they had missed the entire occasion. For those of us who were present--and excepting those inevitable few who were genuinely annoyed by the experience--I would say that it was a grand time.

A more sobering note: one of the comments on the survey mentioned LLF’s absence from the server lately. There’s a peculiar habit of not realizing he’s there and him getting irritated at people not noticing he’s around, but a brief check shows that he hasn’t talked since the end of July. It’s a shame that he’s disappeared; the weirdness of his opinions was always a good way to get discussion going. Wherever he is or whatever he may be doing, I hope he’s alright.

Another thing I want to comment on: true to his policy, Makin reversed the server icon and name change 24 hours after it began, and we took the time to do a little bit of analysis. By his count, we lost no less than 40 people over the period of time that the change was in effect. However, the figures I reported in the entry from yesterday have held true: over 90% of all the departures were from accounts that have never spoken here, and the other 10% haven’t spoken in months.

In fairness, I think there were one or two accounts that had spoken as recently as this month. More disquieting to me personally was seeing an account that had just joined leaving less than a minute afterwards--that sort of consequence is what Ifnar was concerned about. However, it’s effectively impossible to tell if the server icon and name was responsible, as we’ll get accounts that do that all the time.

At the end of the day, the general consensus is that the loss was a little unfortunate but hardly impactful. Ifnar may still not be happy, but even he would be mistaken to point this out as a hugely detrimental activity. Everyone else was either positive or, more commonly, completely ambivalent as to the change. From my point of view it seemed to be a net positive: we lost a few mostly inactive accounts, but the people who use this place regularly had something to talk about for a while.

On the note of inactive accounts, one of the survey responses mentioned purging seemingly dead accounts from the server at some point. Makin predictably denied this idea, and offered some more information in the discussion channel: “even if I purged everyone we'd still have 6000 active users I think”. This proved to be a rather conservative estimate, as a purge of all non-active accounts would only get rid of 3,800 people.

He couldn’t help but delivering his own rebuttal to the idea of course: “the server is very active, the meme that it's a lot of inactive people comes from other jealous servers”. I have no way of even beginning to tell how true that is, but it doesn’t strike me as immediately or obviously false. I have definitely heard enough from the mouths of those in question to suggest they think that way. Regardless, the HSD itself seems to be fairly robust as of today. This pleases me greatly.

Nothing more for today.

---

29^th of August 2018

Very early on, there was talk of food. I blame myself for it--I got distracted by a marvelous set of instructions for steak seasoning, and that alone was enough to set the chat off. Tonight was actually fairly tame in comparison to previous iterations of the topic: I remember a number of times where the descriptions were enough to induce actual hunger in whoever was reading at the time.

To most, food is a perfectly mundane topic, yet it is nonetheless the subject of repeated attempts of discrimination and even fear from some. Back when the Patreon had first been created, I mentioned that I opted to buy a channel and name it #food, giving Cait control. The very fact that I had to do that should be an indicator of sorts: there is a systematic effort to keep food away from public discussion.

For whatever reason, Makin has always been vociferously against food-posting in mspa-lit. On the occasions it comes up when he’s present, the perpetrators are chased out in short order--they’re often sent packing away to #hangout, but really anywhere that isn’t near Makin will do. This is of course in sharp contrast to whenever he’s not around; at such times, food-posting tends to become very animate and surprisingly engaging.

It boggles the mind that he could be against the topic so drastically when it’s something literally everyone can talk about and enjoy together¹¹⁵, to the point that it’s another mark in favor of my “Makin is a sentient AI” theory. I’m actually reminded of Sydlexia, where a similar problem existed: food talk was popular, but no appropriate forum existed to talk about it; this led to people demanding a place to talk about food, and consistently being denied. Perhaps history will repeat itself, and a Food Channel Militia will be formed. Only time will tell.

Aside from this, in the aftermath of the survey yesterday, a dialogue was initiated in the modchat over what to do with #hangout. Toast describes that he and WoC were “shitting around” about it at first, but quickly realized that they felt the same way: #hangout should be eliminated and #general should become the primary channel for such purposes.

I myself am slightly in favor of the idea, as I described in a recent entry. The reasons are simple: #general and #hangout tend to have the same topics; keeping the channels separate contributes to channel bloat; importantly, #general has been a wasteland for months despite being the face of the community. This last point is of utmost importance; first impressions sell the community to newcomers, and I suspect a heavy portion of the totally inactive users (or those who leave shortly after joining) owe their sterile existence here to a completely mute #general when they joined. It is a blight on activity to have a dead welcoming channel.

There are some important nuances to #hangout, of course: the channel was expressly created as containment for interpersonal discussion and especially selfies, which have persisted in being shown there. However, if a merging of #general and #hangout were to occur, it would be a simple matter to keep the spirit of both and allow selfies in #general instead. I see no real downside to this. As Toast says: “the first channel they see is people being friends instead of a wasteland”, and such an arrangement would be very useful for retaining new members.

Of course, the entire conversation was for nought. With one sentence, Makin dashed any hopes for change: “neither is getting deleted”. While I’m mostly ambivalent as to whether or not it happens, I was at least hoping for some kind of explanation for his decision, but when I asked he offered up nothing. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised about that, but it’s still terrible not being able to account for someone’s whims.

I pressed him on it for details and I think he mistook my intentions as trying to get him to agree to delete one of the channels, because he said “finish SPAT and i might consider it”. I know it was a joke, but I was distracted enough that this actually managed to irritate me a bit. I think I was specifically angry about the idea of him holding information over my head like a carrot, instead of just explaining in the first place like he fucking should have.

After rebutting him, I clarified that: “i don't have any real preference one way or the other, i'm just saying that it would be nice to know your reasoning / and by "nice" i mean "not knowing why you decide things is extremely unhelpful"”. I’m not sure if he was just humoring me at that point or not but he did in fact explain, saying that our reasons for getting rid of one of the channels were either dumb or insufficient (“channel bloat is a myth”; “it’s not a big deal if general is inactive”). It was small, but it all that was really needed in the first place.

The chat resumed a sense of normalcy. Twitch has been presenting a marathon of the first season of the Pokemon show, so naturally fans like Griever and myself have been liveblogging the occasion in #eastern-media along with some brief interruptions in mspa-lit. Today one such interruption turned into a very protracted conversation about the state of the show today, which Tensei eventually made fun of us for (“none of the pokemon anime is any good”). Those of us involved took in good grace--I don’t think any of us really perceive the show as being “good” anyway--and someone tried to substitute with Digimon, but Tensei didn’t seem too interested in that either.

Later in the day, Makin posted a link to a Tumblr blog with a similar icon as his own, except that the content is Russian. I’m not completely aware of all the details, but it seemed to open up something of a rabbit hole into a foreign, as-yet-unknown to us community of Homestuck fans (EDIT: I was informed the next day by user xoro that the Tumblr blog that spurred this conversation belongs to the team of “the most widely accepted russian fantranslation of mspa”). Shortly after posting the link to the Tumblr, Makin started sharing screenshots of a Russian 4chan clone, specifically of a thread dedicated to Homestuck.

Already eery, the uncanny factor got amped up to 11 when Makin posted a screenshot of Griever’s artwork being discussed on the Russian board. He must be using in-browser translation software, because all of the Russian has been turned into heavily bastardized English, with all of the hilarious bullshit that accompanies it (“Zodiac is a type of testicle, in which you are given at the output your canonical class and the sign of the zodiac. Hue, in fact, classes and aspects are explained on the fuck.” for example).

It’s been almost half an hour and Makin has not stopped yet. The posts are funny, but beyond that it also raises a question for me: how many Homestuck communities must there be out there that we have no conception about? Surely there’s at least a small group in major countries like China and Japan as well, anywhere with sufficient access to the internet that they would make these boards or chatgroups.

It’s not even strictly that important, because I doubt we would be able to seriously interface with them even if we did find them. It’s just that the mere idea of other communities floating around out there, completely independent of us, is exciting to me. Makin posted a couple examples of content this Russian board has to offer. I wonder: what other esoteric material has been created that we’ve never encountered before? What must the history of these places be like?

Nothing more for today.

---

30^th of August 2018

Despite his reluctance to do anything about #general and #hangout, yesterday Makin decided to initiate an “experiment” of sorts. He told everyone in #hangout to use #general for a while, as he was going to hide the former for “a long time”. The channel description has accordingly been modified to include the line: “TEMPORARY: selfies/hangout behavior allowed”. With my previous reasoning in mind, I’m very interested to see what the net effect of this change will be.

So far the change has been dramatic, if predictable. The activity of #general has skyrocketed, and now two questions remain: will this remain the case indefinitely; and, how will this change the perception of newly-joined users? Will they see it as a more interesting/active place and subsequently influence them to participate and stay more often? I guess we’ll determine the answers to these questions after the experiment has concluded.

Everyone so far, while not particularly enthusiastic, seems to be just fine with it. There was some concern that #hangout regulars would be upset by the move, but really only one person so far has shown a strict aversion: AnionCation has been making their ire well-known in #serious since #hangout was hidden, although their statements are blown somewhat out of proportion.

They’ve openly claimed that #general is “legitimately the most cancer #general you can be in…” and that there are several (around 60, they said!) people who are now ruining the quality of conversations. A quick perusal is enough to determine that literally the only people who have been talking in #general since the switch have been #hangout regulars. I hope that they’ll settle down and not be so afraid of the change, it’s really not bad at all.

There has been a tendency of people lately to make their own shill lists. Some people like Roots are doing so on a joking basis, but Gitaxian is among those who are unironically pursuing the idea. I’m getting increasingly annoyed at the behavior because it’s somehow even more attention-seeking than Makin’s original incarnation of the idea. Maybe it’ll highlight some of the less desirable aspects of having such a thing around, but I won’t hold my breath.

Later in the night, Toast was enormously bored and floated the idea of playing Left 4 Dead 2 like we’ve done on previous nights. For once, no one really volunteered to join in. My first response was one of concern, as it felt again--for the first time in a while--that the chat was dead. Realistically though, it’s probably more the fact that it was incredibly late at night when he asked. Hopefully on future nights we’ll be able to generate more interest.

Nothing more for tonight.

---

31^st of August 2018

The experiment concluded much more quickly than I expected: hangout is now gone, with its functions fully merged into general. Predictably this is leading to some friction; people who were fine with the experiment but didn’t expect it to come to anything have been rudely awoken, and there is some considerable friction between the erstwhile socialites and those they disdainfully regard as newcomers.

It’s not even been a few hours and we’re already receiving some complaints about the treatment of people who are not a part of the #hangout cabal. #hangout did, for what it’s worth, have its own refined brand of shitposting that flourished under olki: he seemed to function as the ringleader for a wide variety of behavior not really seen in any other channel, even #altgen. One specific type of posting that’s not really found anywhere else on the HSD (or shouldn’t be found, anyway) is referred to as “being horny on main”, which is just about what it sounds like. With this and other posting patterns, there seems to be some issues in commuting to #general.

This aside, there also seems to be some chafing between members of #hangout and the new modship, especially VirtuNat. It’s well established that, in the past before she became a mod and shortly after, Nat had trouble with being a little too harsh on other members of whatever conversation she was participating in. I’ve had to personally warn her when her mockery turns too vicious, and to her credit she has gotten far better about it; there hasn’t been a real problem with it for over a year.

Until today, that is. I was pinged by some people who wanted me to address Nat being too trenchant with her jokes again, and because it’s been an issue before I jumped a little quickly to guarantee that it wouldn’t happen anymore-- I went so far as to say that, if they contacted me about it, I would step in and ban her myself until things called down, which seemed to mollify people well enough.

However, this was going too far; Tensei and other mods like Tera appropriately called me out for this, saying it erodes Nat’s authority in her own channel. I agreed with this prognosis and returned to #general to stipulate that anyone doing this to try and supersede Nat would be punished severely. This probably did not rectify the situation completely, but it will have to do for now.

The incident responsible for all of this was some asinine garbage: Nat forcememed something called “crabposting” which, as one might guess, involved nothing more than spamming various images of crabs. Furrylatula was attempting to start a conversation about babies that were born black despite having two white parents; Nat ended up misunderstanding the intent of that conversational bent, banning latula from the channel. People then took this as Nat trying to harass users.

I would write about conversational mishaps more often, but a lot of them tend to follow that general pattern: a misunderstanding occurs and people get way more upset than they need to, which subsequently leads to more misunderstandings. After a certain point, it’s just not worth the time to explain every instance of this behavior. Today it was at least vaguely notable because of the channel change, but rest assured that this sort of thing happens multiple times every single day.

Regardless, after getting involved the channel seemed to quiet down. More than a few have expressed concern with the channel merger, with some like Sora constantly bringing it up and saying that they want #hangout back. After pointing out that literally every user from #hangout is still talking in #general and that it doesn’t actually change the quality of conversation that much, they seem to quiet down. Without fail, however, they end up bringing the topic around again. If this continues it may end up constituting bans.

Nothing more for today.

---

4^th of September 2018

Very early in the morning, there was a conversation in #western-media that was worth participating in. Long running show Adventure Time finally ended, bringing an end to an impressive eight year run. Enough members here have been or are still fans of the show that it gets discussed often, even in just the average week. The end of the show drove up discussion on the topic substantially, as one might expect.

On a general basis, reception to the finale is heavily polarized depending on where one goes to talk about it. For instance, people using 4chan seemed to overwhelmingly hate the finale, but those on the Adventure Time subreddit seemed fairly positive about it. There are two people on the HSD that are generally understood to be “the Adventure Time fans”: Roots and Tipsy.

Given this perceived status and the fact that they use the subreddit and Tumblr, both of which are typically receptive to developments in the show, it’s reasonable for one to predict that they would enjoy the end of the show. However, on this occasion they defied expectations: they absolutely despised the ending. Regardless of why, the manner in which they went about explaining their thoughts was pretty revealing.

Upon reexamination, this negative response to the show is actually somewhat in keeping with Tipsy. She has often had unexpected opinions or reacted to things in unconventional ways, often surprising people when she explains. This occasion was no different; Tipsy is so emotionally invested in Adventure Time that most people probably expected her to enjoy the finale, but at the end of it she was very swift to condemn the episode. She later tried to claim that she didn’t hate it, which someone quickly juxtaposed against a screenshot of her literally saying she hated the finale.

Mocking aside, when she had calmed down on the matter she began to discuss it in earnest, which of course is where the gold of the conversation can be found; after the initial shock wore off she adopted a much less extreme stance. Her criticisms were fair and cogent--they usually are, no matter how bizarre what she’s trying to say is. The takeaway from this is: Tipsy has a talent for catching people off guard with weird positions and then is able to justify the strangeness afterwards, most of the time anyway.

Roots is a different case. He was similarly disillusioned with the finale of the show, but seemed to struggle with explaining his perspective on the matter. An extensive discussion with him seemed to go in circles, although at the end the confusion seemed to clear up somewhat. He made an ill-advised post on the Adventure Time subreddit saying the episode “wasn’t good”, for which he was promptly and hilariously destroyed.

Roots caught a lot of shit for it even in #western-media, although naturally it was less serious than the hatred he received for his views on the subreddit. He mentioned that he felt so irritated and upset with the progression of the finale that he felt compelled to vent by making jokes about it, which no doubt was part of the reason it was confusing to discuss with him.

He and Tipsy had apparently commiserated over the finale for some hours, and both of them expressed considerable surprise at the positive reception on the subreddit (a cursory glance reveals that the Tumblr side of the fandom was similar). It’s curious to consider why exactly they felt so differently from everyone else--while most people involved in the discussion were less invested, there were certainly a few others who were just as invested as Tipsy and Roots. In the end, perhaps there’s just no accounting for taste.

A less intriguing and far more infuriating encounter took place later in the day in mspa-lit. Politics were being discussed (which, in retrospect, that sentence should almost always be accompanied with “and this was a bad thing”); as discussed in a previous entry, conversations where some of the participants are serious and others are not are a recipe for complete disaster if the topic itself is something that should probably be taken seriously. With the subject of journalistic integrity in question, it would be more reasonable than not to assume that the topic was serious in nature.

After some consideration, this topic has been hashed out so much in this document already that it’s not worth revisiting. Suffice to say that I’m perturbed by the outcome of the discussion and I’ve been reminded that I need to maintain an emotional distance in conversations like it. This shouldn’t be so, but reality doesn’t permit otherwise. It’s a very disappointing reminder, but there’s no other logical conclusion based on the proceedings of the conversation. I feel too demoralized to write more about this right now¹¹⁶.

---

5^th of September 2018

Not a lot happened today, so instead this entry will be a brief cover of the statistical changes since #hangout was deleted. It’s been one week since, so this should serve as a decent preview for what can be expected regarding the activity of the server.

The number of messages sent in #general over the last week (August 29th to September 5th, or 7 days) as of 10:30 PM EST is 46,587 coming to an average of approximately 6,655 per day. The number of messages sent in #general over one month (July 28th to August 28th, 31 days) directly prior to #hangout being first hidden was 14,438, or an average of approximately 466 messages per day. Taking this at face value means that after #hangout being removed, there’s been a roughly 14-fold increase in activity of #general.

This obviously seems very good with regard to the goal of increasing #general’s activity. However, it’s also worthwhile to examine the level of activity across both channels. In the same time span of 31 days right up until its removal, #hangout saw 114,072 messages or an average of about 3,680 per day. Combining this with #general for the same time period yields a total of 128,510 messages for an average of 4,145 per day. This comes out to a net increase of 2,510 per day, just about a 1.6-fold increase.

This is still positive while markedly less impressive, but there’s still another factor to consider: Tera appropriately brought up the fact that large and drastic changes encourage the most activity just after they’ve occurred; over time there will be a predictable decrease in the amount of activity until things reach a certain baseline. Such has held true in this case: each sequential day starting on August 29th had 4,282 messages, then 9,582, 9,068, 5,638, 3,600, 4,760, 6,416, and finally 3,312 today.

This does not bode well, but could also be much worse. I’m not an expert in statistics by any means, but based on this I imagine the baseline of activity for #general will be roughly 3,000-5,000 messages per day, which means that on an immediate timescale the merger won’t have accomplished much. One final thing is important to keep in mind with all of this though, which is the ancillary goal to increasing activity in #general: improving newcomers’ impressions of the channel since it’s the first thing they see when they arrive.

At this point it’s nearly impossible to tell if the noticeable increase of activity has had an effect on user retention and participation. The #userlog helpfully gives the number of users every single time someone joins or leaves the server, which can itself be used for statistical analysis. The kerfuffle with user5 changing the server icon and name throws a wrench into this a little bit, but some extremely premature figures can still be determined.

The usercount for the HSD was 11,329 on July 29th. This gradually increased to the high of 11,450 on the evening of August 26th, at which point the server icon change happened and it dropped down to under 11,400, and then at the close of the 29th it closed out with 11,412 for a net increase of 83 users for an average of a bit more than 2.5 new users per day (as an aside, this is slightly greater than the approximately 60 new users per June and July, but about half the rate of growth experienced during April and May).

Conducting any sort of analysis on this particular metric would be extremely premature at this point; it takes a lot longer to gauge population than simple message counts. That having been said, the message count isn’t particularly accurate at this point either. It would be prudent to conduct another look at these figures once more time has gone by. The e^nd of September should provide a much better idea of how the channel rearrangement affects the pattern of discussion.

In fact, at the end of the year I want to try and do a much larger-scale analysis of server statistics. Ceru would be able to help with this through Aradiabot, which would make it a lot easier to obtain this information than the ad hoc process I’ve been using. Maybe Ceru could even use some graphing functions to make this more interesting or easy to read instead of just listing it all out in text. It would be useful to get a better idea of where this server is headed and how major events like community streams or official news from Viz or Hussie affect things here.

It’s worth reiterating that, even if the number of messages goes down in the short term, the long-term goal is to improve the retention and activity of new users over time. The idea is that people are more motivated to participate if they join and immediately notice the place is already active. It’s anecdotal, but this principle applies to myself and several people in mspa-lit I’ve asked about this.

Moving on: so that this entry isn’t nothing but boring number crunching, there has been a significant change in the posting habits of #general since #hangout was removed that merits some discussion. The vast majority of the population of #hangout did move over and have remained active in #general, and the smattering of #general regulars were low in number enough that they were simply assimilated into the culture. This would be the end of it, except that some members of #altgen have started participating and have been adding their signature flair to the channel.

It was subtle at first, with few people complaining about the influx of shitposting if indeed they noticed at all. However, after a week it is undeniable; there is a greatly increased frequency of shitposting in the channel than is preferred. To be clear, #altgen’s brand of shitposting is far removed from the similarly-named behavior that was found in #hangout; the former is clearly low-effort posting that the users post with with reckless disregard for any other people present, while the latter was more socially influenced and followed the mores of the channel, most of the time.

It would be inaccurate, of course, to suggest that #general has been completely taken over by #altgen’s more disruptive style. Rather, that behavior has fused with the #hangout culture to form something new, but still very rough and unformed. The exact identity of #general is impossible to ascertain yet, and will likely take several weeks or even months to settle down into something solid. As long as the activity of it keeps up, though, that’s the most important part for now.

Nothing more for today.

---

9^th of September 2018

The comparative dry spell continues. Early on the morning of the 6th, a number of people who were around for the frustrating development of the 4th agree that it’s at least better than it was, with even Toast agreeing that it was an exhausting affair. We seem to crave activity, and then inevitably some dramatic thing happens that hurts someone’s feelings. Most people aren’t here to engage in bad faith, it’s more often just a confluence of nonsense that happens by chance sometimes. With that in mind, it’s been a weird and aimless few days since the event in question.

It’s not clear what exactly we should blame this streak of inactivity on. Today, the chat itself brought up the intractable problem of a lack of content. The fandom in its entirety is slowing down without anything putting enough energy into the overall system, although it’s safe to say that the effect is being felt more in certain places than others.

For instance, the subreddit is plodding along at pretty much the same pace as it has for the last few years, with roughly consistent quality from what I can tell. The 4chan base has been all but defunct since the comic ended, burning itself out over the frustration of the ending, so it hardly factors in here. Most interestingly, Makin brought up that he thinks “the tumblr fandom is imploding or something” due to a radical shift in behavioral patterns across a few other places.

Specifically, the evidence he brings forth in favor of this includes: “suddenly there's a fanbase on twitter of all places, and we're getting fantroll-type people on the subreddit”. Both of these developments appear to be true, with a massive number of posts concerning the aforementioned fan characters appearing as if from nowhere on the subreddit. Whether this is a larger pattern or just a sudden and transient shift remains to be seen.

In lieu of spending all of my time monitoring a dead channel, I’ve taken this opportunity to take a cursory glance at other channels on the server for once. #western- and #eastern-media were good candidates for this due to a lot of interest-overlap with members in mspa-lit. Although these channels are firmly Ngame’s domain, he doesn’t appear to speak there so often (he responds promptly when summoned though, so it would appear he has his eye on the channels regularly).

A loose group has developed in each channel, with some people lingering across both people and then dabbling in mspa-lit on occasion as well. Zentoyo is one such individual, seeming to drift between all of these places as they please--they remind me of Tipsy a couple years ago, speaking in an almost shorthand style with a generally positive but also firm stance on whatever topic they chime in on. Goobatron is another such individual, who I’ve described at length previously. These two and a fellow named Ciderelles, among others, all speak in #eastern-media frequently enough that I’ve come to associate them as regulars of the place.

The details are lost on me because I’m not typically interested in the subject matter, but it’s clear to me that all three of these people seem to gain a lot of pleasure from trashing on what they deem “lower quality” anime and manga (Zentoyo lampooning this with statements such as “People are weebs n weebs should get out anyway”). Then again, making fun of the content regardless of its actual quality appears to be the cultural rule for the channel as a whole, so this may not be representative of their actual behavior on an individual level.

Ngame will more frequently participate in #western-media itself, and Tipsy, Roots, and Griever are also pretty active there as well due to their interest in cartoons such as Adventure Time (again, crossover with #eastern-media is typical due to their interest in shows such as Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures and Dragon Ball). There are some users with a decent smattering of messages in the channel such as one fellow named Big Salty, but from the glimpses I’ve seen most people have less than 2,000 messages.

Rather than sustained conversation more typical of channels like #mspa-lit or #altgen, #western-media experiences staccato-discussions, where most serious talk is begun, transpires, and is completed within a short amount of time. These bursts of activity are separated by long spells of shitposting, it would seem. The exception to this is when a highly anticipated show comes out with new episodes, upon which the channel is usually swarmed with outsiders and whoever could be deemed regulars tend to struggle in order to regain control of the channel.

#coding-tech, by comparison, is an extremely well-organized place. In undergraduate school I took three computer science classes and have had a loose interest in the topic since, so I’m at least able to follow along in conversations and know a little bit more than nothing at all. Even so, the level of discussion is usually so far above my head that I can’t contribute anything meaningful. What’s more, I would wager that most of what the participants in #coding-tech know is self-taught, or even just a hobby.

Channel regulars such as virtuNat, anoymous, Sein, and even Kreuz have all gathered an impressive knowledge in computer science in general, and some of them have developed that even further. The pins are chock full of helpful links that provide tools for people to learn about these things as well, should they have the aptitude and motivation to pursue it. One such link is for a game that teaches people how to build a basic functioning computer out of standard logic gates.

In a society where most people treat computers like pure magic, the fundamental importance of that game alone is difficult to overstate; it provides the basis for creating the more complex systems we’re familiar with practically from scratch. There are also links for learning programming languages, and a few projects that members of the channel worked on to relate the overall topic back to Homestuck (such as creating a functioning programming language based on one that appears in the story).

There is of course the required assortment of shitposts, but even those typically approach esoteric by general standards. That having been said, the channel’s discussions as a whole appear to be insanely productive compared to most other channels. If I were to guess the amount of empty conversation or even shitposting that goes on in the average channel, it would approach anywhere between 50-75%. By comparison (and this is admittedly a very narrow and therefore flawed view), #coding-tech approaches anywhere from 80-90% productive conversation. The culture of the channel is nothing short of an enigma when compared to the rest of the server.

Nothing more for today.

---

10^th of September 2018

I mentioned yesterday that we started receiving a massive influx of posts from people who wanted to show off their original characters, or OCs, on the subreddit starting about five days ago now. That type of post is already made a lot compared to other types, but for some reason the volume of OCs increased dramatically over the course of 24 hours or so. On a given day there’s usually a handful of OC sprites or art, but starting four days ago that number skyrocketed: we went from getting two or three of these posts a day to over fifty of them in the span of two days.

This prompted Makin to start a megathread explicitly for containing the posts, although the damage is mostly done already. It’s possible that establishing a megathread hampered the willingness of people to participate, as the number of these posts in the megathread is substantially lower than from when they were being posted wholesale. Alternatively, people may have tired themselves out already.

In fairness, the level of activity for those two days was astonishingly high given the state of the fandom these days. We seem to have our good days and our bad days, although it’s pleasing to see that the subreddit has been slightly more active since the OC invasion. Incidentally, this means that the quality of the posts is way up from their normal baseline of “mediocre” or “outright shitty”.

While there are still a few shitposts meandering the subreddit, they are far and few between for once; best of all, of those insufferable posts that are not actually relevant to Homestuck except as cheap jokes the frequency is down to almost zero. Very gratifying after the whole rule change debacle in previous weeks.

This flurry of activity is actually pretty heartening in a more general sense as well. While things seem to be slowing down for the fandom even more than we might have feared, this near spontaneous burst of posts is a reminder of the original spirit of this group. I’ve often expressed fear that, even if substantial new content showed up, the members of the fandom would not be sufficient to pick it back up. Times like these serve as an indicator of the opposite, where all we need is a good tap to get things going again. Hopefully this is the case in the future, whether it come in the form of Hiveswap Act 2, Hussie beginning his next story, or something else entirely.

On the other hand, mspa-lit hasn’t really held to this trend. When I pointed out the sense of slowing down, he claimed that school coming back is responsible for the feeling of less activity. While this makes some sense, in the case of mspa-lit in particular I’m sure it also has to do with disallowing generalized topics. Further, Makin’s shill list is simply not compelling or substantial enough to generate higher levels of discussion¹¹⁷.

The reasons for this are manifold and unfortunately we don’t really have the tools to pinpoint it: the most obvious would be that not enough people are reading it, but other possibilities include the fact that it’s simply not an accessible reading list (overestimating the tolerance most people have for it), that there’s not enough content to keep discussion going for long, etcetera. That first point sticks with me; I can’t help but wonder if things would be significantly different if the only change was the sheer number of readers for the shill list.

I brought up this principle with Tensei when we were discussing the idea of fanart for some of the shills like Worth the Candle: he stipulated that the characters are too boring to inspire fanart¹¹⁸ from anyone, and I felt obligated to point out that the fanbase for WTC is prohibitively small: the quality of a work is less important for garnering fanart, far and away the most important factor is the number of fans.

Obviously the quality of a work would ideally correlate to how many people appreciate it, but this doesn’t necessarily follow in real life; a quality story does not always attract attention from enough people to become successful or renowned. Conversely, a story with a sufficient number of fans will almost always get artistic tribute regardless of its quality: if you have a really good work with 100 fans and a mediocre or even shitty work with 100,000 fans, the more popular work will inevitably have more fans that turn out to be artists, some of which will be motivated to create fanart.

To bring this tangent back around to the main point, the reason that the shills don’t get discussed often isn’t necessarily that they’re bad or unworthy of being discussed; rather, it’s due to the fact that so few of us ever actually end up reading them. It is impossible to sustain conversation without a sufficient number of people who know what’s being talked about, and the shill list doesn’t receive the kind of exposure it needs to really take off with people. Whether this is by design or is accidental is a different matter entirely, but it would strike me as kind of weirdly stupid if Makin prefered the shill list to remain this impotent.

Speaking less about mspa-lit in particular, there was an incident this morning with two users who were engaging in some outrageous tomfoolery: one of them was pretending to be hacked by the other, which seriously alarmed an uninvolved user who promptly notified mods about it. It was clear from the onset that whatever these guys were doing was asinine garbage, but hacking another person’s account is not something to be joked about.

We did the most sensible thing in response and decided as a team to ban the fools. The entire debacle was infuriatingly stupid, so it was a relatively quick and painless decision. Unfortunately, later in the evening one of the offending users came on with an alt to try and heckle the mod team for “not looking closely enough into the issue”. The only reason I describe all of this is because the actual procession of the event was unusual in structure; in terms of importance, this event was about as unremarkable as one can get. With that in mind, I shut down the alt with extreme prejudice and went back to doing something more important with my time.

Final note for today, but altgen has gone and done it again. Despite repeated attempts to warn people against it and even providing an appropriate example of what and what not to do, cropped porn has seen so much abuse that Dingus and the other of our milieu have decided to ban the practice once more. It looked like people caught on the last time I demonstrated how it should be done, but I guess that was too much to ask for.

At this point, we’re not even sure whether it’s a widespread problem or if it’s only a couple of particularly energetic people perpetrating this issue. If it were the former, then it could be chalked up to altgen simply being shitty as it always has been and is technically supposed to be. If it’s the latter, then it’s just the latest in an infinitely long series of things being ruined for everybody at the hands of a couple jackasses.

Nothing more for today.

---

12^th of September 2018

Advertisements for Homestuck Book 3: Act 4 began in earnest yesterday. Makin used this as the signal to start uploading commentary from book 2; he wanted to avoid doing this until the next book started being pushed so that his extension would avoid hurting sales of the book as much as possible. I’m not sure how effective this policy is, since it’d involve gauging the initial excitement of the book releases versus sales over time and a bunch of other complicated factors I’m not really interested in quantifying. Regardless, it’s at least an attempt at good will to make sure the books are more successful.

That having been said, I began work on organizing the commentary today. It’s a long and generally monotonous task, but it forces me to read the text of the comic more thoroughly to make sure I understand where everything’s supposed to go. This usually means that I pick up on small jokes or setups that I didn’t notice before or simply don’t remember, and I feel like sharing it with the group occasionally. I did so a few times tonight, not expecting much of a response, but pleasantly a veritable font of conversation sprung up from this.

Similar to the outbreak of OC posts on the subreddit, all it took was a small bit of prompting to unlock some of the old magic that was around from discussing Homestuck-centric content in the past. Tonight we delved into that feeling, reacquainting ourselves lightly with the sheer density of the comic. We were able to freely enjoy our obsession with all of its various facets once more, and while the discussion petered away in less than half an hour it was an energetic and truly enjoyable break from the very gradual decay of entertainment value.

With this in mind, I’m now looking forward to the community reread much more than I was before, which was already considerable. It seems that we simply need someone willing to lead the reread, which I might end up doing if no one else wants to. A few other people like Nights are starting to ask about it as well; unlike last time the reread happened, the Discord may get its own channel dedicated to the event, which would almost certainly improve participation and lead to interesting discussion.

This ended up getting sidetracked after some time by a discussion of server statistics; after bringing the idea up with people in mspa-lit, I decided to bite the bullet and create a spreadsheet with all the data available on the server about user and message counts for each month. No bots were around to record the usercount data from before April 2017, but message counts are easily obtainable with Discord’s search function.

Though there isn’t much to work with, some patterns or events can already be elucidated: the beginning of the server displays rapidly increasing message count with a particularly large spike after advertisements were put up on MSPA. January of this year had a statistically significant dip in message count due to Nu-Altgen, with messages in altgen alone being cut literally in half to 150,000 as compared to 300,000 for December and February each. This was only a temporary faltering though, with the count picking back up in subsequent months.

While the rate of growth has slowed significantly, the amount of messages being sent is still increasing steadily as is the usercount. I’ve decided to release the graphs of the information I was able to gather from 2016 and 2017 since those years are obviously complete already, although it’s hard to glean many meaningful patterns from the data since it’s only been a couple years. Thankfully, now that the framework is complete it’ll be easier to release information for each subsequent year for however long this document and the server itself persists.

Later in the night we started discussing the latest addition to the shill list, an unusual work by the author of Slate Star Codex called Unsong. The response to it has been generally positive, but a few detractors have dismissed it as utter trash, notably WoC. The disagreements between him and those who liked the story so far are very protracted, and have touched on the heart of some conversational difficulties that I personally take issue with in mspa-lit.

The argument proceeded in a vaguely circuitous manner as they typically do, with the same problem being run upon time and time again: one side found an element of the book to be a problem and the other did not. At this point, any onlooker who isn’t an expert in what’s being discussed would probably be able to dismiss it as a matter of individual taste. Not WoC: at this point he began to assert that the opposing side was literally wrong in their assertions, which automatically bumps conversations like these up to another level.

The problem with most conversations that take place here is that it’s a bunch of non-experts trying to talk about things they have no real education in. This is both harder and easier to do with stuff of a mathematical or scientific nature: if it’s quantifiable then it’s pretty hard to fake knowledge about it, although education is still extremely helpful for figuring out how to interpret that information correctly.

When it comes to the arts, though, all bets are off. WoC tried to talk about this as if he has objective knowledge in something that can usually be reduced to what people seek as a matter of preference. As soon as one tries to inject objectivity into it, it raises a question: what determines that the person claiming authority is actually correct in their views?

I’m not averse to deferring to people who are well-educated in what they’re trying to talk about: I would infinitely prefer to listen to someone with a degree in a given area over someone who doesn’t have one. The problem is that WoC is not one of these experts in the subject of writing; he’s passionate about it and he knows a decent amount, but he tries to pass his ideas off as authoritative and his ideas thusly stink to everyone else present.

In more simple terms, I responded that WoC overvalued his own opinion. He speaks strongly, but at the end of the day he doesn’t have anything more to stand on than anyone else in the chat does. Wave provided a very succinct explanation of why the behavior is bad: “A snob without merit is just a douche”. Some people are very good at convincing themselves and even others that their opinion is worth more, but it doesn’t change the fact that they’re no better qualified to speak on the topic than anyone else.

Nothing more for today.

---

13^th of September 2018

Makin ended up adding another bot to the server, called Disboard. It’s apparently just to get put on a public listing so that people have an easier time searching for servers related to a specific topic, which is honestly nice. We had a discussion recently about ways that people can find the HSD, and he made it clear that: “right now the only way people can find the server is if they look for it”, assuming they aren’t already using the subreddit. Seems appropriate to put it on more searchable lists if possible.

A quick perusal of the tag “homestuck” on Disboard’s website reveals 23 other related servers. I wonder how many have population overlap with us? Further, they only appear in the listing if Disboard has been added, so how many dedicated servers exist that remain unknown? I can easily imagine dozens more of these servers with less than 50 or 25 people on them, floating in the ether and completely unknown to us.

More relevant to us, Makin is trying out something to attract new users to mspa-lit and get them to read the shills: he’s alternating the name of the channel as #read-x, where x is a different shill each and every day. I suspect he’s too lazy to actually follow through with this for an extended period of time, and if he manages to do so then I also suspect it won’t accomplish much. Everyone seems pretty ambivalent or dismissive of this development; in all it’s actually quite inoffensive, albeit slightly attention-grabby. If it generates some interest in the channel then that’s great.

I steadfastly refuse to call the channel anything but mspa-lit though. Since it’ll be hugely annoying to keep up with the daily name changes, I’m just going to keep the channel name as “#mspa-lit” in the list at the beginning of this document; it’s probably the best option for this document anyway, as it’s useful for historicity/consistency’s sake.

Also, read-shills/read-x is a terrible name. I will never change my mind about this. Nothing more for today.

---

14^th of September 2018

Today is the anniversary of Hiveswap: Act One coming out. As might be expected, people are immeasurably disappointed that it’s taking so long to get the second installment. Many including myself are openly expressing fears that it’s been abandoned as a dead project. The most upsetting thing for most of us is the complete lack of communication, which of course is a long running theme of the last four years.

Two examples were brought up as to why the project should not reasonably have been delayed this long: Oculus Rift, the VR headset, was crowdfunded to a similar $2.4 million figure as Hiveswap, and despite the immense complexity of developing such technology it was successful or enticing enough that Facebook bought it for $2.3 billion; a more fair example, Hollow Knight is a game that was partially crowdfunded with about $57,000 being raised on Kickstarter, was developed on Unity, and despite not achieving certain stretch goals the development team delivered extra content.

Despite having over 40 times the budget of Hollow Knight and being crowdfunded earlier, Hiveswap was released half a year after Hollow Knight and is still only a quarter (or an eighth, if you count Hauntswitch) complete. With these things in mind, the only possible--let alone reasonable--explanation for this discrepancy is profound and thorough mismanagement. Even taking into account the loss of funds in dealing with The Odd Gentleman, the fact that it’s taken so long to get what we have now is nothing short of mind boggling.

The conversation today mostly consisted of the long history of pushbacks on the date of Hiveswap’s release even just for Act 1, and about how we’re now going through the ringer again with Act 2. Some time ago there was a newspost saying that we would have more information about Hiveswap coming in “several weeks”--that was at the beginning of April. It has been nearly half a year since, and our patience only continues to dwindle away.

Especially now that the anniversary is here, more doubt surrounds the future of Hiveswap than ever before. Or, rather, it may be more accurate to say that people are finding it hard to care anymore. With each passing week, less people bother with playing the Friendsims and less bother to even bring up the fact that we have no information to work off of. If anything, the only sentiment I see anymore is a gradually growing bitterness over the state of affairs.

Makin weirdly insists that Act 2 will definitely come out on 11/11, despite not having (or at least not showing) any evidence as to why. He is so certain of this that he has entered into a bet with WoC regarding whether it will come out this year¹¹⁹: if it does come out, Makin gets ten dollars; if it doesn’t come out, WoC wins the money instead. This echoes the “bet” that WoC made last year with no one (he claims it was with Anervaria in particular about Act One coming out, which of course he lost, except this time he won’t be snorting hot sauce up his nose).

Back to the point, Makin’s insistence that it’ll come out in November is vaguely nonsensical. Assuming this wasn’t a joke, even if the complete lack of absence in that direction didn’t say anything then there are a couple of things that possibly go against the idea: the official Homestuck Youtube account actually unlisted the trailer for Act One, meaning no one can see it anymore. This might be simple housekeeping (although goodness knows why they would bother), or as Makin puts it: “is this going to be like namco high / where hussie pretends it never happened”. It’s hard to tell, but the development doesn’t exactly bode well.

There was also some debate over whether Viz or WP is responsible for Hiveswap’s development and PR at this point. It’s not immediately clear to most people whether Viz has any sort of stake in Hiveswap at this point. I’m not sure why, but some are under the impression that Viz’s hand is definitely involved with the game; we mostly appreciate Viz’s handling of Homestuck--there is some displeasure about the handling of the conversion from Flash to HTML5, the early animations are still crappy-quality Youtube videos-with the books especially being well-received, so the disconnect between Homestuck getting handled well and Hiveswap getting this extremely subpar treatment is confusing to people.

I too was under this impression up until today. A cursory glance at the webpages for Viz and Hiveswap doesn’t turn up anything suggesting a link between the two. The conclusion from this is that WP is still at fault for the property being mishandled so badly. The real question then is: is this ever going to change? The extreme upheaval in WP’s development team does not exactly inspire confidence, even so many months later; the entity still exists and is active to some degree, as the Friendsims suggest, but what on earth is really going on?

As I said before, the situation seems increasingly untenable for most people. Without a serious update of some sort, the number of fans who feel alienated or downright apathetic increases. If this trend continues, then we can only wonder how long it’ll be before people permanently drift away, potentially crippling the fandom. While some suggest--jokingly or not--that this outcome is inevitable or even good, I can’t help but feel that it would be a horrible waste.

(Update as of 9/29/18: I’ve been informed that James Roach released a video with some Hiveswap: Act 2 concept information. Enjoy.)

Nothing more for today.

---

17^th of September 2018

As it’s continued to be slow for the last few days, I’ll describe some events that have loosely happened since the last entry in today’s update.

On the 15th, I was celebrating the end of a long week of real life circumstances by drinking. After some time, I was taken with the sudden and violent urge to absolutely destroy a channel in as profane a manner as possible, so naturally I decided to pay altgen a visit. They quickly deduced that something was happening and the channel managed to accrue some significant activity beginning around 10:30 PM EST.

I’ve already described the Altgen Purge of days past and the more restrained but still frenetic Sacrifice. The former has not been allowed on the server for over a year now, and the latter is still new, only being around for a couple months or so, and is performed on a weekly basis. The channel is trying to find out ways to optimize the experience or better establish it; right now it’s in a gimmicky state, with each week being slightly different and/or based on a specific theme.

Some ideas that got tossed around after the last Sacrifice, taking place on Thursday, involved making it more of a regulated contest than the ad hoc mess it is now: typically what happens is I am reminded that it’s been a week--or I barge in with no preamble should I remember--and simply begin chanting “SACRIFICE”. This only works if a sufficient number of people are present; if not enough people join in or if the chat isn’t spamming “SACRIFICE” hard enough then I deem it a “failed sacrifice” and leave it for another time.

Once this part works, I typically select someone at random based on if I noticed them in the last week or if they’ve made a particularly good contribution to the channel. The person I choose is deemed “the sacrifice” and I ping them, give them the role “Altgenner of the Week” with a nice gold color to distinguish them, and then it’s over. Some weeks have a better result than others, with the best Sacrifices rivaling even the Purge in terms of sheer spam and shittiness. It is quite something to behold.

At the conclusion of the Sacrifice on the 13th, I recognized that the formula was getting stale and asked for some ideas. Someone, I believe qweq, mentioned that we should do the next event purely in the form of caveposting. Along with trying to establish a better system in general this was better than any other idea so far, so we were planning on doing it this Thursday the 20th. Then, I got drunk.

Thus on the 15th, fueled with a limitless desire to shitpost, I stumbled into altgen and initiated the Sacrifice a mere two days after the last. Being a Saturday night, there were plenty of people around for the occasion, and despite some initial confusion about the timing it picked up steam very quickly. True to qweq’s suggestion we conducted it solely using caveposting manner, which somehow whipped people up into a greater frenzy. I sacrificed qweq for providing the caveposting idea, and resolved again to come up with a better system to determine sacrifices in the future. At this point though, altgen started to truly spiral out of control.

Much like how the Homestuck fanbase has a lot of untapped potential for excitement, so too does altgen have this hidden reservoir of energy, except for shitposting. It used to be easier to draw out, but rule changes, politics, and a shifting userbase have made it much harder to unlock that potential. This is probably for the best, as the results of successfully doing so are fearsome to behold.

Altgenners launched into some of the most spirited shitposting I have seen in many months, fueled somewhat by their own restlessness, the momentum of the now-completed Caveman Sacrifice, and my own drunken stupor. I cast all hesitation to the wind and insulted whoever for whatever reason I so chose, broke rules with thorough whimsy, and overall just stirred the place up as much as possible.

The details after the first hour or so are gone from my memory, but I checked the results the next morning after nursing my aching head and was impressed: altgen usually sees an average of about 5,000 to 7,000 messages a day, give or take depending on if it’s the weekend and other miscellaneous factors. On the day of the Caveman Sacrifice there were just over 10,000.

Altgen was allowed to bask in this glory for a day or two; I felt satisfied enough with the effect of my presence that I mostly kept my hands off the place until today. After the brief discussion of how to more normalize the Sacrifices, I asked if anyone had done any thinking or come up with plans to do so. Sea Hitler and Dingus revealed that they actually had come up with a small system, one which would involve creating a contest where people can participate weekly.

Their version of it involves having a meme contest, where the person with the most votes for best meme wins altgenner of the week. While I dislike the idea of always being about memes, the idea is simple enough that it could be tweaked into something more effective. I’ll be working with them in the upcoming weeks to improve the system as much as possible and make it more engaging/workable, especially considering altgen’s intense capability to fuck things up.

Today, Makin mentioned a unique development that will go totally unnoticed by the average person but is nonetheless important: the Internet Archive has ceased complying with the robots exclusion standard. Like the vast majority of people this meant nothing to me, so he explained that the standard, also known as robots.txt, refers to a system that guides archival as performed by automatic programs.

Internet Archive does much what it says on the label, serving as an archive for as much stuff on the internet as possible. One may search for a webpage that is no longer around, and if one of the pages was cached in the past then it will be archived so people can see it indefinitely. The process of archival is insanely tedious, so anyone who bothers typically uses crawler programs, or robots, to automatically look through websites and archive them.

However, there are reasons why someone might not want a page archived, such as revealing personal information. If this is the case, then the owner of the webpage can specify in the settings of the page (robots.txt) whether or not a crawler should actually archive the page (“it's a honor code thing / it doesn't actually stop it from being crawled / it's a REQUEST / to not get indexed by google or other searchers”, Makin specifies).

The unfortunate part of this is that if a website tells crawlers not to archive it, that applies to ALL forms of the website past, present, and future from the time it specifies in robots.txt. This effectively ruins the idea of archival: “... what many people did was like, to erase history, they bought the domain and added robots.txt saying to not index / fucking over a lot of people / used in a lot of disinfo campaigns too”. It became trivial to thoroughly destroy efforts at keeping information preserved.

That is, until today. Internet Archive will no longer follow the robots.txt policy: "it'll help billions / a huge part of history is now available to humanity”. Those who relied on the principle in good faith will no doubt be upset by it, but Makin mentioned that Internet Archive also does information removal if one contacts them about it. It’ll be less convenient, but ultimately a better service for the effort.

Looping this around to why this matters for us, it would be remiss of me not to say that this opens up possibilities for Homestuck fans. The forums are sadly not affected by this, as the problem with them is extensive depth; in order to avoid storage/memory problems, Internet Archive only caches pages that were obtainable on an index search (the exact specifics of this are lost on me, but the overall point is that not every page gets cached and most forum threads are exempt from the process). However, who knows what resources will become available that previously weren’t? I find it hard to imagine that not a single lost fan adventure or information would be recovered from this policy change.

Aside from that, not a lot has happened. There have been remarkably few things for mspa-lit to comment on lately, although there was a Worth the Candle update today and SpaceX had a presentation about the future of the Big Falcon Rocket and a future mission to the moon. Relatively few people commented on the proceedings of that, mostly being myself, tmtmtl and Makin. The rest of the topics were fairly isolated from each other or insubstantial.

This is a very dangerous pattern. I’m reminded significantly of posting tendencies in the later days of both the Sydlexia and the Twitch Plays Pokemon IRC chats: it is fairly common, practically expected, that any given group will have members post things seemingly at random and/or according to their interests, and then the rest of the group will seize on the topic and talk about it for a while. It is the most base form of giving conversational sustenance to your group.

However, in both of those groups the amount that people would participate lessened gradually over time. The willingness or ability of people to participate and give a shit about what was being discussed seemed to dwindle. The rate at which users would submit something to be discussed decreased along with the actual rate at which people decided to discuss those things. Naturally, after enough time passed, each community became moribund.

I have seen this happen in mspa-lit before. I have grown quite depressed whenever it occurs, although it’s not an irreversible process. Even a little trickle of news or attention is usually enough to inflame us once more, giving rise to conversation like nothing happened. Even as I write this, Niklink posted a link to a spontaneous 4chan thread and now those present (for posterity’s sake and as a loose representative example: Gitaxian, Trickster, Solarsail, Putnam, Reti, Biscket, Dingus, tmtmtl, Sora, Tori, Revlar, and two or three others) are all posting with wild abandon. This has actually been in progress for half an hour or so, which is heartening to see.

Thus, the measure becomes more complicated: obviously how much people talk in your community is a sign of how strong or healthy it is, but the exact resilience of it is harder to assess. Clearly our community has the ability to bounce back from slow periods just fine, which makes me more optimistic for the future. Even the smallest amount of news we might care about rejuvenates us. The only question is, how long will that hold true?

I don’t believe that the community is dying, necessarily; I’ve expressed that fear multiple times, but at this point it’s more of a distant thought than anything else. I have faith that we’ll continue largely unabated for some time, if all goes well; I simply think it’s important to keep all the variables in consideration. It’s only true that everything is okay up until the point where it suddenly isn’t.

Nothing more for today.

---

19^th of September 2018

Yesterday, Makin made a claim about SBAHJ Book 2, commenting that they’re being moved from China to a Topatoco warehouse. While the assertion that they’re being moved from China makes sense (with the amount of manufacturing that occurs there), the specificity and confidence he had in the statement gave me some pause. After asking about it, he said that he had insider information of some sort and steadfastly refused to elaborate. Most people in the conversation just kind of moved on, and I certainly didn’t press for more--yet, I wonder whether he actually has an inside source and who it could possibly be. I’m certainly not about to make any guesses.

Today, on the other hand, we ended up discussing the shill list and why people are motivated to read it at all. It touched on the idea of Makin’s supposed cult of personality again, with people like Ost claiming that no one would actually read anything on the list if it weren’t for Makin being in the position he is, not to mention working so hard to gamify the list. And the fact that he’s been pushing it so hard for several months now.

I got burned in that conversation so I was already kind of hesitant to get involved further, but then it somehow morphed into yet another conversation about Makin’s suitability as leader of the community. This would have been perfectly rote but for the involvement of user5, who kept trying to comment on the proceedings in ways that were completely unrelated and frankly confusing. I would have been more upset if I could’ve actually parsed what he was trying to say, but in the end all it did was make things weird and difficult to understand.

As it is, I think I’m okay with that. Conversations about Makin’s leadership qualities are so old and over-hashed that I would never have considered including today’s discussion in this entry if it hadn’t gotten super weird for some reason. At this point I have no energy left to revisit that particular avenue of thought. As it always does, it ended without any sort of conclusion--satisfying or otherwise--and was just kind of a mess.

Instead, I’ve been trying to work out some additional angles for statistical research on this place. After assembling monthly activity graphs, I’ve been really curious about the activity of all of the channels individually. After looking into it, there appear to be three channels that could be identified as “major”: #general, #altgen, and #mspa-lit each with over four million messages (altgen has nearly five and a half million).

#hangout was the next biggest with just over 800,000 across its lifetime, but like some other channels it also had the disadvantage of being around for less time, being created on the 7th of May 2017. It dwarfs the other decidedly “minor” channels, such as #serious at just under 300,000 or #coding-tech with 200,000, not even to speak of the ones with less than 100,000 each. Yet, I wanted to include #hangout with the major channels in this analysis due to its relationship with #general.

After looking into it, there is an absolute correlation between the two. #general has about the same level of activity for a good month after #social was created, but then starting in August that year it started to decline rapidly. Messages dwindled from an average of 4,000-6,000 to about 1,000-2,000 a day. This got progressively worse as time went by, and in May of 2018 it was impossible to ignore: #general had fallen to less than 1,000 messages a day on average, roughly speaking. Around this time the channel was essentially dead, with the lowest days having less than 100 messages each.

Thus, even if there’s a slight net decrease in total messages in #general from when we had it and #hangout, this should more than make up for it with an increase in user retention. After checking briefly, the number of messages in #general has remained consistently high. Although it’s only been a month, that’s still a 10-fold increase at minimum for what is widely understood as the face of the community. It will undoubtedly be more palatable for anyone happening to step in than a completely dead channel.

That having been said, there appears to be some difficulties in getting the culture of the place to stick. For about a week after the two channels were merged, the socialites were desperately trying to hang on to their mannerisms. Eventually though, they succumbed to the slow but steady inflow of other people--between people joining the server, the (few) people already using the channel, and a couple other factors, the users from #hangout have inevitably changed a lot of the characteristics that were emblematic of their channel.

#general is now a weird amalgamation of various elements: it occasionally displays what is verifiably #hangout-ish behavior, mixed with the gentle and unassuming attitude of people from #general before the merger. One of these other factors I mentioned comes in the form of a surprising amount of participation from altgenners such as qweq. One might suspect that this would be a problem, but it hasn’t been: none of them are actually shitposting.

Yet, there is a certain quality that their presence brings to the channel. It’s almost impossible to put my finger on it, but even without the actual act of shitposting their mere behavior has managed to alter the emotional and behavioral undertones of the channel. The dynamic feels different because of them. It might be because of a bias towards perceiving the attitude of people from altgen, and this is just normal behavioral mixing. It’s really hard to tell at this point.

In an effort to understand all of this better, and to bring it back around to the topic’s origin, I’ve embarked on a quest similar to pulling the message and user counts out for statistical purposes. It’s essentially the same idea but bigger in scale by an order of magnitude: I want to get the data for how many messages are sent each day in every channel. For a channel that’s been around for the entire duration of the server, that’s over 900 days so far; with every channel combined, even with those that haven’t been around the entire time, that’s a lot of data points to collect.

I already attempted to gather the data for #general, and after two hours of repetitive clicking finally got caught up to the current day. Upon seeing just how many channels there are, I promptly said “Fuck that” and decided to ask Ceru for help. If this were a couple years ago I would probably have done it by myself anyway, but after some of my previous projects like this I’ve lost the energy for doing things the ridiculously, unnecessarily hard way.

Ceru wrote some code to go through and do it automatically; there were some difficulties with it at first and I was afraid it wouldn’t work, but after finagling things he managed to get it working. It takes some time, but it’s a damn sight faster than me doing it by hand. It’ll be tomorrow at the earliest, probably a few days, before all of the channels are caught up, at which point I can continue updating the data by hand with no problem whatsoever. Ceru’s help with this is enormously appreciated (update as of 9/29/18: it worked! Results are here).

Nothing more for today.

---

20^th of September 2018

As I tend to do when things slow down, I decided to cast out into other servers a bit more frequently today. A few choice conversations actually reminded me of a topic that I’ve touched on before, but only in passing. The concept of splinter servers has been explored a few times in the past in this document, but I’ve never really offered a history of what are arguably the most well known of them.

Back in Ye Olde Days of mid 2016 or so, characters such as cynicallyCritical and Aradia were still around in conjunction with Toast. They established a very firm camaraderie with each other; there were an assortment of other people involved, none of whom I’m really familiar with unfortunately. For reasons that I am also not familiar with, presumably a mix of being upset with Makin and just wanting a group of their own, these individuals decided to create what might very well be the first HSD splinter: Stargazing.

Bear in mind that I wasn’t around for these proceedings and I’ve actually gotten conflicting reports from people on why or how things happened, so events get a little fuzzy from here. If I’m not mistaken, Stargazing started sucking out activity from the HSD to the point that Makin grew concerned, which is kind of the origin of his poor reception of them now. Stargazing was on an invitation only basis, but over time the server accrued more and more people that were deemed cool enough to join.

For reasons that are again unknown to me¹²⁰--the reason I was offered was simply “drama”--Stargazing was dealt a fatal blow later the same year when a group broke off to form yet another server. Pointedly named Microscope, or Micro for short, Ost and a user named Callum were responsible for forming this new group. To distinguish it from Stargazing, they made the decision to have relatively open invitations.

Twonks and “a large number of altgenners” ended up joining, and Nights mentions that the high proportion of randoms ended up killing the server quality. Amusingly, the solution to this was to simply create what is humorously referred to as “Microscope 2: Electric Boogaloo”. Even fewer details are available to me about this particular incarnation, although at this and all potential subsequent instances of servers being created, it’s basically irrelevant; only the first one or two “generations” of splinter servers can really be called relevant to the origin; after that they have essentially become insular communities with their own sets of history and rules.

It’s important to note too that it doesn’t proceed in a straight line of servers like this, either; rather, it’s actually pretty common for members of a splinter server to become emboldened and create their own even more derivative servers; in some cases this becomes such a nested phenomenon that everyone has their own server that everyone else from the parent server become members of. After even a short time, the process can become so incestuous that it’s nothing short of overwhelming to keep track of.

Another server worthy of mention was borne out of the whole Nu-Altgen fiasco. After doing that number-crunching the other night, I noticed that January of this year had one of the lowest message counts of any average month, about 150,000 less than would otherwise be expected. Makin was nothing short of mystified when he saw this, trying to come up with a whole host of (incorrect) reasons for the discrepancy. He didn’t feel like systematically getting the actual answer, so I went ahead and did that too.

It turns out that Nu-Altgen happened literally at the beginning of this year, and when one compares the message rate in altgen to months before and after January it becomes fairly evident: November and December of 2017 both had over 300,000 messages in that channel alone, then January saw the rate get cut literally in half with less than 150,000 messages. This serves as an example of how devastating the formation of a splinter server can be: around 20% of the total message count for an entire month was wiped out.

I can recall Makin being pretty concerned about this. He went so far as offering Nu-Altgen their own channel in order to get them back--something I warned against him doing--but they declined. The outcome appears to have worked out anyway, as the message rate for altgen absolutely exploded in later months, rapidly climbing to nearly 500,000 messages each month. What’s more, there have also been some reports of Nu-Altgen basically self-destructing as time goes by due to infighting and lack of interest.

There are, of course, numerous other servers, but not all of them formed in the same manner as Stargazing or Nu-Altgen. I’ve described this before, but it’s an idea of some contention whether or not a given server qualifies as a splinter; some argue that being a “splinter” depends on the intent with which it was originally created, while many claim that it has to do with the server’s population and how its members all met. If the latter is true, then many private servers with a mix of HSD residents and more personal friends would all qualify as personal-splinter hybrids of some sort.

It’s actually a pretty complicated issue, although one that has cooled down considerably. In addition to people not really caring quite as much about bringing them up, Makin has stopped persecuting the idea quite as much as he used to; he has defaulted to the idea that all splinter servers are doomed to fail eventually, and whether or not this is true it seems to mollify him enough. Besides, as near as I can tell there hasn’t been a significant splinter formed in months.

The splinter server phenomenon is actually something to consider on a purely conceptual basis as well; from what I can tell, the concept is actually related to similar practices on IRC. I’m hardly an expert in communication, but it seems obvious to me that the reason this happens is because of the way these services work: even back on IRC, it was easy enough to create and register your own server on a given network. This is even more true for Discord, to the point that it’s trivial to set up and give one fairly complex and personalized settings.

This isn’t really the case on other media platforms such as boards and forums. The communication is simply too slow, and creating these other domains involves too much technical work. It does in fact happen: the multitude of 4chan clones is clear-cut proof that this phenomenon exists, but there seems to be a correlation between posting speed and the frequency with which splintering occurs.

My own past with Sydlexia is another point of evidence towards this: we only experienced a serious schism once it was clear to everyone who even remotely cared that we were perilously close to community death. The amount of momentum required to successfully forge a new forum--with other people--is just too much for it to work, even if it’s not strictly impossible. This fact leads me to suggest a rule (which, knowing the internet, has probably already been postulated approximately 400 billion times): the rate at which an internet community can splinter into derivative groups is proportionate to the speed of communication.

All of this may lead one to wonder: if the splitting of a community is so common, then why bother trying to attach meaning to associating with specific people? Indeed, I wonder about that idea a lot already, questioning why it is people seem to be as nonchalante about the loss of community members most of the time. Mines provided an interesting if somewhat troublesome answer: for him, at least, it’s less about the concept of forming a community and more about forming a space.

When I asked for clarification, he described it thusly: a community is based on people and the connections they form, whereas a space is based more on the feeling or atmosphere. He mentioned that, despite the milieu of mspa-lit changing drastically over time, the atmosphere of the place feels basically the same as it has for the last couple years. While the exact details of this could be thoroughly debated, upon some reflection I feel like this is actually a pretty accurate assessment.

However, I take issue with the idea that the state can be derived without people. It’s easy enough to say that the atmosphere of a place is why you go somewhere, but the atmosphere is typically informed and cultivated by the kind of people who go to it. It’s entirely possible to manufacture a desired feeling or tone regardless of who is participating, but when that happens it usually just feels forced and fake; in the big picture this is only really successful in driving people away. I don’t think I need to explain why this defeats the purpose of having an internet group in the first place.

Nothing more for today.

---

23^rd of September 2018

There’s been a small but noticeable shift in the population of mspa-lit: in addition to others, there’ve been two people who suddenly showed up and are participating a notable amount in the proceedings. In a time of bereft of substantial developments of any kind, it’s nice to see that there are still newer people showing up and participating. The people joining us recently have been ᛈᛟᛏᚨᛏᛟ and Vitis.

ᛈᛟᛏᚨᛏᛟ, runic letters equating to “Potato” (which I will strictly use to refer to this person from here forward), appears to be an extreme cynic. So far they remind me heavily of tmtmtl for various reason: they express significant disdain for most things we end up discussing in the chat; or, rarely enough they will latch onto something, usually highly specific, silly, or otherwise mundane, and designate it as cool. These behaviors makes very little sense to me and leads me to believe that, also like tmtmtl, Potato is a younger member.

Vitis is also highly cynical, although this manifests in a slightly different form. The few interactions I’ve had with them so far suggests that they are a Carlarc-esque shitter, although at this point they appear far less blatant or frequent in their shitposting; while Carl is typically pretty shameless when he engages in his usual manner of fuckery, Vitis appears to be markedly more mild, or at least is showing some restrain as they get used to the group.

Both of these users appeared almost from nowhere a few nights ago, and I first took notice of them on the 21st. I’m actually somewhat taken aback at how quickly they’ve inserted themselves into our fold, although they have done it in the ideal sense: rather than making a big deal of participating and joining up, which is often seen as attention seeking behavior, they have simply moved in and made themselves at home. If they have questions they either work to inform themselves, unless it is sufficiently confusing, in which case the “lurk moar” rule is willingly suspended.

Based on this, should they choose to continue talking here, I assume they will be well-accepted. Their attitude is definitely fitting: we are more or less infamous for our collectively negative appraisal of most things, or for being too harsh on stuff we talk about. In true form, both Potato and Vitis have been very quick to lambast most of the topics they’ve been around for, including HPMOR and video games such as Kerbal Space Program or especially Pokemon. If they continue at this rate I have no doubt they’ll become recognized fixtures in the community.

In the last couple of days a few remnants of ideas from earlier this year were brought up: less relevant of the two I can think of is the Homestuck Zine, which appears to have been completely dropped. This was brought to my attention yesterday when Makin posted a screenshot of the Twitter page, saying they were “in the process of wrapping things up,” and I briefly got excited. That’s before I realized the tweet in question was from the middle of June.

Since then there has been absolutely mention I can find of the Zine. It would be one thing if, after the initial announcement, there had been nothing; the tweet previously linked suggests they got far enough in the process that they were finishing up the issue, and then it was just scrapped for some reason. The What Pumpkin staff releases all happening months prior, even before the Zine was first announced. What on earth happened that the Zine just completely disappeared? Revlar’s initial prediction that it was all a simple scam may turn out to be correct¹²¹ .

Similarly, and arguably more importantly, what about the Friendsim art contest? The winner of the contest has not received any kind of word from What Pumpkin, and after so long it honestly feels like they’re just not going to bother. After this topic came up the other night, I distinctly remember Mines commenting: “I just want Homestuck to die already / It’s been so mismanaged,” a sentiment that is slowly but surely spreading throughout the server as a whole. Resentment towards whoever may be responsible is rising and it’s eventually going to culminate as something terrible.

This led to an overall discussion of the state of the fandom now and in the past. I started reading Homestuck back in late 2012, although my participation online was sparing enough that I know little about the state of things back then. The number of people around who were solidly present in those days is gradually decreasing, as time goes by and interest in the comic wanes. I’ve been under the impression that the zenith of the fandom was throughout late 2012 and 2013, but Tensei--obviously present for that time period--insists that this interpretation is incorrect.

Instead, he says that 2012 by itself was the peak in fan participation and comic activity. While it’s trivial to corroborate the rate of the comic at any given time, I tried to argue that the fandom still had serious momentum even when the comic started to slow down. Other people present argued that, once the pauses and hiatuses began, the relative activity of the fandom was basically a flatline compared to before--even just a short time after Hussie initiated whatever pauses, the fandom was apparently dead by the end of 2013.

This raises an interesting question, for me at least: if the fandom was pronounced dead in 2013, then what on earth could it be considered now, five years later? Further, if the law of averages says that the more “normal” fans (some would say “less obsessed”) all disappear over time, then are we starting to reach the tail end of those who are properly invested in the comic? How much longer will this continue until even the most ardent among us are dispirited and give up the chase?

Then again, I’m sure people have been saying such things or asking these questions since even before the comic ended, and there’s still a lot of us here. Maybe our general willingness to discuss things together will prevail over the ever-increasing gap in content? I’m reminded of the fact that Avatar: The Last Airbender is receiving a Netflix adaptation that will probably revitalize their fandom for at least a while, depending on the overall quality.

Comparing Homestuck to The Last Airbender might be disingenuous, but what I’m suggesting is that something similar may happen: perhaps Hussie will finally begin a new comic or there will be some sort of development that kind of reinvigorates us for a while. I joked the other night that WP or whoever is making decisions might be trying to starve us on purpose, making sure we fade out before releasing actually new content in order to start the fandom anew. Actually believing this would be kooky beyond simple conspiracy theorism, of course, but it’s a more palatable explanation than simply “nothing is happening right now”. It’s distressing to be told how far we’ve fallen.

This discussion about the state of the fandom actually began on the 22nd and carried over into the next day. A more in-depth examination of the change in activity involves looking at the actual things the fandom produces and how popular they get. There are relatively few things from the modern day that can be said to approach any level of true popularity in the fandom as a whole, but there are multiple examples of content from 2012-2014 that are still fondly remembered by nearly everyone who was around back then.

Even I, with my minimal contact with the rest of the fandom at that time, can very rapidly identify stuff like the old Octopimp videos (which the creator now looks back on with some shame, if I remember correctly) and the Homestuck Gif Party videos (which nearly everyone who knows what they are cringes over nowadays). More positive examples include the beloved Lullaby for Gods video. The underlying point of providing these old things I’m sharing is that nothing quite like them is produced by Homestuck fans anymore.

I don’t believe anything in the fandom will ever again approach the level of recognition that these things did in the past; the crux of this argument is that this would be true even if things made now are of similar or better quality, which is a really important litmus test for the overall strength of a group. This leads into one of the explanations for why the fandom has declined so much: the obvious reasoning we’ve discussed before is that the source material has dried up and we’re basically starving to death, but we mentioned that the style of the comic--bearing in mind that it was started in 2009--simply isn’t palatable to modern-day culture.

There is serious merit to the idea that the same comic released in 2019 would simply not attain the level of popularity because the culture from now as compared to 2009 is just too radically different. User5 mentioned: “literally every single character / is some fkin stereotype of how ppl talked in 2000-2009 / … / its just more sanitized and weird / … / [now] people are alot less genuine and therefore alot less verifably fking stupid”. Talking on the internet seems to require a lot more appreciation for nuance and sarcasm now than it did a decade ago; thus the argument goes that now people are far less able to relate or appreciate the characters and their behavior.

I disagree with this on a general basis. It’s certainly true in specific communities, ours being a good example, but I wouldn’t expect this to be the case ubiquitously. I suspect that too many users here are having their behaviors erroneously informed by 4chan or other websites that are purposefully cynical/ironic/deceptive to the extreme, which colors their perception of everywhere else. Not to suggest, of course, that the internet at large is completely innocent or naive, but rather that most internet communities will consist of a mix of both, which should be expected. If there’s another explanation for why Homestuck has decreased in popularity so much aside from simple decay, I don’t believe this one is particularly accurate.

Nothing more for today.

---

24^th of September 2018

Yesterday we mildly began a more concerted effort to actually handle slurs to err on the side of caution from Discord. Makin has repeatedly asked in the past what Discord’s policies actually are regarding censorship or guidelines for handling slurs, but they’ve apparently always waffled on the answer somewhat. Instead of waiting for any sort of hammer to drop, he’s decided that we should take the initiative on this matter and fix things up ourselves.

I’ve actually been waiting for something like this for a while: Makin enlisted the help of DeltaPsi and Ceru in getting rid of all instances of slurs (the list of which is fairly arbitrary but culturally sensible), although the question of what to do after that has remained unanswered for the most part. Was the cleanup all that needed to be done or should we be more proactive?

If we’re speaking terms of quantity, the number of slurs wasn’t even that great in the big picture. I don’t have access to the raw numbers since most of the posts are now deleted, but the number of posts that had slurs in them probably didn’t even come to a tenth of a percent, which suggests that the behavior was rare enough to not merit much of a response to begin with. That having been said, what we’ve done already chafes with some of the other mods.

Tensei, WoC, and Toast have all very strongly spoken against this censorship; WoC in particular is not happy at being rendered largely unable to inflict his more choice words on people, but in the end he’s submitted to the change as well. They were even more vehemently against my idea, which was to take it a step further for altgen and proactively ban slurs from being spoken there.

Altgen has been a problem in this way even when we were less concerned with this in the past, so it felt like a natural next step to prohibit them from saying them now. I didn’t expect my mandate to be so controversial since it was only one (evidently problematic) channel, but Tensei was strongly outspoken against my plan anyway. After an appeal, Makin basically said: “I don’t care about this one way or the other, let Drew handle it if he wants”, and that was that. I don’t anticipate it’ll be much of a problem anyway, but we’ll see how this works out.

Later in the day, there was a remarkable development on the subreddit: a fellow named /u/XanDavis came and gave an impromptu AMA. They explained--and gave proof that--they were previously known as Mayonaka on the MSPA forums. This is notable because Mayonaka was a user who inspired an entire segment of Homestuck, which I will explain shortly. Back when it was just Problem Sleuth, Hussie would let people pay him to draw their ideas and make short comics out of them.

Mayonaka was around during this time and decided they had an idea they wanted to see Hussie write and draw out, so they forked over the cash and described an idea called the Midnight Crew. Later when Homestuck became a thing, glimpses of the Midnight Crew were jokingly shown in certain panels, and then the first Intermission was dedicated solely to a story about them. This eventually looped back into the comic proper, and is now regarded as “one of the best elements of the entire story” by a significant proportion of fans.

In the AMA, Mayonaka describes these circumstances and then elaborates further, explaining that after the Intermission started they wanted to make a sort of prequel to the events concerning the Midnight Crew in Homestuck. Apparently this fancomic attracted a lot of attention and sparked some serious controversy, so they eventually deleted the entire thing. Now only a few sparse images on the Internet Archive can be found; by the author’s admission, the rest of it is completely lost unless some random happened to archive it by chance.

Mayonaka showing up to talk on the subreddit is our equivalent of one of the Knights of the Round Table appearing and casually giving out details that Arthurian scholars have been debating for centuries¹²². In one fell swoop they put to rest a question of a continuity problem concerning a pendant that appears in the Intermission but was retconned out later, something that has been a curiosity for us for literal years. Seeing this figure appear and give out such details like so much candy is really cool in a silly way.

Sadly, Mayonaka doesn’t seem interested in Homestuck at all now. After questions from myself and MoreEpicThanYou, they mentioned that the comic got too complicated after a while and they stopped bothering to keep up with it. They also mentioned that they were “looking forward to Andrew’s game”; I don’t know if they keep up with modern developments like we do, but we didn’t have the heart to tell them it’s probably not happening. This does kind of underscore the musing from yesterday about what we must be like in comparison to an “average fan” obsession wise, but if one thinks about it for too long it actually paints a fairly grim picture.

Nothing more for today.

---

28^th of September 2018

For the last few days I’ve been musing on the very noticeable decline of interest in mspa-lit. After keeping track of discussion in #general and #altgen for a while, it feels like those channels are self-sustaining enough that it doesn’t really matter, but mspa-lit’s level of activity has been dropping gradually as time goes by. It’s hard to say conclusively without the actual numbers to visualize the trend, but the feeling from earlier this year is back in full swing. Perhaps this will change in future months; I can only hope for such an outcome.

A conversation we had today briefly led to discussing SPAT: tmtmtl mentioned that it gives us a greater sense of community, which I misinterpreted initially. I thought she was saying that SPAT is one of the only things left that’s keeping the channel alive and I was instantly filled with a profound sense of disgust at the idea. I used to say a while ago in this document that I don’t want to affect the flow of community events with this document, and the idea that it would continue past its expiration date just because of what I’m doing is ironically revolting to consider--it made me feel like I was interfering and meddling in things.

Returning to the original point though, she claimed that these updates are simply something that the group looks forward to, and I appreciate that perspective a lot. I hope that this document deepens their appreciation for each other, if nothing else; the chances of my writing actually being picked up by anyone in the future is slim to none, and I hold to no illusions that it will keep the memory of this place alive except for maybe a few extremely eccentric people interested in the remarkably obscure.

More realistically, I would just like everyone who I have described here to be able to remember their experience of this place fondly. Sometimes more than others it’s no doubt hard to achieve that, especially between pointless drama and a steadily decreasing interest in the thing that brought us together; occasionally, though, there is a fine balance that leads to golden moments, filled with just the right topic to engage people and the perfect level of banter for everyone to enjoy. The less enjoyable times are important in their own way, but as long as we can remember the reason we endured then it will all have been worth it.

I believe that, however briefly, we had such a moment today. This was perhaps aided by the first bit of anything that we could reasonably call news in a long time: James Roach released a track on Tumblr that was originally going to be featured in Hiveswap Act 3, then was put into the end of Act 2, but he wanted the full thing to be released; thus this post. Nested at the end is some information about Hiveswap’s developmental status.

As we feared: “we’re basically just on hiatus rn”. James posits that this was implied by the announcements that came before, and while the post is not fresh in my memory this is disappointing to hear. I was afraid that there would be a lot of negative response to this, but it seems as if everyone who’s bothered to comment is being supportive, thanking James for breaking the many months-long silence on the topic. It’s really gratifying to hear just about anything about Hiveswap from one of the few who would reasonably know anything about it.

After the post came out, Makin preemptively forfeited his bet with WoC about the release of Act 2, saying: “remember I am always right / except when I thought act 2 would come out this year / that was a critical miss on my part”. WoC demanded compensation in the form of a video game on Steam, or perhaps a Team Fortress 2 hat. After some consideration he settled on Fallout: New Vegas, and in this manner the bargain was upheld.

James’ post comes out after some news from Viz yesterday, which is subtle but possibly important: the release date for Homestuck Book 3 was originally October 25th, but it has been pushed up to the 23rd. Even if you aren’t familiar with Homestuck itself, if you’ve been paying attention to this document at all then you should understand the significance of toying with specific dates by now.

Naturally, the change has led to a lot of speculation over Hussie saying there would be “some news” later this year over the status of the epilogue. October 25th is the second to last Meme Date in the comic, followed only by November 11th. There is also potential for Christmas or New Year’s, but we consider those times far less than the ones that have immediate, canonical relevance to the story. June 12th this year was completely devoid of any news whatsoever, which played a significant part in our general dissatisfaction now.

The release being moved up from the meme date, while admittedly not being much to go on, is an impossible-to-miss sign for basically everyone who cared enough to join this server. As soon as the change was noticed, it set off a flurry of excitement; some are actually looking forward to anything, although most of us I suspect are still being cautious. I certainly have no intention of getting my hopes up for an update of some sort, as nice as it would be.

I don’t want to spend too much time on this topic, but recently we had a run-in with an older, intensely ignominious figure from our community. For those reading this that are aware of what I’m referencing, I’m personally requesting a moratorium on the subject’s details. For the purposes of this document, I’m only commenting on it at all to avoid confusion regarding past versions: I have scrubbed all instances of a particular name because the person it belonged to was fabricated. They deserve no recognition of any kind, and in all instances where I must refer to them I will name them only as recursiveSlacker. This is retroactive as well: the first mention of recursiveSlacker is now marked by a footnote in the entry for 14th of July, 2017.

For something less horrible to write about concerning the general goings-on of our community, it is high time that I described some more of WoC’s behavior. WoC runs a comic that he has literally titled Low Effort Comics, of which he delights in posting updates for to people with a ping or a DM. It’s actually been pleasant witnessing the steady increase of his artistic prowess over time. Occasionally he’ll put his skills to work making edits of other comics like Dilbert, which are often used to poke fun at various people in the community, especially myself and Makin.

Recently however, he’s just started posting screenshots from an older comic known as Bloom County. There’s a character known as Bill the Cat who is, in a word, a complete moron in every conceivable way¹²³. There is a specific image of Bill the Cat that WoC has started posting whenever he deems the current conversation or participant pointless and meandering. As one might imagine, the mere words “Bwong bwong bwong twang” have become a point of extreme annoyance.

WoC and Toast have both been doing this recently, where they seem more and more determined to shut down people or topics they don’t care about. This is being done at the risk of making things fatally boring--even more so than it already is--and just making it generally less worth talking. It’s an aggravating habit that they seem completely devoid of remorse for. I’m not sure if they’re attempting to improve things in a perverse way or if they’re simply trying to squeeze some blood out of this joyless stone in their fashion.

Toast, to his credit, seems to realize that he’s having an adverse effect on the quality of the place lately. Without going into too much detail, he asked for some advice on how to improve. I’m afraid that I don’t actually have the tools or experience to effectively help him, at least not in the way he’s describing. The fact that he’s asking at all is important though, and I hope that he’ll reach out to other people to hear what they have to say.

Too often it feels like people here trying to be genuinely interested in stuff get shut down. Sometimes people end up killing conversations prematurely because they’re not personally interested, or they do something so inconvenient that it ruins what would have been an amicable topic. Nat did something like this the other night, where she brought up a genuinely cool coincidence (“avogadro’s constant times boltzmann’s constant = ideal gas constant”).

I commented lightly on this and she took the opportunity to make fun of me for the perceived ignorance, which succeeded in immediately annoying me mostly. I’m not sure if she was going for that necessarily, but it is one of the countless examples of this sort of thing: an ill-timed joke or general mean-spiritedness, whichever it actually is, ruins a legitimate interaction. I’ve seen the same process play out dozens of times now.

Not any one person is responsible for this problem, but there are some who are more guilty of doing it than others. Regardless of who’s to blame, when this happens so many times it becomes a natural response to want to visit other places. I’ve been checking out other channels and servers more and more commonly over the last month; the population of our community seems to drift more often than it did before, with old people leaving at random and new people coming in, or even vice versa sometimes. The worry of activity is almost certainly just in my head again, brought on by long days where I think too much. The only thing I can consciously grasp that suggests the opposite is that Tipsy has recently started speaking again, which for some reason I take as a good omen.

I’m sure it’s clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that I want this place to endure, and I think it easily could if we just had a little bit more to go on than practically nothing. The news post from today led to a small but noticeable burst in activity. However, it couldn’t keep up for more than half an hour or so; the question here is in sustainability, and whether or not we’ll be able to keep a hold of ourselves for much longer.

In one of these related servers¹²⁴, I was talking about how fearful I am of an actual collapse of our community because the fear is more real now than it has been in months. Tensei eventually commented: “embrace the fucking mono no aware”, a Japanese term for the “awareness of impermanence”. It suggests that accepting the transient nature of things is important, and while it is sad that things will pass, there’s not a lot we can do to resist it as time goes by.

I recognize that this is ultimately true for us as well--I’ve consciously and unconsciously considered the idea for a long time now--but it doesn’t make it any easier to accept that this place is going to go away eventually. All I can say is that I really hope this outcome is a long time away, as long as it reasonably can be given the circumstances. I might be surprised yet--activity seems to fluctuate right now, and there could be a renaissance of some sort if the right circumstances arise.

Such a revival is really unlikely at this point, but even without one I don’t think that’ll change things for me very much beyond being increasingly wistful. I effectively made my decision a while ago: even if the community does dry up someday, I’m okay with staying until the very end. This place, the events that have happened here, and especially the people that inhabited it are things I don’t want to forget, and I’ll do what I can to preserve them.

Nothing more for today¹²⁵.

---

29^th of September 2018

Today there was a pretty considerable altercation between Tera and Tensei. Apparently some potent discourse happened involving the word “trap” again; I was busy at the time so I didn’t get to witness any of it personally. Tera claimed that it asked Tensei to stop using the word and that he refused, accusing Tera of virtue signaling. As one might expect, Tera became rather upset at this and decided to stop using mspa-lit as a result.

Naturally I was pretty irate at this turn of events and, as usual, decided to weigh in to try and help--I wanted to fix this unfortunate turn of events. After confronting Tensei he claimed that none of what Tera mentioned had actually transpired, but when I asked for evidence he said that “the log is right there” and I should go check it myself; Tensei was completely unwilling to engage on the matter because he thought it was unworthy of concern in the first place.

I was initially baffled by this and unsure how to proceed, but after some consideration it only served to make me angrier. Tera was somewhat vague in its explanations, if indeed it offered any, and Tensei was loathe to treat the matter with any sort of respect or concern. In a last ditch effort to try and get the two to reconcile I bridged the conversation in the modchat, but neither of them really cared for some reason.

At this point I had a vision of myself struggling futilely for hours or even days to fix a problem that neither party actually cared about, and as a result of this I suddenly gave up. It is possible that it really wasn’t that big of a deal--although the intense lack of respect or willingness to cooperate seemed itself to be a huge problem--but all of the underlying tension of the previous few weeks came to a head and I dropped the topic almost violently.

In truth, I was very disappointed in both of them. Tera seemed unwilling or afraid to face the issue, which is more understandable, but Tensei was utterly dismissive of any ill-feelings he may have generated. He often touts a personal philosophy that seems driven by self-interest, which by itself is not necessarily bad, but occasionally I can’t help but see it as full-blown selfishness.

I don’t really want to pass judgment on either of them because my assessments are flawed in a variety of ways. But, regarding the incident today, I think that I’m allowed to be disappointed. Two people that I trust to behave like reasonable adults both displayed an inability to act in responsible, considerate ways. At a certain point there’s nothing I can really do with that, especially since neither of them perceive it as a bigger problem; normally I would throw myself into the middle of this to make the people involved reconcile, but this time it’s not worth the anguish.

My decision to remain uninvolved paid off anyhow: Tera started reusing mspa-lit later the same evening, calling itself “weak-willed” or some such. While I’m glad it’s decided to stay, the development also served to heighten my frustration in a subtle way. How many times have I involved myself in the affairs of other people for no real reason? This outcome makes me wonder if my efforts in similar predicaments have been more or less wasted.

At the end of the day, though, I’ll settle for Tera being back. The rest of the day was filled with a more interesting, pleasant development anyway: Makin found a Homestuck-related Bay 12 Games Forum thread from mid 2009. Funnily, Putnam can be seen speaking at various points, but the main attraction is the enormous quantity of art and fan-theories. It’s basically a mega-thread that spans literally from the end of July 29th in 2009 to the current day (the last post at the time of writing being May 4th, 2018).

While it’s certainly not the MSPA Forums, this thread provides an excellent snapshot of the state of the fandom from even the earliest parts of the comic. Because the thread also has persisted to the modern day, it’s useful for tracking the evolution of fanart and commentary. Since Homestuck ended in 2016 the thread has been mostly abandoned, with only a few posts each year keeping it afloat.

Before that though, everything from the beginning of the thread up to a few months after the comic ended is extremely dense: there’s literally 3,522 pages with 15 comments each, meaning there’s over 52,000 posts in that thread alone over the years. I haven’t really trawled through it myself (and can’t really think of anyone who would have the time to do so), but I imagine there’s a lot of forgotten gold resting there.

Indeed, so entertaining were the contents that Makin and a few others were consistently posting art from the thread for several hours. Most of the images were actually quite interesting: the quality varied considerably, but most of it was clearly earnest and some of it was even quite well done. There were many pictures that portrayed ideas or events that fans thought would happen; most of these ideas turned out to be incorrect of course, but it illustrates the mentality of the fandom in its youth.

For a long time Homestuck operated on a basis of expanding scope: each development in the story brought up more questions than it answered, and everyone who was a fan enjoyed hashing out possible answers to those questions. The intense theorycrafting is something that most older fans of Homestuck remember fondly, and giving the thread even a cursory glance indicates that the viewpoint is well deserved (from user Neruz on October 18th, 2009: “Nothing is coincidence in MSPA. Nothing.”).

One of the parts of discovering this thread I find most important is what it implies for the fandom as a whole. In keeping with the nostalgia of old theorycrafting, this lone thread on a completely unrelated website is a visible example of the kind of energy and intensity that fans had for the comic so long ago. Makin once said a while back that losing the MSPA Forums was probably the greatest blow to fandom history; based off of this thread alone I imagine he’s right.

Nothing more for today.

---

30^th of September 2018

Just a scant couple of hours before I woke up today, mspa-lit witnessed the return of a number of people who have been missing for quite some time now. I missed the first portion of it of course, but it lasted even after I managed to get involved: Minish, CookieFonster, and Yaz all popped onto the server and started a conversation that truly did feel like old times for us.

A lot of this consisted of really casual, lighthearted mockery--Tensei at one point remarked, “isnt that a proverb or something / trouble never comes alone”--and Makin feigned dismay at their return. It turned out Minish was celebrating his birthday, which is the reason he and Cookie came back apparently. Yaz ended up coming back when they heard a “reunion” was taking place and wanted to join in on the fun.

Other people besides me were fairly happy with the change, no matter if it was temporary. Bambosh remarked on “all the friends we made along the way / its like christmas”. There was much ribbing about the festivity, Makin at one point saying “I’m out”. Minish jumped on the opportunity to say we had unlocked “The Drew Ending” of the server, as opposed to “The Makin Ending”, an overt reference to visual novels and their pathed storytelling.

At one point Nights made an errant comment: “why is there like a highschool reunion happening here”, which is honestly a fitting title for all of this. A similar event is actually what inspired me to get more involved on the server in the first place; on one of the very first nights I had joined, I was enamored with an interaction between Toast and older regulars CynicallyCritical and Aradia, among others; their familiarity and in-jokes reminded me heavily of what I liked so much about the Sydlexia community.

Just as back then, though, eventually the event today ended. Yaz and then Minish left the server once again, although Cookiefonster appears to be staying for now. I’m sure something will cause him to go once more eventually, but in the meantime it’s nice to have another oldie around. There’s no telling when the next Highschool Reunion will happen, but it will undoubtedly be just as entertaining.

Nothing more for today.

---

We had a conversation today about the nature of the fandom as it is now; this isn’t exactly rare, but today the conversation stuck out to me for a few reasons. As a point of reiteration, when we talk about “the fandom” it’s usually more in reference to the HSD than to the holistic fandom, including 4chan and Tumblr (what vestiges may be left in those places anyway). To our knowledge, we’re the only Homestuck community left of this size and/or activity, so it’s hard to gauge reactions from other communities that may still be out there.

At any rate, we were discussing what we think of the fandom in this era where Friendsim is the only regular content we receive. Griever spoke of the fact that we’re basically in an obscenely large gap between Hiveswap episodes, calling the default state of our existence “haitus culture on steroids.” Anyone familiar with the history of the fandom will understand the truth of this: we have grown increasingly bitter or jaded, and have started latching onto any scrap of news we can get our hands on.

In regards to the Friendsims, my understanding is that most people really don’t care about them--they have turned into a fairly pedestrian affair as time has gone by. However, Griever also pointed out that “... it at least recaptures like / the tiniest fraction of update culture / even if it evaporates in minutes”. If one takes a peek in #friendsim shortly after a new episode has released, they will see a torrent of people’s reactions to the content. This is indeed reminiscent of the fandom back when Homestuck was ongoing, but now it is a mere shadow of what we had before.

At one point in this conversation I made a comparison of my own. Update culture in antiquity was not unlike what made Twitch Plays Pokemon so entertaining: Homestuck itself was a manic thing when it was still updating regularly, though it was meted out over a great period of time. TPP by contrast was an incredible fever of excitement, if you weren’t paying attention for more than an hour it’s likely that you had missed out on something exciting.

Both Homestuck and TPP were events of unparalleled fan involvement and enthusiasm, both being great examples of lightning in a bottle. I often think that most of what we do is just waiting for the next internet phenomenon to capture that lightning. Griever pointed out that TPP is still so well remembered in general consciousness that references to it pervade every single episode of the currently ongoing Twitch marathon.

What’s so interesting about this is that, at this point, it’s been literally four and a half years since TPP’s initial run ended. Then one can look at the Homestuck fandom and see us, plodding along two years and then some since Homestuck ended. It’s been even longer than that since people ubiquitously considered the comic entertaining, and yet we continue mostly unabated.

At this point Andrew and Trickster chimed in with something I found amusing. Andrew commented, “... Homestuck isn’t what keeps us here, let’s be real.” Trickster responded, “it’s the sense of community most likely,” to which Andrew invoked a long-standing meme: “It’s literally the friendships we’ve made along the way.” Jokes aside, for most I’m sure this exchange is fairly unremarkable, but to me it was a perfect encapsulation of why this document exists.

Nothing more for today.

---

9^th of October 2018

The last week has been fairly unremarkable with few things of Big Importance or Interest occurring, if any. I was actually indisposed from real life events and unable to participate greatly for most of the time. One amusing thing took place yesterday: Makin brought up the idea of Boss’s Day, which takes place on the 16^th of October.

Tera immediately took him up on this and started making an appropriate card; he laboriously made it clear that he was really joking and didn’t expect anyone to do this, but Tera is still going along with it for fun. The idea is entertaining enough that I’ll also participate for sure, and perhaps others will as well.

Aside from this, I noticed Nat getting increasingly rude with people again. There had been a number of complaints from people that she was being particularly mean-spirited in their interactions with her. This has been a problem in the past, although when confronted on the issue she seemed unwilling to talk about it--it’s unclear whether she just does it for fun (which is almost certainly true to an extent) or if she’s stressed out from real life events (also probably true). Attempts to talk with her ended in being excessively mocked.

Unfortunately, things came to a head today after I witnessed Nat calling Trickster worthless. She was digging into him extremely hard, saying that his contribution to any and all discussion are pointless and that he would be better off removed from the chat. I’ve gotten used to her diatribes against me personally, but going after other people just because she feels they’re stupid pushed past that limit of what I was able to tolerate.

I was so annoyed with her edginess that I brought it up in the mod chat, igniting a small discussion about effectively judging when someone is “being too much of an asshole”. WoC spoke in Nat’s defense, also pointing out that Trickster sometimes participates in ways that are almost criminally stupid. Tensei was also present, but most acted vaguely aloof about the entire situation while poking fun when he could.

Makin eventually came in, and after taking all of three seconds to figure out what was going on he naturally started mocking us, and especially me for “not getting along with the children.” However, after Nat made some more characteristically inflammatory remarks, Makin swiftly changed his tune: “okay / that was edgy / I side with drew now.” It was a meme, but progress is progress I suppose.

The joking continued for a little while, but eventually he did make it clear that he wants Nat (and to some extent WoC) to stop being edgy about other people in the chat. He went so far as to lampoon himself over it: “we already have me to deal with / I don't want another person antagonizing everything / I'll just replace you if you cause more problems than you solve.” He then made a limp threat about “another reckoning” sometime soon which no one really took seriously, but nonetheless wrapped up the conversation well enough.

After the discussion in mod chat, things did in fact proceed more amiably in mspa-lit. Tera brought up naturopathy, which provided ample conversation for a while. It’s worth noting that I’m fiercely against any sort of pseudoscience or alternative medicine. However, Tera mentioned that the treatment plan typically involves massages. Tensei, ever the hedonist, said that he would have no qualms subscribing to it if it meant he could get massages out of the deal.

Makin naturally came in after a while and joined me in my crusade against naturopathy. Tmtm mentioned that he expected Makin to shove the conversation into #general, to which he replied: “I'm sorry tm this is SCIENCE AND RATIONALITY defeating dumb shit / it belongs here.” It was not unlike uniting against a common enemy: when we’re not bickering with each other, things can be great fun here. Or perhaps it’s just that I hate it when I’m the one getting ganged up on.

That having been said, the problem from earlier in the day returned not long after. Nat and WoC were both posting with such misguided aggression and rudeness that it kind of spoiled things for everyone else. They were just toeing the line that it would have been inappropriate to chastise them for it, but I was so peeved that I just decided to stop talking in the chat for the rest of the evening. If this continues then something serious will probably need to be done to get them to stop.

Nothing more for today.

---

10^th of October 2018

Nights has been consistently ramping up production of Oceanfalls over the last month or so. He’s been pointing out when his comic gets threads on /co/--an increasingly common event--and is extremely excited about the fact that random people are talking about his work. For him, this is certainly good motivation to continue making Oceanfalls, and it’s nice to see his efforts being rewarded this way.

This lead to a conversation today where Makin spoke very frankly about fanventures and webcomics in general, to the negative. He posited that Night would probably not complete the comic: “I expect oceanfalls to fail because even hussie abandoned jailbreak / and adventures have a really really bad record / it's statistics.” Nights was pretty confused as to why he brought this up, which served as the primary conflict of the evening.

In situations like this it’s usually a kind of pointless tug-of-war between the two people talking, because it is a battle of ideology with no substance underlying it. However, in this case 1011686 has collected evidence about this very topic. They’ve compiled an enormous amount of data on fanventures and is essentially the resident expert on the topic.

Thus, 1011686 lent their opinion on the matter: “well saying you expect an adventure to fail because most of them fail is actually an accurate statement / although you would be expecting every adventure to fail in that case with no exceptions,” to which Makin responded: “I kind of am / nights just thinks I have something [against his] baby in particular / ... / what you call biased for failure or whatever / is just a premortem analysis.” This did little to mollify Nights, as one might expect; if anything this only made him more frustrated on the matter.

That having been said, after seeing this happen before it wouldn’t surprise me if Makin is actually trying to provoke Nights a little. He’s not trying to spark hostility, which would be completely stupid, but rather I think he’s trying to induce a sense of stubbornness and determination so he’ll actually go on to finish the comic. Makin has openly used spite and annoyance to motivate people before, so it would be perfectly in keeping for him to employ the tactic here as well. Whether or not it will work in this case is something only time will tell us.

Aside from Makin’s pessimistic prediction, Oceanfalls is actually quite successful so far. The threads on /co/ are perhaps an indication of their overall popularity; if even a reclusive and generally hostile environment has people talking about your content, then you might be doing something right. More relevant to us is the webcomic’s position on MSPFA, which at the time of writing sits at the seventh most favorited fanventure on the entire website.

Nights has expressed some annoyance that his fanventure is behind a few others that are, in his opinion, extremely inactive. I’ll avoid quoting him or naming the ones he was thinking of to avoid drawing flak his way, but after some reflection I actually agree: it feels like at least some of the fanventures that are most liked have actually fallen by the wayside, being updated very infrequently if ever. With the way the system works there isn’t any ranking decay where a story falls in rankings or relevance over time; besides people manually unfavoriting, which hardly ever happens, any given fanventure could remain up potentially forever, far past the point that anyone actually cares about them.

Nights is of course extremely happy about where he is now, but wants to keep doing better and reach the top someday. However, while his aspirations are strong, he is also fearful of what may happen if he achieves her goal: “i am scared of the threads soemtimes / its very ambigious i like being out there but also sometimes its uncomfortable run of the mill 4han stuff / … / its like being noticed by someone you admired for a whilr but then you find out that they like to occasionally set thigs on fire.” He likes the attention of course, but he recognizes that it can also be dangerous.

Bam brought up a fitting example that is definitely in line with the emerging threads: Oceanfalls porn. Nights is very heavily against lewd material of most kinds, and the idea of his art and concepts being used in such a way makes him extremely uncomfortable. We haven’t played witness to every single thread to come through, but thankfully it seems as if this hasn’t happened yet. That having been said, with the internet it’s just a matter of time before rule 34 kicks in.

Nothing more for today.

---

14^th of October 2018

Today there was a rather silly altercation between Gitaxian and Revlar: they started discussing incel culture and how to address or stop it. The discourse started simply enough, but somehow ended up consuming the chat for four hours, if not more. If this wasn’t frustrating enough, it was realized quickly enough by almost everyone present that they were actually arguing in favor of the same position, and just differing on the wording.

As soon as we understood what was happening the amusement quickly turned to frustration, a pattern that displayed itself numerous times over the course of the evening. At a certain point the focus of the conversation shifted such that Revlar was attempting to convince Gitaxian that the latter had been flip-flopping on his stance throughout the discussion. The wording of this accusation grew kind of vicious--it seemed to many that Revlar was gaslighting Gitaxian about what his own position was, which offended us greatly.

Thankfully before this could get out of hand in that sense, it simply got out of hand in a less stressful capacity: eventually they resorted to a hypothetical, centering around a figure they named Pablo. The conversation instantly became much sillier, addressing how Pablo might feel in the case of being an incel and approached with certain arguments.

This was far more entertaining to everyone present, and the peanut gallery grew so fervent that the very name of the channel was changed to #mspa-pablit. I missed this entire affair unfortunately, but the impact of it was felt far and wide; many people even changed their name to some variation involving Pablo, which is pretty rare occurrence. It’s not unthinkable that the Pablo meme will persist for some time after this.

At some point there was a problem where fetish discussion broke out which was extremely denigrating towards furries, which is pretty typical for mspa-lit. Tera quickly grew upset at the insults being bandied about and mandated that all subsequent reference to the topic would merit a ban. Revlar was in the middle of typing out a comment when Tera sent the warning out, and when he posted his message he was banned as warned.

I gave Tera some praise for holding to its threat, but Revlar quickly messaged me with thorough indignance, saying he would leave the server if he wasn’t immediately unbanned. The tone that he approached me with put me off rather badly, which I didn’t hesitate to tell him. I was afraid that it would escalate from there but we both managed to calm down. I talked him down from leaving while trying to explain why his initial response was inappropriate, and I think there was some success in the reconciliation.

He apologized for his actions, which was greatly heartening to me, and as was appropriate I conveyed that Tera should unban him. I hope in the future he won’t be so quick to anger when something trivial like this happens. Still, the overall tone of the conversation gives me some pause; I know Revlar can be perfectly reasonable when he’s in a good mood, but sometimes it feels like I must walk on eggshells to keep his good mood intact. I really do hope that any further conflicts with him will be minor, if they exist at all.

Nothing more for today.

---

15^th of October 2018

There was another silly mess I wasn’t around for, unfortunately. Discord recently released a new “slow mode” feature that forces people to send messages only so often, one message every x seconds depending on what channel operators deem wise. Makin turned this on as a test and forgot about it, going to bed and leaving it on all night. Naturally there was some confusion, but when people realized what was going on they immediately began trying to break it.

This led to some amazing displays of munchkinry: the entire channel was laid to waste and turned into an altgen clone as people messed with the system. The specific example given to me after the fact was Skyplayer, wherein she started posting pictures of some commentary from the latest Homestuck book that inflamed a historically contentious topic. The results were about what one might expect.

As an exceedingly brief explanation, the characters in Homestuck are “related” through strange narrative machinations, but are not actually related in any conventional sense. This is briefly teased in the comic itself where the characters flirt with each other before realizing it could be construed as incestuous. As with any social topic like this, there is fierce debate in the fandom over whether or not such a romance would be illicit.

This all having been said, the commentary recently released put that debate to rest in a very blunt manner. It simply says that “something happened between them”, although it is ambiguous on what that something might be or whether or not the statement itself is a joke. Returning to the evening at hand, Skyplayer was essentially posting that piece of commentary over and over again, effectively mocking those on both sides of the issue.

Predictably the channel was thrown into total chaos, remaining that way until Makin returned later and undid slow mode. Nights later confirmed--quietly--that the related Tumblr tag for the ship in question had positively exploded a few days ago because of the very commentary Sky had been spamming. It’s a little surprising that the news took so long to reach us, although it was bound to happen sooner or later.

In a perverse sense, I’m actually amused greatly by this development. While our group may be relatively active, the fandom at large has had basically no cause for controversy or furious discussion in a very long time. Seeing the brief burst in activity was something like watching a dormant volcano tremble ever so slightly. The fact that it all happened because of this particular topic only served to make the drama that much more entertaining, although I’m sure many would openly disagree with that.

Nothing more for today.

---

16^th of October 2018

Not a lot to speak of today, but something really nice to note: we did end up going through with the Boss’s Day celebration to some extent. A fair few people in the modchat made mock cards for Makin, some with more effort than others but all entertaining, to show their “appreciation” for his lordship over us all. Makin got a kick out of the different cards he received, and those of us who participated had a pretty good time as well. It was otherwise a pretty unremarkable day, but it was very nice to share in some lightheartedness together.

Nothing more for today.

---

18^th of October 2018

In contrast to the last entry, the only thing worth describing today was a fight with Revlar that ended disastrously. The incident involving Revlar from the 14th was mockingly brought up; WoC and Tera were--to my perception--lightly making fun of him of for the way he had responded, although not mentioning him by name. I joined in on the fun, defending Revlar against their mockery and lightly drubbing him when I thought it was fine, but when Revlar started participating in the conversation his responses were filled with rage.

I don’t think any of us really understood it immediately when he joined the conversation, but he was unutterably pissed off that we had started speaking about him in such vague terms. I’ve thought about it a lot since it happened, and I can’t tell if he misunderstood what we were trying to do or if he did understand and he had a fundamental problem with the concept. Whichever was the case, he became so angry that I was genuinely afraid of him in some capacity; I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation like it on Discord before.

After some back and forth, naturally he left the server. He made a comment near the very end saying that he knew coming back was a bad idea, that he knew it was just going to be a huge waste of time. I’m not sure how much of it was genuine and how much of it was just the anger talking. I was also upset and angry, but after cooling off I started to think about where the fault really lay for all of it.

This is one of the many times where I don’t really trust myself to say with certainty who’s at fault. My tendency is to try and see the interplay, where usually both people involved in a fight are at fault for various reasons (depending on how utilitarian or humanitarian you are). I also wanted to extend that idea here, where I was at fault for teasing Revlar but can’t help feeling that his response was disproportionate. A few others I asked in confidence agreed with that idea, but I still don’t feel comfortable saying in a final way, “This is where the blame lies.” It feels kind of disrespectful in a way.

The important thing from today is that I don’t think Revlar is going to come back, probably ever. Many of us said that last time and he did eventually, which suggests that time really does heal all wounds. Somehow it feels different now, and all I know for sure is that I regret that things have gone in this direction.

There are some other things that are ruined by Revlar leaving. He was the GM for a tabletop game that myself, Gnawms, Tmtml, Niklink, and Barry were all participating in which will almost certainly die now, and he was no doubt involved in variety of other things. Yet, all of that is kind of secondary to the idea that upsets me the most about this encounter: he felt so upset at what was happening that he no longer felt like he could stay.

At that point it becomes a question of, “Is that perception reasonable?” and this is one of the occasions where I can’t think of any answer. Nothing more for today.

---

21^st of October 2018

Today we discussed some threads about Homestuck on 4chan where the HSD was specifically brought up. Since mid 2016, Homestuck threads on any of 4chan’s boards are usually cut short, presumably because of some sort of janitorial bias against them. Today though, one thread in particular managed to achieve a far longer duration than normal. It was at the very tail end of this thread in which the HSD and some people on it were brought up by name.

Discussion of the thread in question was kind of vague and short-lived whenever it came up, which was weird to me. It got posted in a few related servers and in a couple channels on the HSD itself, but no one was talking about it at great length. Tensei pointedly brought it up to me during the day and I took a look through it myself; the references to the HSD and a few mods were mostly amusing, at least at first.

One poster ended up making some really disturbing claims: they were allegations that a member of the mod staff (who will purposefully remain unnamed to avoid wrongful witch hunting) was engaging in “recruiting teens and kids into some kind of pedophilia ring”. Naturally this was extremely alarming, and led to a couple tense reactions: I reviewed the thread entirely to try and get more information, eventually concluding that the poster in question was grossly misinformed or purposefully trying to slander the mod in question.

At one point I posited that it’s kind of pointless to take anything on 4chan seriously. Tensei instead claimed: “just because its 4chan thats saying that your house is smoking doesnt mean that its not on fire”. This was ominous to me, but I can’t help feeling that it’s silly to view information shared on 4chan with anything other than enormous skepticism--there are too many idiots masquerading as people who have all the facts, or even intentionally trying to stir trouble, to accept any of it as truthful.

Makin later came on and read the thread, at which point he demanded some sort of explanation from the mod being foulmouthed. Upon clarification from them and clarification from others of us, Makin agreed that it was most likely someone trying to stir trouble. More than likely it was recursiveSlacker seeking retaliation after their latest attempts at infiltrating the server were thwarted.

This of course segued into further conversation of what exactly recursiveSlacker has been doing. The answer is that they’ve been systematically trying to get Discord to revoke the server’s partnership status. Occasionally users will inform us that recursiveSlacker is still active on some splinter server somewhere, generally trying to stir trouble and slander the HSD or its mods in any way they possibly can.

It’s great that we don’t have to personally deal with such nonsense anymore, but these other places do now. The odious user is still in Smolmuffin’s Oven for instance, where they’ve apparently been insufferable over the topic. The Oven has collectively tired of their behavior and it recently culminated in recursiveSlacker being punished there, too. It would be better to remove the person entirely, because every minute they’re allowed to remain is another minute where innocent bystanders risk being swept up for some batshit revenge scheme, or simply to bend their ears for a while.

So that not all of this entry is awful, it would do to briefly describe a note I made about a regular here: Putnam seems to be attaining awareness of his posting habits. He’s likely been aware of them for a long time now, but this is the first I’ve personally seen him talking about it in a meta sense. Occasionally Putnam will suddenly post something completely unrelated, and all conversation will halt for a second while people are unsure of how to respond.

After some seconds of this they will either hesitatingly respond to him or move on with their original topic). Putnam openly mentioned this fact after doing so today, although it didn’t change much: he simply waited a while and then posted again, waiting for someone (who eventually was me) to bite. I guess old habits do in fact die hard.

Nothing more for today.

---

22^nd of October 2018

I mentioned that Makin casually threatened another Reckoning the other night due to generally angsty behavior, but he also mentioned that the demographics of the server have changed so much that it might be prudent to do one anyway. The conversations in mspa-lit tonight demonstrated just how true that is: the names involved in any given discussion now are really different from how this place looked even just one year ago--it’s given the entire channel a weird shift in tone and appearance.

There are of course an assortment of completely new names, including La vie est drôle (or just vie for short), Frumple, Vitis, and Potato, among others, all of whom are completely distinguishable from people who came before. These people are not the only users who show up though: the chat is still replete with older regulars. Their presence is not necessarily a constant, but there are long streaks where people like deadGuy, Tripheus, Soup_Main, SolarSail, and hb will pop up, as well as a large variety of others.

All of this is to say that mspa-lit, and indeed the HSD as a whole, is currently in some sort of strange transitory period where the culture isn’t anything like what it used to be, but it’s also not quite something solid or identifiable right now. #general was going through the same transition recently, but it has lately started to emerge with a distinct culture--it’s now largely what it used to be before #hangout was established.

From this, it can be said that the #hangout merger is more or less complete. This is further evidenced by the fact that many socially oriented topics are being openly discussed in #general regularly now: people will share selfies of themselves or pictures of their pets or places they’re going, which is the single biggest point in favor of the idea that the cultures have finally come together.

By far the most favorable thing about this outcome is the increase in #general activity; the statistics demonstrate that the activity of the now singular #general is far greater than #general and #hangout were even in tandem. Consequently, as I had argued would happen when #hangout was first deleted, this has also led to a sustained increase in users staying after they have joined. I won’t explain the hard numbers to any real effect; the important thing is that the rate of retention is massively increased, which suggests that the feedback loop I had hoped for is in place. How long it can be sustained remains to be seen, but this brings me great optimism for the future of the community.

User5 is conducting a Monsters vs Bastards competition: it consists entirely of having people vote against two different drawn pictures in a tournament style contest, and when he announced it it brought a small buzz: the distinction between monsters and bastards still isn’t really clear to us, although it probably has to do with whether or not the subject is an animal or creature. If it is then it’s probably a monster, but if it’s a human then it’s probably a bastard. We’re still not sure to be honest.

User5’s continued presence is something of a surprise, but also pleasing. At one point he made a comment about the fact that he’s still talking here: “i came here to troll u not become one of u,” which was extremely amusing to hear. The statement actually reminded me faintly of the original magic that I became fascinated with in this server, and especially mspa-lit: there seems to be a distinct capacity to convert people into regulars even if they weren’t terribly interested in participating at first.

People do of course leave on occasion, but as I pointed out earlier in this entry there always seems to be new people to talk to and discuss things with. The community has some sort of magnetic property to it that draws people in; this isn’t true for some of course, but the idea generally holds up. Explaining why this is the case is beyond me, hence why I call it magic--explaining all of the precise factors that make this place the way it is would probably take up a document that’s over 500 pages long and counting.

Later in the evening, Gitaxian started spamming the channel with a metric shit ton of conspiracy theory and “alternative science” infographics. This mostly concerned inane ideas like flat earth, alt-right Pizzagate-centric stuff, and the like. Gitaxian did this after discovering a twitter page dedicated to the stuff apparently. It’s horrifying to realize that people who believe in such things exist right alongside everyone else, but the chat got a lot of amusement out of the ordeal. However, Git was providing links for more than an hour, after which point it got really old and I had to ask him to stop. Thankfully Git is pretty reasonable, and he ceased without throwing a fit.

The last noteworthy event of the day was Makin restoring the name of the channel: it was #mspa-lit-returns at first, and then afterwards simply #mspa-lit. This probably won’t last (I suspect it’s to celebrate 10/25 and will become #read-shills again afterwards), but for now it is a sight for sore eyes. The restoration came with a bevy of joy from older regulars like Toast and Gitaxian. Obviously I’m quite happy about the development because it makes this record a little less confusing. Hopefully it’ll stay that way.

Nothing more for today.

---

23^rd of October 2018

There was a flare up with Putnam last night: he was talking about personal concerns he has regarding his hometown and how it treats LGBT individuals, which itself followed a similar discussion about the Trump administration’s policy regarding sex and gender. As he is wont to do, Putnam discussed or ranted about this for an extended period of time, immensely concerned because the newfound policy will directly affect him.

Unfortunately, Putnam also indulged his tendency to rant about the topic long after its expiration date. Nights and Toast both gave him warnings to stop talking about it, and after he continued to do so he was channel banned by Toast. A couple hours later, he mentioned that circumstances conspired such that he was no longer as agitated about the topic, and wouldn’t talk about it anymore. Thus I took pity on him and unbanned him from mspa-lit.

Nights and Toast criticized this decision, saying it encouraged Putnam to talk more about this stuff and that it undercut their authority. We hashed this out a little bit, and in their defense I kind of ignored their complaints because I just wasn’t interested in dealing with the issue. Tensei came on a little bit later and injected some extremely obvious bait where he asked Putnam what happened to get him to talk about it more. Gnawms chimed in with a meme answer for what was going on, Putnam responded in detail both to refute Gnawms and answer Tensei’s question, and then Putnam was promptly rebanned for it.

Immense confusion followed as a lot of mod drama got dragged out into the open. People such as Tera and Tipsy, as well as a number of others who wish to remain unnamed, were immensely uncomfortable about Putnam being banned. They weren’t sure why he was banned: the original topic was only banworthy because he was talking about it ad nauseum, but Tensei had specifically asked him a question about it and it was weird to forbid him from answering; further, they wondered why no punitive action had been taken against Tensei and Gnawms for stoking the altercation.

I was also immensely confused about this, and was myself upset about the fact that Putnam had been rebanned. At this point it was exceedingly late in the evening, 3 AM EST or so, and it was getting progressively harder to tie things together logically. I discussed the matter briefly with Toast and he suggested we ban Tensei for egregiously baiting Putnam over something we had just established was causing problematic discussions.

I had been yelling about the proceedings in modchat for a good hour at this point and didn’t want to deal with it for too much longer. After mulling over our conversation for a bit, I agreed that it was the right thing to do. Even though there was no way to really enforce it because Tensei could just remove the ban, the symbolic gesture seemed appropriate punishment for unambiguously breaking server rules. I applied the ban and then promptly went to sleep, resolving to deal with the fallout from the decision in the morning.

Predictably, I woke up to an extremely large can of worms. Tensei was bewildered at my decision precisely because it had no punitive weight, and he suggested that it had actually made things worse because of the way the hierarchy of our mod team works. We then had a lengthy conversation where he explained that principle to me: it’s nonsensical for one full mod to ban another because we’re on a level playing field.

I stipulated that it wasn’t really a matter of authority over each other, but rather that he had simply broken a rule that was well-established and no one should be above the rules. His rebuttal was that, in his point of view, he hadn’t broken any such rule, so which of us two mods is to be believed about what was the right course of action?

In my defense, rules aren’t just a matter of what a mod happens to believe is right at any given time. When I say that Tensei had broken a well-established rule, I mean that there have been a multitude of cases in the past where we banned someone for doing the exact same thing he had done: excessively baiting someone over a stupid topic and/or something that is known to set them off without fail has been a bannable offense for literal years at this point.

What’s more, the precedent already exists with Putnam specifically that baiting him over things is a terrible idea because he will take it without fail; he’s practically incapable of resisting bait unless it’s clear beyond a reasonable doubt that it’s actually a joke, at which point it’s not even really bait. This is exemplified by the alcohol conversations, so why would it suddenly be okay to do it about something else?

Yet, Tensei’s point kind of superseded these problems. At the heart of the matter is that we can’t have mod infighting, and there’s actually precedent against this as well: on the 31st of July this year, there was a conversation in the modchat where Toast thought pseudo-mods should be allowed to ban each other. That conversation was somewhat more complicated because pseudos have more power than each other based on where a given altercation happens, but it was also agreed then that the hierarchy of power should never be outright violated.

Thus, I had to agree that Tensei was correct. I retracted my argument that he should be banned for the bait even though I still believe what he was doing was wrong. He was gracefully receptive of that criticism, honestly. It’s actually not the first time that he’s stopped doing something simply because I expressed that it was inappropriate; he has completely stopped teasing Putnam about alcohol ever since I asked him not to.

Among us, we reiterated that as a general order for all mods we need to resolve internal disputes in the modchat only, and stop dragging things out in the open. Pseudos and mods all need to remain on an equal playing field respectively; taking unilateral action against each other is unacceptable. Hopefully a situation like this does not happen again, at least not for a long time.

Aside from this internal drama, there were actually a few fandom developments today. First was that Feferi, the Tumblr blogger who won the What Pumpkin comic contest so long ago, was apparently given an NDA. Ironically, she may have broken this NDA immediately after signing it by saying she’s under a contract in the first place (we’re not really sure, it depends on the content of the NDA really. The post in question may have been taken down, which is certainly evidence in favor of the idea).

This suggests that something is happening. The initial post from WP clearly said that the winner would have a fan character put into Hiveswap, although recent developments have made it clear that Hiveswap is not happening for quite some time. Some of us think that the fan character is now just going to be put into a Friendsim instead, but honestly have no real idea what’s going to happen.

The NDA certainly doesn’t help this confusion. The fandom as a whole is not fond of NDAs--and we especially are not fond of them--due to old events from the time of the Kickstarter for Hiveswap. The general perception is that, instead of simply explaining things to us, What Pumpkin or whoever makes these decisions prefers to keep information locked away. It’s understandable in certain cases, but the tactic feels overused and has led to a significant distrust of the practice. Makin has gone so far as to call them “evil”, a sentiment echoed by many of us.

Regardless, there’s little else to be gleaned from that just yet. Instead, there was some disruption concerning news about the future Homestuck books. In order for this to make sense for anyone not intimately involved, I’m going to have to explain the narrative structure of Homestuck a bit. Hopefully it won’t be confusing or overly indulgent.

Homestuck is principally split up into seven primary acts, the first four of which are undivided units. This is completely fine, but after that it rapidly deteriorates. Act 5 for instance is split into two parts: Act 5 Act 1, and Act 5 Act 2. This is due both to length and because there’s a huge narrative shift in the middle of the story that justifies it. Act 6 is the true monster of this system, being broken up into an absolutely mind boggling collection of act acts and even act act acts.

To anyone who hasn’t read the comic--and to most people who actually have--it is an incomprehensible mess and the narrative structure actually kind of stops mattering after a while. The point of this explanation is mostly to indicate that organizing the physical books is no doubt a Herculean task; most of us have understood for a long time that it was never going to be as easy as putting one act per book.

With this being said, the advertisements for the next couple of books went up today, but we became a little bit dispirited: Act 5 Act 1 will of course be its own book, but it looks like Act 5 Act 2 is going to be chopped up even further, with the fifth book of the rerelease being entitled, “Act 5 Act 2 Part 1”. At a minimum it looks like Act 5 is going to be three books long, further subdividing an already overwhelmingly modulated story.

A much more entertaining bit of news is that For Fans By Fans announced a few new shirt designs. This would be otherwise unremarkable except for the fact that one of the shirts is a quality rendition of the community meme “Eridab”, drawn by our very own user Sparky. The meme is simple: it involves one of the characters from the comic, named Eridan, performing the related pose. It is exceedingly silly to us that the meme made it in as a shirt design, and we had no other choice but to celebrate wildly by spamming the emote for a while. It is a great day for #altgen, and therefore the world.

Later in the day, however, another negative development struck: Putnam decided to leave over the recent confrontation where he was banned from mspa-lit. He stated: “this is the third time people have been totally incompetent over almost this exact thing / and thus i am out”. If this were one year ago I would be trying my hardest to bridge whatever gap in communication is going on here and to help people resolve the conflict. However, I’ve already embarrassed/exhausted myself once today, and am way too tired to reach out and try to help again.

There’s a good chance that I would actually make things worse anyway, given how distracted I am right now. Putnam leaving is a huge disappointment as always, but this has happened so many times before now that I’m actually struggling to get really upset about it. If nothing else, I’ll probably ask about it at some later date. Hopefully this can be resolved peacefully once everyone’s moved on from the upset a little bit.

I really need to reassess how I approach these things anyway (how many times have I said that in this document?), and make sure I can handle my responsibilities here. In my defense I’ve been getting progressively distracted by real life responsibilities, and ancillary tasks or hobbies. It may actually be worth mentioning one such hobby here.

Recently I began streaming casually again, doing a wide variety of content. This was spurred somewhat by getting Twitch Affiliated, which allowed me to install a custom emote and make things just a little bit more exciting for people. Sometimes there’ll be a decent viewership based on what exactly I’m streaming, up to fifteen people at the most, but when I’m streaming something less exciting or just for fun, it will usually come down to three people: Andrew, Qweq, and Tera.

So prevalent is their participation even when I’m just doddering along that it has become another group akin to what Putnam, Tera, and myself all had with streaming TV shows. It’s strange how these things can arise spontaneously out of a general activity, but the four of us have become comfortable with it; our enjoyment of participating together in this way is so great that we’ve dubbed it the Cozy Chat.

This having been said, streaming games seems to take up all of my spare time and reduce my ability to pay attention in the HSD proper. I’ve noticed myself drifting away from key issues and not focusing as much, which leads to altercations like today. Thus I’m going to try and get finished with all existing games or projects I want to complete, so that I can redouble my focus on the HSD and avoid causing any other serious problems.

Nothing more for today.

---

25^th of October 2018

Today is the second anniversary of my joining the HSD. I took a moment to look back at my first messages in the server. This was back when we still had a bot welcoming newcomers, so 72 bot announced my arrival and all that. I thanked it and then immediately dived in to the conversation taking place at the time. It’s weird to think that was two years ago now--the server looks so much different from how it was back then.

More importantly, today is 10/25! This is probably the second-most celebrated of the meme date holidays for the fandom, behind only 4/13. We commemorated the occasion with a community stream as is tradition. To celebrate his status as a running gag in Homestuck, Makin settled on a Nicolas Cage theme: on the list for tonight was The Rock, National Treasure, and Ghost Rider.

The stream was less active than we might have expected, lately they’ve been getting between 150-200 people, but this time we had around 100. We didn’t advertise this stream very much so I guess this is more or less to be expected. This is not to say that it wasn’t a delightful time, though; 100 people is still an enormous number for a community stream, and it was suitably entertaining occasion.

Outside of the stream, there were some rather interesting posts on the subreddit: user /r/spankety has compiled a massive archive of fandom audio, including original music, voice work, and other assorted projects. Called the “Lotus Time Capsule”, it includes work from the entire range of the fandom’s history, with whatever spankety could get their hands on really. Of note, Tindeck apparently announced that they will cease operations soon, so spankety personally ripped all of the Homestuck-centric audio off of that website for inclusion in the archive.

Another interesting project is from Youtuber The RPG Monger, who created a daunting 40 minute video explaining the early history of the fandom. This is an excellent exploration of the story and fans, and how each affected each other as time went by. For anyone reading this who may be curious about older things, I highly recommend checking it out. The running time is intimidating but it is definitely informative.

Both of these works bring me great joy--I’ve become increasingly worried about data archival as time goes by (why read this stuffy document when you could go experience the works themselves instead?). Seeing more efforts to keep things preserved against the passage of time is wonderful, the effort is invaluable for keeping our history intact. I’ve included direct links to each of these works in the Related Materials, under Lotus Time Capsule and The Complicated Story of the Homestuck Fandom.

Despite these incredible fanworks, there has unfortunately been no official information of any sort all day. While most of us didn’t really expect anything, it’s still disappointing: for some it’s yet another nail in the fandom’s already well-sealed coffin. Yet, between the fandom holiday and my anniversary here, today has been quite pleasant. Indeed, everyone is in a rather jovial mood from the stream.

We’ve only recently lost some people that were very near to the mspa-lit community, but today has successfully kept the darker mood at bay. There’ll be time to lament such negative developments another day. For now, it’s enough for the rest of us that we’re all here and willing to enjoy a nice time together. This year’s 10/25 has served to deliver a refreshing atmosphere and almost everyone is reveling together; I hope that everyone here will enjoy themselves for a long while yet.

Nothing more for today.

---

27^th of October 2018

I’ve noticed a sharp uptick in the rate of people joining, even accounting for #general’s greater level of activity. Makin recently mentioned permanently purchasing ad space on MSPFA, and at his bequest (and also because I was already curious) I’ve started keeping track of usercounts each day. October will probably see an appreciable increase in user gain if this trend continues--it’s already rivaling pre-#hangout levels, so the end result may turn out to be pretty exciting.

The number of posts has also been going up. It resembles months like April or May, where the rate of posting is invariably higher than later in the year. My attempts at record keeping are already showing some trends of user behavior and participation--it’s exciting what kind of information statistics can reveal to us!

There was a noticeable event today where Makin experimented with a new channel configuration. Within a test channel he made it so that all users--not just mods--can edit messages, including pinning and deleting. Within just a few minutes of its creation, the new channel erupted into complete chaos as people were editing each other and mods with reckless abandon.

It didn’t last terribly long, honestly: Makin shut down the channel just a scant few hours after opening it. I’m not sure what he got out of it, but a little bit of discussion suggests that it might be useful in a future April Fool’s Day, or on special occasions for fun. Come to think of it, I have no idea what we could possibly do for April Fool’s next year. We might want to start planning ahead of time if we want to get something truly amusing together.

Later in the evening, altgen started getting riled up about something that I wasn’t actually present for, so I can’t comment on whatever it may have been. As soon as it was over though, I committed altgen to its weekly sacrifice as is now usual. The energy from the original event carried over and made it one of the most animate sacrifices we’ve had yet. What’s more, the energy didn’t dissipate once the sacrifice was done--it only seemed to increase in intensity.

People started joining the voicechat en masse and actually coordinating with each other on what to spam the channel with. For half an hour they went through various iterations of things to say. Even Makin got involved at some point, joining the voice channel and spamming Bowman’s Credit Score, and then later the thoroughly-hated fandom song Karkalicious.

As a brief aside: this song, released in 2011, has become widely reviled as a cringey but immortal contribution to the fandom’s collective history. There are few people that are fans of Homestuck who have not also heard of Karkalicious, which is both entertaining and very unfortunate. It’s sometimes used in a way that’s reminiscent of Rickrolling people: one may trick another into clicking on a link, thinking it’s for something else, and then they are greeted with this highly embarrassing fan video from 2011. The harmless prank has fallen out of favor in recent years, but it still rears its magnificent, ugly head every so often.

Returning to the topic at hand, chat spam rotated through various messages, including an spamming the shills list and even this document itself as an homage to Makin and myself respectively. There were of course a large assortment of other altgen-centric spammings, including “Bread” (I honestly have no idea how or why that one started), and it was only after about half an hour that the spam began to die away.

By the time they stopped, #altgen had managed to accrue a staggering 13,000 messages for the day, half of which were accounted for in the last 30 minutes alone. The experience was a whirlwind, reminding me greatly of older #altgen when the Purge still happened with some regularity. For obvious reasons this sort of spam is unsustainable, but I wonder if it might happen again sometime in the future.

Nothing more for today.

---

28^th of October 2018

At some point today I was informed that there actually WAS some kind of information on 10/25, specifically a tweet of Hussie wearing anime shades that was posted on James Roach’s Twitter account. I initially dismissed this because it was clearly silly, but a follow up from James himself also shows Andrew Hussie on Discord saying: “this is explicit acknowledgement of the epilogue’s existence”. It’s not much, but it’s definitely more than nothing.

A far more bizarre Twitter occurrence happened yesterday, where Hussie commented on the Twitter of a prolific rapper named Lil B, who had inadvertently shared a Hiveswap-centric picture. The picture features one of the more intimidating characters from the Hiveswap Troll Call, and says: “THANK YOU BASEDGOD! TYBG! TYBG! BASEDGOD FUCK MY BITCH!!!” Hussie responded: “thank you based god, i knew i could count on you.” There is literally nothing meaningful I could add to this sequence of interactions, so I’m going to move on.

On the server itself, there have been increasing problems with Biscuit. Lately he’s been consciously acting like a class clown, so that people would have a figure to point and laugh at. This was harmless, if annoying, but it’s been going on for a while already. I tried talking to him about it last week and thought I had helped him to understand that he shouldn’t do such things, but all of it was for nothing after today.

Biscuit started or inspired a raid on the Undertale Discord, which itself was almost completely unaffected; the raid was dissipated within seconds because they’re used to such shenanigans and have a bot function that minimizes the impact as much as possible. Everyone actually did manage to get some amusement out of how laughably ineffectual the raid was, and to prolong the inevitable I actually took part in poking fun at Biscuit for the affair.

However, one of the most serious rules on the entire server is not to start raids on other places. The outcome of his actions tonight were unambiguous. I shouldn’t have participated in making fun of him because I think it confused him; he didn’t believe me when I said I was going to have to ban him, probably just taking it as another joke at his expense.

He quickly changed his tune when I actually went through with banning him. There were immediately pleas to be let back on the server, all of which were very tiring to hear. Eventually Bisc, knowingly or not, began using some manipulative statements to sway me. This heightened my annoyance to extreme levels and I cut the conversation off immediately.

Biscuit was probably not actually trying to manipulate me or anything, he just comes across as kind of a dumb kid than anyone malevolent. However, I’ve only recently been burned by recursiveSlacker’s actions which fall in a similar vein. For the next few days, there’s no way I’m sticking my neck out to let Biscuit back on.

Even as I write that, though, I know it’s not really true. Banning people isn’t really a tool meant to just waste people who are ignorant or don’t know better, it’s for getting rid of actively malicious entities that can’t be reasoned with. Biscuit has shown in the past that he’s willing to listen to explanations of why he’s in the wrong, so I imagine that this topic will come up again in the near future.

I’ve told him to try talking with the other mods, but the result will most likely be the same either way. Even if he never comes back, hopefully he learns from this not to act like such a fool just to get other people to notice him. Last I heard he was on User5’s server, and if my interactions with him are any indication then they’ll knock the verbal shit out of him really quickly.

Nothing more for today.

---

29^th of October 2018

Tori got in trouble for shilling her new personal server today. The last one, quietly referred to only as “Walmart”, effectively died some time ago. She became upset at being confronted about it, berating herself briefly. I made an ill-advised attempt to fix things by listening to her describe what her new server is about, but it didn’t really help; she left the server soon afterwards.

I’m growing increasingly frustrated at this trend. In the last two weeks alone we’ve lost four established mspa-lit regulars: Revlar, Putnam, Biscuit, and Tori are all gone now. The circumstances differ of course--Putnam will probably come back soon and Tori might come back eventually, but Revlar and Biscuit are both effectively gone for good. I’m not sure what’s up with this month, but I hope that the departures and bans stop for at least a while.

On the other hand, there are so many new people joining the server thanks to Makin putting the ads up on MSPFA that we don’t know what to do with them. We’re experiencing a rare case of new user spillover, where they’re coming to mspa-lit and promptly getting sht on because they’re unfamiliar with the culture here. Some of these encounters can actually be greatly entertaining.

This is especially true of randoms who come in that are transparently from one community or another, trying to stir the pot somehow. One such example included a user named only Charlie. He came in to mspa-lit and immediately started talking about Smash Ultimate. Makin determined within seconds that he was using talking points from 4chan threads about the game, leading to some well-deserved heckling.

Finally, there was some great news: the SBAJH books are fully printed and ready to go. The only thing that’s left to do is send out the user surveys to figure out where they must be delivered. The post mentions only that the surveys will be sent out “soon”, which is unfortunately ambiguous. In this fandom, “soon” refers to about six months, on average. However, I’m confident that the surveys will be sent out within a month (still a laughably long time, but short on this fandom’s timescale) due to the comparatively unambiguous wording of the books’ completion. We will have that BBQ sauce yet.

Something potentially even more exciting in the announcement is that they found a bunch of old shirts sitting around. There’s no telling which shirts these may be, but they’re apparently classic. Makin has openly described wanting a particular shirt for himself, although he didn’t back the Kickstarter so he probably won’t be able to check if it’s available. The chance that his desired shirt will be offered is highly unlikely, but there’s really no telling what could come out of this. I’m just glad we’re getting close to having these books, a year after the initial Kickstarter.

Nothing more for today.

---

30^th of October 2018

The cover for the new Homestuck book has come out on the Viz website. There’s noticeably more excitement about this upcoming book than there has been about the previous ones. I assume it’s because of the characters that will be involved; or perhaps the middle section of the comic plays into a serious deal of nostalgia for people. Either way, talk is slowly building over these books. I wonder if the later installments will be more successful than the first few.

On the subreddit, Makin was convinced by user /u/maxdefolsch that Act 5 Act 2 would be split up into more than just two books, possibly as many as three or four. Makin’s reaction to this was nothing short of horror; he brought it up multiple times on Discord, becoming progressively more annoyed each time. His thoughts are summed up well enough in this screenshot:

Really though, few of us are surprised by this possibility. It’s just the reality of the fandom we’re all part of.

Slightly less related but arguably adjacent to our interests, the Undertale Twitter page suddenly started posting ARG-like messages, mysteriously referred to as a “survey initiative”. One of the tweets mentioned to check the page in 24 hours, and there is immense excitement over the announcement of a sequel. No one is sure what it is yet, but there is little doubt that it will be something related to a new game.

Even less related to our fandom’s source material but no less exciting, the final Smash Ultimate Direct was announced for Thursday morning. There’s no shortage of people in mspa-lit who are huge fans of the game, so this announcement on top of everything else was just icing on the cake. There was a ridiculous amount of stuff posted today, so between that and the newfound speculation over an epilogue for Homestuck there’s suddenly a lot to be excited about.

Perhaps because of this, the mood for today was overwhelmingly positive. In both the HSD and in adjacent servers, it was generally a really feel-good environment; there were multiple posts, unprompted even, from people who were just saying that they appreciate each other. It’s such a simple and silly thing, but it’s always extremely gratifying to see people enjoying themselves and each other like this. Maybe 10/25 worked some magic this year after all.

Nothing more for today.

---

31^st of October 2018

It’s Halloween night, and some of us immediately got into the spirit by switching names and profile pictures with each other. As a couple examples: Gitaxian and myself switched so that he looks like he’s on the mod team, MrNostalgic and Multivac switched as well. All in all, it was a harmless but effective prank. I lost track, but easily over a dozen people fell for the imitation. Even people in #general were thrown off, which was great for a few laughs.

Today surveys went out for the SBAHJ books, greatly exceeding my expectation of one month. The shirts didn’t turn out to be anything special, simply being four old versions of the most basic shirts available pretty much on every Homestuck merchandise website. The survey itself ends in about 10 days, at which point I assume the orders will be shipped out. It’s exciting that we will finally have our loot--many people are curious what the BBQ sauce will be like, including myself.

The project suspected to be Undertale 2 turned out to be an ambiguously adjacent game to Undertale, the first chapter of what is called Delta Rune. Accompanying the release was a cryptic requirement that said not to talk about the game for the next 24 hours, a request that basically everyone broke within the first five minutes of release. It is completely free, and there is now some interesting debate as to whether it is a demo or if it’s actually Chapter 1 of the full game.

Of all things, Putnam came back onto the HSD to discuss this more properly: he insinuated that it can’t be a demo for the same reasons that an episodic game like The Walking Dead or Life is Strange weren’t demos. However, there was flavor text in Delta Rune that clearly suggested it was actually an incomplete version of what would follow after, stuff in the vein of, “You can’t access this area until the full game comes out!” This unambiguously ended the debate, at least until such a time that we have even more conclusive evidence either way.

A new channel, #undertale2-spoilers, was created to contain discussion for the game. The new channel immediately exploded in usage, quickly rivaling the three biggest channels in messages sent over the day. This is due for a few reasons, not least of which that it’s shiny and new, but we’ve also been starved for some significant, game-changing content. Even if it hadn’t been for those things, we would probably still be discussing the hell out of Delta Rune because it is of very high quality.

It’s not often that we get the chance to pass around some new content that is both tailored to us and well done, but Delta rune has quickly established itself as the new thing everyone’s going to be talking about for months. The most succinct description I can offer is that it’s “Undertale, but better.” Everyone I can see has been greatly satisfied with their experience, praising the story, music, and enhanced gameplay elements compared to Undertale.

Delta Rune is roughly three hours long, which I have to stress is insane for something that is ostensibly a demo. Of course, three hours long means that the base content is exhausted fairly quickly (especially in our hands, where we usually tear through these things pretty maniacally), but much like its predecessor the game is chock full of secrets and easter eggs, and lots of genuinely endearing bits and pieces that you can easily miss if you don’t turn over every stone.

Oda described the game as positively oozing with style and passion--as near as I can tell, this response is practically ubiquitous. Within the first few hours of the game being released I had already seen people changing their names and profile pictures to various characters in the game, including Qweq, Sea Hitler, and Makin himself. I can tell that this game is going to be among our main focuses for quite some time based on this alone.

So fervent was discussion over Delta Rune that it leaked into mspa-lit frequently, among other channels. While spoilers were mainly avoided as he was playing it, the fact that we were talking about it outside of the new channel pissed Makin off so badly that he eventually hid mspa-lit from everyone until he finished the demo. That incident aside, the entire server has been positively buzzing about the game. Seeing what we got with this, it can be concluded beyond any reasonable doubt that we’re all eagerly awaiting the release of whatever’s next, be it Chapter Two or the full game.

More related to Homestuck and the HSD, WP released the full transcript of the recent interview Hussie did with the Washington Post. There was a lot of grumbling about the article as it was released on WaPo proper. Some people overwhelmingly were put off by the way Hussie sounded in it: at best it didn’t feel like his usual manner of speaking, and at worst he came across as some sort of faux-intellectual. Trip, characteristically inoffensive at most times, went so far as to say, “That interview was so fucking pretentious it honestly doesn't even sound like hussie talking.” No one was really quite sure what to make of the affair.

Makin was especially critical at the time, but with the full transcripts being released today it paints the interview in a whole different light. Apparently WaPo effectively ruined Hussie’s responses, and the full context makes it sound much better. Makin commented in a rare state of repentance: “fucking hell / they butchered his answers / this is way more sensible / sorry hussie”, but of course, after looking further: “christ the epilogue weaseling / I retract my apology”. In all, people are greatly mollified by the release of the full transcript.

That having been said, I was curious why WP felt the need to release the full transcript. It seems odd that they consciously decided to do this, because Hussie has done interviews before but they never bothered to follow up on them. Is it possible that they too were miffed by the way the interview went and wanted to set the record straight? Whatever the reasoning, we are more or less grateful that they decided to do so; the full conversation is much more reasonable and actually gave us something to talk about today.

Less positively, there was some conflict between myself and other mods tonight. I’ll avoid naming them, but at one point there was a user who inadvertently changed their name to a racial epithet. Spiral noticed this and told them to change it, which they did by modifying it slightly. Spiral was not satisfied with the modification, so she brought it up in modchat to try and get some help.

Nat and WoC were against the idea of forcing the user to change their name further, deeming it wholly unnecessary. After the recent power problem between Tensei and myself I’ve been trying to be more hands off when it comes to what the other mods are doing or what they want. Yet, today it seemed clear that they were going nowhere in their discussion of what to do.

I decided to step in and tried to manage the conversation in a way that was effectively neutral. I wanted to help them get a better understanding of each other if I could. However, my arbitration quickly went bad after we started discussing the relevance of the epithet in question: WoC insisted that it was antiquated to the point of obsolescence, citing the way that it would probably be handled in his town. He claimed that using it where he’s from would probably be met with strange looks, but wouldn’t really merit any punishment.

At this point there was a serious miscalculation on my part. I’ve been trying not to behave in such an anal retentive manner when talking with others--it can lead to the appearance of being kind of robotic if I do it too much, which I don’t really want. Based on this I wanted to try and engage in a little banter during the discussion, so rather than just explain flatly why his argument didn’t make sense I called it childish.

The intent of this wasn’t literally to insinuate he’s a child for believing the idea, in my mind it was equivalent to their practice of calling each other stupid over minor things. Yet, this immediately set WoC off. He quickly became furious, going off on me for being patronizing. I was extremely confused by this, and without going into too much detail the conversation only devolved further from there.

I was quite upset about this for most of the evening, alternatively trying to figure out how much in the wrong I was and being indignant about WoC’s response. At one point I messaged a few of the other mods to get an idea of what I was doing wrong, which they were all helpful about. It’s distressing when my ability to interface with other people fails like this.

Despite getting so frustrated with me though, later WoC was casually shitposting with me like nothing happened. On one hand this sort of thing makes it harder for me to tell if I’ve seriously screwed up or not, but on the other I’ve got to admire that he can make frustration roll off him like water off a duck’s back.

In truth, I really appreciate that he can and is willing to do that when it comes to talking with people. Toast, one of the people I messaged for help, was in a similar vein as the night went on. The fact that these guys were still willing to try and interface with me despite perceiving me as patronizing is really kind of them. That patience alone is worth their respect, and--as I usually resolve when these issues crop up--I should be actively treating them better. I really appreciate them and everyone else who remains patient with me whenever I’m hard to deal with.

Outside of mod drama, I want to take the time to describe a mild let down with altgen this month. The day where the channel got spammed to hell and back was great, but there’s an overall theme with October that was left agonizing unfulfilled for its entirety. Last year around the beginning of October, I wrote that it’s common among various groups to treat October thoroughly as a meme month, specifically around the premise of being “spooky” in a shitty and over the top way.

So great is this idea that October is commonly referred to as Spooky Month or Spook Month, depending on who you talk to. With how altgen can be, I was seriously expecting a slow ramp up in related memes throughout all of October. Yet it was more like the opposite: a lot of “spooky memes” came out to play at the beginning, and then by the end there was practically nothing except one or two particular users trying to post them frequently.

I am immensely disappointed. I was anticipating that Halloween in particular would be a veritable bonanza of shitty skeleton memes. Yet, when I checked the channel earlier today, there was a big fat load of nothing. The channel wasn’t even active! Upon some further reflection I realized this is probably because they’re all out trick or treating. That thought alone made me feel like I’m getting way too old for this--it’s easy to wonder how on earth I’m still here sometimes. Maybe I can force a cascade of spooky memes during the sacrifice this weekend instead.

Nothing more for today.

---

Discussion of Delta Rune is still picking up steam, and there’s no way to tell if it will continue to keep up or if it’ll just settle down over the next few days. The 24 hour period where Toby Fox requested that no one share spoilers is over; a few of us in mod chat suggested that we disperse the spoilers channel so that people can talk about it in appropriate channels (Nights: “main stuff there is game discussion, fanart of it, and memes / which could all go in gaming/art channels/altgen respectively”).

I’m pleased that the hype around the game is still building up. I would be impressed but it’s honestly just what should be expected with a game like this. Something that a lot of people really like about Toby’s development style is that he includes so many things in the game simply because they were ideas that he thought were entertaining--this seems obvious, but it’s basically the exact opposite of what we typically call “pandering”. With a game that he clearly cares about beyond reason, it’s no surprise that he was able to make it so well.

I actually had an exchange with someone named Jade in the spoiler channel. They remarked: “this game will make my week / i swear to god / it rekindled a flame inside me”, with many people expressing similar viewpoints. I responded: “this is what it's like to have good content get released guys / this feeling is something to treasure.” It truly has been a long time since we’ve had reason to feel this way. Hiveswap Act 1 was like a small dose of this, because it’s clear that the developers cared a lot about that as well, but Toby managed to make both Undertale and Delta Rune feel so effortless.

Speaking of, Toby came out with a post on Twitlonger today that contained a lot of responses to questions he got on Twitter after the demo came out yesterday. It turns out that he pre-typed most of these questions a month in advance of the demo releasing, which was pretty interesting; he did also insert some new responses or comments based on how the game was received.

Honestly, the responses all feel somewhat melancholic. He seems to have a huge lack of confidence in his abilities, despite the success of Undertale previously and now with how people have responded to Delta Rune. He mentions that based on how progress for developing Delta Rune was before, it would take an impossible amount of time to complete the game by himself like he did with Undertale.

Thus, he wants to assemble a team to help him finish Delta Rune. He then expressed further doubt about forming and leading a team, with ultimately no way to tell how long it might take for the rest of the game to be finished. This is somewhat dismaying, but also completely understandable. It shouldn’t need to be said again based on what I’ve written just previously, but I think it’s safe to say that everyone here is just fine with waiting.

Toby cares a lot about this project--his answers in the Twitlong post make it exceedingly clear that he thinks about the story and things in Delta Rune constantly. That, combined with all of his previous work, gives us no doubt at all that he is going to make something truly great. We’ll be here in the meantime, almost certainly discussing what he’s done so far to death.

Indeed, we’ve already taken to calling this gap between the demo and the full game the 999 Year Hiatus based on one of his answers. What Griever said some nights ago about hiatus culture is already in effect, with bizarre connections being made between some of the content of the game. Tera literally took one of the face sprites in the game and isolated the mouth, rotated it, and compared it to the Greek character lambda to reference the ubiquitous Half-Life 3 meme.

I’m sure as time goes by, the insanity will only continue to grow. With that in mind, it’s wonderful that we all got to experience that spark of enjoyment once more. We may be completely batshit when we’ve got nothing to do but spin our wheels, but the intense passion we have when it comes to experiencing quality things together is indisputable. I’m glad I got to witness the fervor here in real time, and I eagerly await the next time we’ll see it too.

Nothing more for today.

---

3^rd of November 2018

#undertale2-spoilers was slated for deletion today, but before going through with it Makin held an open poll to see whether users wanted it to remain or if they were fine with hiding it. The result wasn’t that surprising in retrospect, but the overwhelming majority voted to keep it as its own channel. Thus, #undertale2-spoilers was converted into #deltarune, and occupies its spot just below #gaming.

This was controversial of course, because that’s a lot of discussion that isn’t being fed into otherwise relevant channels. It would have been controversial the other way too--damned if you do and damned if you don’t, really. After some consideration I think this is for the best right now; discussion of the game is still in full swing (not as heavy as it was when it came out of course, but it still rivals or exceeds the other major channels). If it were dispersed, the related channels would get completely flooded or--even worse--the conversation would disappear from the server entirely.

Thus, it’s probably better to wait until the topic dies down a little first. Containment is better than completely drowning out other conversation, which is almost certainly what would happen with Deltarune. In fairness, I suspect that it won’t take too long: I predict that the channel will fall substantially in activity over the course of this month, and by the beginning of December it will be hidden. It would be different if it were a full-length game, but the demo is 3 hours long. No matter how many secrets may be densely packed into the game, it can’t sustain conversation the same way that a longer piece of media would.

For today’s drama, there was an exceptionally dumb fight between mspa-lit regulars and Makin, the first of its kind in at least several weeks I think. Putnam came back a couple days ago for Delta Rune discussion, saying as much after Makin accused him of not being able to stay away from mspa-lit. After Putnam stated this, Makin mspa-banned Putnam until he asks to be unbanned.

To be absolutely clear on the conditions surrounding this ban, Makin instated it so that Putnam “wouldn’t be tempted” to talk in mspa-lit, but as soon as Putnam asks to be unbanned Makin will do so. This means that the ban is essentially toothless: Putnam may come back as soon as he wants, and if he doesn’t want to come back¹²⁶ then it’s not actually an issue to begin with. From this, it’s pretty clear that the ban is more of a joke than anything else.

However, this did not quell an unbelievably huge response from a number of people in mspa-lit, including Gitaxian, MrNostalgic, hb, and Andrew. I’m usually against this sort of administrative display myself, but it was extremely clear from the start that this scenario isn’t actually a serious problem. I tried to indicate that their outrage was misplaced, but it only seemed to make them all angrier. Andrew in particular was beyond furious at the ban, excusing himself from the conversation so he could go calm down.

I was kind of bothered that they took it so harshly, so if nothing else I decided I would follow up on their concerns. As the conversation was winding down I DM’d Putnam asking whether or not he was actually bothered about being banned from mspa-lit. He woke up later that evening and said only: “not really.” This amused me a little bit, as it was weird to see people arguing so fiercely on behalf of someone who doesn’t actually care at all.

Then again, I can’t blame them for being concerned. If the situation was different it’s not unlikely I would have been on their side in the discussion. As it is though, this was so transparently not an issue that I can’t help but view it all as kind of silly; their efforts were basically a complete waste of their time. On the other hand, I really appreciate that they showed such concern for another person in the chat that they deemed defenseless, or treated unfairly. I hope that they’ll remember their passion for other people at a time when it’s actually needed.

On an unrelated note, I recently finished and released my Sydlexia article that I’ve been working on. For those who may be curious there’s a link at the beginning of this document (the Table of Contents also lists it for easy access). The reason I bring this up is twofold: after bringing it up there was a smattering of conversation in mspa-lit. Makin thought it was “entertaining”--I was surprised by this assessment and brought it up enough times that he started making fun of me for repeating it--and other people such as Dead Guy were similarly amused by some of the information therein.

The article led to some brief discussion about when various people present had joined the HSD, and what things were like back then on the server. Toast mentioned how different the place was when he first joined (“the first 3 months of this server were / unironically probably the best,” an assessment I take some issue with but can’t effectively dispute), and there was a significant bout of reminiscing between us all.

The second reason that I bring this up here is that it helped me to draw some comparisons between the Sydlexia community and the HSD. Such comparisons are a little difficult to make both because Sydlexia happened an increasing amount of time ago, and also because of just how different it was to what we have here. Yet, there are a few key differences in the structure of each community that I feel reveals some insight into how each place works.

The biggest differences I can identify are thus: the Sydlexia channel was hosted on IRC, which--while not exactly difficult--was far less accessible for the average internet user than joining a Discord server. Joining the HSD can be done without a proper account OR any sort of specialized client, which means it’s just a one or two click process. Secondly, Homestuck as a source material was magnitudes greater in popularity than Sydlexia ever was, conferring far greater niche status upon the latter. These two differences together functioned as a significant barrier of entry into the Sydlexia community, while the HSD is comparatively open.

What does this change about how each community works? First and foremost, it means that the average person who got as far as the IRC channel was already more dedicated to the group, by dint of knowing it existed at all and then especially by bothering to get there in the first place. This consequently led to a far smaller population size (this should be obvious, compare a community of roughly 50 people at maximum to a server with nearly 12,000 people on it). Between these two factors, the Sydlexia IRC was a far more stable place than we are.

This leads to a subtle but very important difference in how each community behaves. Over the last two years I’ve become increasingly aware of a systemic lack of loyalty in mspa-lit. People expend less effort to get here, and the pool of users who join is so large that the average tendency for actually caring about the place or each other is significantly lower. Even among some mspa-lit regulars there is a pervasive lackadaisical attitude: Toast and tmtmtl30 are among those who have openly stated they would stop using this place if another, more entertaining server¹²⁷ made itself known to them.

In a more general sense, this mentality has already manifested in a relatively high turnover rate for users: for an mspa-lit regular the average time someone stays here is between six months to a year, maybe more, and for the average user it’s less than six months (note: this isn’t empirical, it’s admittedly just an estimate. All things considered it’s probably not inaccurate though).

Further, it’s difficult to say that there is any solidly identifiable core of people in this server. The only person who I can comfortably say would remain here permanently is Makin himself, and even that is something I’m hesitant to state; there is absolutely no guarantee in my mind that he would not abandon this place if he managed to create a bigger and/or more interesting server. On the surface this appears natural, why wouldn’t one exchange the HSD for a better place?

However, this leads to what I mean when I invoke the word “loyalty”. It greatly confuses me when anyone floats the idea of leaving, because it shows a casual disregard for the relationships formed with other people here¹²⁸. I can’t imagine how or why someone would talk here everyday without having formed significant friendships with at least some of the other people here (for example, Toast has quite endearingly called me “irreplaceable¹²⁹”). In my eyes, leaving the server for another would be effectively removing those established relationships because they’re no longer convenient--in a word, it’s selfish.

Perhaps my idea of a community is simply more cohesive than what most other people here tend to think. I’m also not sure exactly how much the accessibility of this place alone contributes to that mentality; one must remember Makin’s influence in purposefully reducing opportunities to socially bond with each other, alongside a loose but pervasive paranoia against “hugboxes”. This undoubtedly plays a major role in how people view mspa-lit as well, making it frustrating or nearly impossible to try and form an attachment to it.

The core of the problem, from what I can see, is that there is no concept of “group identity” here. The few people who participate often enough to be considered a part of this group are systematically discouraged from pursuing that notion, leading to a significant decrease in willingness to stay. Based on what Makin desires--namely, a place free of emotional attachment--this is valid for the short term, but in the long run it just means that there is no safety net. Goodwill towards each other is often in short supply in mspa-lit, and as soon as it’s exhausted on petty drama there’s very little else to convince people to stay.

This lengthy explanation now past, I feel obligated to point out that the comparisons between the HSD and Sydlexia are not just cause for concern. Indeed, the reason I bother to discuss this so much is because the two share some positive aspects as well: Sydlexia undoubtedly displayed some incredible potential for social interaction and camaraderie, and the HSD as a whole--especially channels like #mspa-lit--also show this quality from time to time.

It may be rare to witness, but I wouldn’t have written such a long document over nothing. There are times in this server that show off some of that same magic that Sydlexia had so long ago. There have been a handful of golden days where everyone present was having an incredibly good time just talking and messing around each other. It’s easy to forget that the rest of the world exists when such days happen.

I suppose I’m in the wrong for worrying so much about this, really. It’s not fair of me to expect the exact same environment to spring up here as it did before; it’s probably quite selfish if I’m being honest. Yet, I can’t help but be a little nervous when I hear someone say they would have no qualms leaving for another place. Such ideas are unconscionable, although I guess that’s more of a me-problem than anything else. I would be less bothered by all of this if closer, stabilizing interaction wasn’t effectively forbidden.

In my time on the internet I’ve developed a general expectation for how long websites last. Bear in mind that the following assessments rely on a significant amount of activity per user: average communities don’t last for any great amount of time, usually dissipating in six months to a year if not shorter. More stable communities seem to run between one to three years, usually based around an appreciable nucleus that can sometimes last long after the bulk of the community is gone. Sydlexia is by far the longest cohesive community I’ve witnessed, with its identifiable rise and fall separated between nearly an entire decade of dense history.

With this having been said, I’m curious to see how the HSD performs. I wonder if it will last as long as Sydlexia; we’re already approaching the three year mark and somehow still rising in numbers. How long will true activity be sustained? With the promise of the Viz Homestuck books at the very least, perhaps it’s possible that we will persist for a while yet. Makin also claims that he has plans upon plans to keep this place going no matter the scenario that faces us.

Usually I would cast doubt on him, but with this particular topic I’m not sure if I want to find out if he actually means it or not. Rather than my usual dour cynicism with these thoughts, today I choose to remain optimistic about the future of our community. We’ve made it this far, who knows what may happen? If nothing else, I already have a very rich history to look back on with these people. I’m glad I’ve had the opportunity to associate with them, and I look forward to the time I get to spend with them in the future.

Nothing more for today.

---

4^th of November 2018

Today was strange in a way that borders on the surreal. Biscuit was, of course, banned a number of days ago for inspiring a raid on the Undertale Discord. Since that occasion he has been pestering various mods and mspa-lit regulars to the point of obnoxiousness, swearing six ways to Sunday that he didn’t mean to cause such a problem. For once I wasn’t interested in hearing excuses and shot him down, but User5 messaged me about this a few nights ago.

After Biscuit was banned he didn’t really have anywhere to go but User5’s server and started hanging out there, variously participating and moaning about being banned from the HSD. Whether through pity or frustration with this behavior, User5 messaged me to ask whether Biscuit was “actually a bastard or just a dumbass”. I had already been reflecting on the matter, and was forced to conclude that Biscuit’s overall demeanor suggested he was simply a moron and not actually a shitty person.

An important bit of philosophy that User5 and I agree on is that bans shouldn’t be meted out just to get your way on something. Any reasonable person would also agree on this definition, but this means that banning someone just for being an ignorant fool is not appropriate--they actually have to display some level of malevolence to deserve getting the boot. While Biscuit’s actions were indefensibly in violation of the server rules, it is more than likely that he meant no harm with what he was doing.

Thus, after discussing the matter with User5, I rediscovered my moral scruples and decided to bring up the idea in the mod chat. No one was eager to discuss the matter, especially not me, but we have an obligation to be responsible with bans. Most other mods, Tera and Spiral for instance, were loathe to participate in the discussion and abstained. WoC was understandably against the idea, although he and Nights admitted that letting Biscuit back could be acceptable after an appropriate “time-out”.

Even those who had originally abstained thought this plan was reasonable enough, predicated on the idea that Biscuit was really just an idiot and not actually a shitty person. Tensei, on the other hand, had a far more interesting idea. I’m not sure what made him think of it, but he suggested something that almost came across as a complete joke at first: Biscuit could be unbanned in half a year to a year, or he could be unbanned immediately if he managed to convince Marsy to come back to the server.

As far as I recall, the reaction of the other mods to this was mostly sheer confusion. I was myself completely bewildered at the idea, but it was also entertaining to consider. None of the other mods actually spoke against the idea--Makin himself seemed to think it was funny and implicitly encouraged it--so I went ahead and made the offer. Biscuit was also confused and I felt my compunctions nagging at me when I told him the deal, but he agreed readily enough that I honestly forgot all about it over the next few days.

That is, until earlier today. Out of the blue, Biscuit messaged me saying that he had almost secured Marsy’s promise that he would come back on. To clarify somewhat, Marsy had been banned in January of 2017 for overtly racist remarks over one of the members of WP. He was unbanned one year later but simply never decided to return to the server, presumably having moved on. No attempts were made to actually fetch Marsy back, most present agreeing that it was probably a Very Bad Idea.

Thus, when Biscuit messaged me today, it was with mild shock that I realized he had accomplished the ridiculous task set out for him. I could barely keep the smile off my face as I shared a screenshot of him claiming success. A couple of pseudos present immediately bemoaned this development, but at this point the bargain was out of my hands. True to Biscuit’s word Marsy popped back into the server, nearly two years after he had been exiled. I honored the arrangement and unbanned Biscuit as well.

Biscuit’s return caused some unrest, with a strange mix of greetings and puzzlement as to why he was back in mspa-lit so soon. It wasn’t until a bit later that people saw Marsy; those of the old guard who understood the implications were rightly terrified. Most people didn’t really know why it mattered though. I guess things will change a lot over two years.

There wasn’t much to the reintroduction, thinking on it. Makin and a couple others mockingly-but-also-seriously told Marsy, “just try not to be racist this time.” He responded, “I guarantee you, I will be racist.” I don’t think anyone knew whether to treat that as a joke. We still aren’t sure whether or not it was a joke, because he only said a few other things before he stopped talking for the night. I guess either way we’ll see how long this lasts. Maybe we’ll all be surprised, but if I were a betting man I would be emptying my pockets on “not long.”

Biscuit, for his part, seems to have marginally improved in the week or so since he was initially banned. It is not the greatest improvement, although in retrospect I’m not sure how much User5’s place could have worked him over in just a few short days. To his credit he’s definitely avoiding being stupid on purpose, but he still has an overwhelming tendency to stick his foot so far into his mouth that he starts digesting it.

I guess this is something that will just take time. Biscuit is young still, younger perhaps than most people even on the HSD. I think I may be spoiled by the presence of people like Tera, who is still relatively young but already wields a certain perspicacity. Toast may be used as an example of someone who started off as a shithead and now isn’t quite a shithead anymore. There is hope for Biscuit yet even based solely off of others, and it’s just going to take time to see how he turns out. Hopefully it’s for the better.

On a different note entirely, Makin put out feelers regarding a potential Homestuck reread sometime next year. The last one was hosted about two years ago under Whatislostinthemines, shortly after the comic ended. There are many people in the community who have only read the comic once or twice, and whose memories of the story are beginning to fade.

Thus, there appears to be some significant interest. Makin commented: “people are REALLY hyped for this / I believe even groups unrelated to us might join in,” which would actually be quite exciting. I have to imagine that a reread would suffer from the same problems as any other community event, especially drop off in interest overtime. However, it might bring back a little interest in the source material. This is something we sorely need right now, with people becoming less able to even recall what happened at specific parts of the story.

With luck, we’ll be able to start huge and finish well enough. The reread is currently planned to be held at the start of next year, beginning in February, so that it will culminate with 4/13. If done properly, it could actually be quite successful in terms of turnout. Just thinking about all of the little moments in the story that people have forgotten is making me excited--it’ll be nice to rediscover these things with everyone and potentially start up some engaging conversations, old and new.

Nothing more for today.

---

5^th of November 2018

We received some very sobering news. Yesterday morning, artist George Buzinkai, composer of many integral soundtracks for Homestuck, died yesterday morning.

Makin verified with another member of the Music Team, and today the collective fandom mourned her loss.

The music that Buzinkai was responsible for composing or arranging was used in pivotal spots, especially Doctor and Showtime. These tracks are lodged so firmly in general fandom consciousness that it’s nearly impossible to imagine the comic without them. In the thread linked above, many of the comments describe the impact that her music had to the point that her influence is unmistakable.

Speaking plainly, Buzinkai’s death comes as a complete shock. She could not be described as old, and the circumstances around her death have not been elaborated on (and probably won’t be, in the interest of privacy). Niklink commented succinctly: “I guess I never thought of Homestuck and its associated periphery as anything other than a young kid's game. Definitely not something where the people involved could pass away.” Other figures such as Bolin disappeared, either in infamy or with respect, but none had died so far as we knew.

In effect, this is something of a wakeup call for us. There was some discussion about the age of other figures, especially Hussie himself, who recently got into his 40’s. As the years go by, the potential for upset will grow ever greater with many important figures getting older. Obviously we hope that reports like this will remain infrequent, but the reality of the matter will no doubt linger in our minds for some time.

There is nothing I can really say to soften the matter; Buzinkai’s passing is greatly upsetting. Though, the outpouring of praise for her work and stature in the fandom was notable. There was no shortage of people coming forward to describe how her work has affected them. We have been reminded once again that nothing lasts forever, but we have also been reminded of what brought us together in the first place. To be sure, her legacy is something we won’t forget anytime soon¹³⁰.

Rest in peace George Buzinkai. Nothing more for today.

---

8^th of November 2018

The PDF of the new SBAHJ book was sent out today, but it is with a heavy heart that I say it was released to general disappointment. Makin, myself, Skyplayer, and an assortment of others discussed it at great length; within half an hour of its release we firmly settled on why exactly we felt so negatively about it.

The exact reasons why are many, but all of the explanations boil down to the idea that it simply doesn’t carry the spirit of the source material. SBAHJ’s original incarnation is such a precise blend of ironic shittiness and high-effort laziness that none of us are strictly surprised it wasn’t able to be replicated, but the new book is so drastically different in tone that it feels like Hussie must not actually have been involved at all. It’s as if the book was written by people who don’t actually understand what made the original comics so enjoyable.

Even after the initial discussion was done with, we spent a significant portion of the day collectively scratching our heads and wondering where on earth it could have all gone so wrong. The first half of the book actually seemed somewhat promising, but then the second half was irredeemably flat and boring. It would be unwise to describe a precise example, so instead I will try to briefly describe these problems in a general sense.

Great attention to detail was spent on the actual panels themselves; KC Green’s art has a quality to it that can approach physical discomfort, which is great for SBAHJ in a way. However, after a while the editing is simply nonexistent. There are so few instances of image artifacting to speak of, and the actual placement of panels or objects in the new book is so traditional that it’s practically indistinguishable from a regular bad comic. Griever made a comment when we were comparing the book to original SBAHJ strips: “it's a masterwork of ‘fuck wherever your eyes are looking at’”, whereas there is nothing to really forcibly draw your attention in the new story.

The problem is that many of the greatest parts of SBAHJ were made in the editing. The art itself is almost required to be lazy, such that KC Green’s efforts--while impressive in certain spots--were largely wasted. Further, Dril’s involvement with the writing may actually have worsened the overall quality of the book by making it more coherent. I recognize how bizarre such a statement is--not even to speak of calling coherency bad, Dril is not exactly known for this quality to begin with--but it remains that the overall product just did not achieve the mind-numbing sense of bafflement that SBAHJ is predicated on.

To clarify, none of this is to suggest that we wanted the book to fail. To the contrary, we are arguably the ones who wanted it to succeed the most. This is both because we are some of the only people left who cared enough to follow the book’s development in the first place, but even once it wrapped up development there seems to be no hype anywhere. There is barely any talk of the book on Tumblr or Twitter despite KC Green and Dril’s attachment; 4chan threads on the book seem to be dead on arrival. All of this suggests that we are possibly the only ones talking about the book to begin with¹³¹, and regardless of whether we thought it was good or bad that’s usually not a good sign.

To close on the subject of the new SBAHJ material, sometimes it feels as if we’re the only ones who truly care about the success of Hussie and his subsidiaries. Collectively we’ve received a lot of heckling for how we speak about What Pumpkin, but none of it has been out of malice or a desire to seem them fail. Just the opposite, really: we want to see these people succeed, and it’s always saddening when they don’t. Unfortunately, there’s only so much we can do, and there is certainly close to nothing we can do to actively help. We are thus relegated to watching the property fall into squalor or crash and burn outright. I’m not sure which is worse at this point.

Moving on to developments in the HSD specifically, so-called “hornyposting” has become a difficult, nebulous problem in #general, prompting discussion of a new rule to keep it from overtaking the channel too much. The idea of what hornyposting actually is has been of some debate, and coming to a consensus has proven immensely difficult so far. In keeping with altgen style I wanted to make it ambiguous so we could rule on a case-by-case basis, but a number of users and even Ifnar spoke out against this policy.

Thus, conversation continued for a couple of hours. A number of people weren’t happy with the idea of instituting any such rule to begin with: notably, an infamous altgen user named Krilo was vociferously against the idea and wasted no time saying so; they requested a ban after calling the server “progressively shittier”, and in turn I wasted no time obliging them. In retrospect, Krilo was probably the user most responsible for this behavior by bringing up fetishistic talk and inspiring others to follow suit--banning them alone probably mitigated the issue such that we might not have needed to instate the rule at all.

Then, users like AnionCation were remarkably hostile to cutting down on hornyposting because they associated the term with general flirting. While the flirtatiousness has also gotten out of hand, it’s not something that we’re really including under the umbrella; I tried to explain this to Anion but it failed to mollify them. Anion then touched on an older issue, claiming that the reason #general was abandoned for #hangout in the first place was because #general was moderated poorly.

This was a rare opportunity to use my information collecting, so I gladly explained why they were wrong: if we’re going by raw numbers, then statistics show that merging #hangout and #general was a good idea because the net rate of posting is significantly higher now. This explanation didn’t really help Anion feel better, and kept trying to insist that it was due to specifically poor decisions on how #general was moderated that made it unpalatable to people. I largely ignored this because it was clear Anion was more distraught over the new rule change and was using it as an opportunity to vent their spleen.

However, after the discussion as a whole I did agree that the new rule would need some specific details. Thus it was instated: “examples of hornyposting include: making overtly sexual statements, excessive fetishistic remarks, and ERPing.” Everyone present seemed to think this was a reasonable enough definition (Ifnar may have had some further reservations, I don’t quite remember), and I was thankful enough to call the discussion to a close without further issue. Hopefully this cursed talk about piss and feet will stop now.

Nothing more for today.

---

13^th of November 2018

It’s been a slower week, although #general seems to be moving along at a rapid pace now. As far as people are concerned, the weirdness continues: Marsy left only a day or two after he rejoined, which was honestly to be expected. More importantly this leaves us unsure what to do with Biscuit. Ultimately he remains for now, because he did everything that was asked of him: it’s not his fault Marsy decided to leave again. However, after a week of annoying the everloving shit out of everyone in mspa-lit, he was “voted out” of the channel and now has a permanent ban from the channel.

This is not the best solution, or even a good one necessarily, but we’re really at a loss as to what else to do that wouldn’t likely be construed as unethical. Arguments for dismissing him based on his original offense feel somewhat hollow since we voluntarily let him back under specific conditions. Then again, we’re not strictly obligated to follow any actually consistent set of rules¹³². We typically avoid playing too fast and loose with the server’s inhabitants, but it would be far from the first time that we’ve made an exception. Desperate times call for desperate measures, as they say.

Besides Biscuit, a far more serious issue has cropped up anyway. Accusations, accompanied by numerous screenshots of evidence from numerous #oc-cosplay regulars, suggested that a heavily established altgen regular named Prism had been ERPing with minors in the past while themselves an adult. With the volume of evidence, it took minimal deliberation for the mod team to agree that Prism should be banned. The last thing we expected was that this would attract the attention of Maxmikester.

“Attention” may be putting it lightly; Max flew into an absolute rage when he learned that Prism had been banned from the HSD. It turns out that Prism and Max were in a server together where Max had been painstakingly trying to set up a fanadventure group for some months. With Prism banned they no longer felt motivated to pursue the project, which laid waste to Max’s plans. He managed to gain access to one of the screenshots used as evidence against Prism and immediately dismissed it as “an attempt to disrupt” his server.

Unfortunately, this outburst was not contained and he started ranting to me about the issue. After some time of this and discussing the development with the other mods, Makin gave me permission to ban Max for the sheer fury that he was aiming in my direction. After the damage was done, Max continued to demand an explanation for what was happening. I’m not sure why I bothered, but I continued to try and explain it to him for some time.

Miraculously, Max eventually understood the exact extent of the allegations against Prism. He apologized for his actions and asked if he would be let back. I abstained from the discussion because I was already responsible for Biscuit’s reentry, and I don’t really want to keep painting a target on myself with questionable decisions. As far as I can recall, the consensus was a little vague but Max has ultimately not been unbanned.

Max is really just the latest casualty in a pronounced string of bans and people leaving. This suggests that a fundamental shift in our culture is taking place¹³³: with so many established people being tossed out or otherwise removing themselves, those remaining have no choice but to redefine how they interact with each other. The community as a whole now is nothing like it was a year ago, which in turn is nothing like the community when I joined two years ago¹³⁴.

To be sure, a number of identifiable regulars remain but the overall demographics have changed so much that it’s hard to figure out what the server will look like culturally as we move forward. Rather than my typical brand of despair, I just feel kind of bemused and quiet about everything now. I don’t want to return to that feeling of pessimism (for obvious reasons, but also because Tensei, Tipsy, and others have started calling out my gloomy thinking), but the truth is that my previously bright outlook has been replaced with a rather muddled grey¹³⁵. I hope that, as before, my concerns about what’s happening here prove to be unwarranted¹³⁶.

Nothing more for today¹³⁷ .

---

14^th of November 2018

My frustration over user turnover has been steadily mounting, and I brought it up in chat today. This ignited a discussion as to whether or not significant turnover is actually happening as I describe; further, there was talk about whether such a pattern is even necessarily a bad thing. Mines and Toast both claim that it’s natural for communities such as ours to experience users coming and going, and that few people will actually feel any motivation to stay. Makin in turn decided to describe something he calls his water filter theory.

Without getting into the specifics, Makin feels like it’s appropriate and helpful to make the channel something of a grinder to new users. He cites the presence of people like Biscuit as evidence that not having an effective enough filter is a bad thing, further stating that in order to get quality regulars you need to be fine with not retaining the vast majority of newcomers. I rebutted this by saying that there needs to be a balance between quality and quantity: obviously having no filter at all will lead to a severe depression in conversational quality, but too much of a filter will choke the channel out and ultimately make it die due to not having enough participants.

These talking points have been described before; it’s not really necessary to explain them at length again. It is enough to say that we talked about the subject once more today. More important, in my mind, is that the conversation proceeded quite amicably; despite our opposing feelings on what should be prioritized, there was no obvious chicanery and the conversation managed to be lighthearted and entertaining for just about everyone involved. I take this as a sign that for all my bellyaching, the community is still pretty healthy.

A far more interesting bent occurred when lurkers were brought up. Without a doubt there are many users who simply watch the channel and never speak, for some reason or another. Miraculously, at the mention of lurkers one such person named Cruuk decided to speak up. They claimed to have been around since December of 2016, but a quick glance at their history reveals that they have basically never spoken in mspa-lit before.

We often joke at the expense of such lurkers, and having one decide to speak up during such a conversation felt almost weird. Cruuk themselves seemed to be a reasonable fellow, making me wonder why exactly they decide never to speak up. Perhaps they prefer to maintain a more detached position to what happens here? I never thought to ask while they were still talking, and now it feels almost as if it would be rude to do so--they went back to lurking not too long after the conversation stopped, and disturbing their peace feels like it would be an inconvenience.

Even discounting the fact that Cruuk was well-spoken enough, their brief participation helped to illustrate the point that there are in fact people wandering around here without ever talking. A less obvious detail this illuminates is that regulars may not truly disappear, it’s highly possible that some of them have simply stopped talking and started lurking instead.

Perhaps it’s just harder for them to enjoy talking as time goes by. There does seem to be a distinct process of stagnation going on, both through our source material becoming less relevant and with the community slowing down on a general level (so that I might mitigate claims of severe waffling on this issue, Makin himself pointed out this latter detail: “[the community has] a fine structure, it's just we're at the end of entropy¹³⁸”). I wonder if it’s possible or even desirable to try and reignite everyone’s passion here; it would be nice to inspire everyone to talk more often, but to what end? Forcing conversation is arguably worse than letting it die out naturally, and so the internal struggle continues.

Aside from all this, we learned later in the day that Viz released an interview with Hussie. I haven’t listened to it myself yet, but of note people were in severe disbelief: the voice in the interview apparently sounds nothing like Hussie does in previous interviews. A few people a are looking into the issue currently, but the discrepancy may be explained by differences based on where and how the interviews have been recorded--the latest interview was likely in a controlled recording session whereas the interview most people are familiar with was at a loud convention. More details on that to follow as we figure them out.

Nothing more for today.

---

16^th of November 2018

Interesting notes on the associations between a few people. Today Tensei and Makin were making jokes about bullying--both in that they were ironically bullying people and then making jokes about the act of bullying. This was pretty unremarkable by itself; the part that interested me was that it provoked a rather extreme response from both Tipsy and Roots during the course of the conversation.

They may have said it explicitly and I just don’t remember, but both of them have apparently had rather intense experiences with being bullied in the past. I can sympathize with this: being a victim of bullying, whether indiscriminate or targeted, makes it much harder to tolerate such behavior even when it’s clearly not actually malicious. I’m less inclined to be upset about it, but I certainly understand why one wouldn’t enjoy the topic.

Conversely, Makin and Tensei both seem just fine with this brand of humor. I’m sure it’s easy enough to gather from previous entries, but neither of them have any qualms messing around with others as long as it doesn’t actually carry ill-intent. Their casual teasing suggests a lack of experience as the object of such barbs--if I recall correctly, Tensei has outwardly mentioned that he was a bully, and never actually bullied himself. Then again, it’s highly possible they did go through this and it simply didn’t bother them as much, or they normalized it somehow. I can’t pretend to know or understand how their behavior works in this regard.

Causation and psychology aside, Tipsy and Roots--as well as some others--responded to these jokes in a severely negative fashion. This included some rather pointed statements from them that bordered on hostile; at one such remark, Roots literally told Tensei to fuck off, which garnered some chastisement from me. At this point I made an effort to break up the parade because it was clear people’s feelings were getting hurt, but I was still puzzled by the exchange as a whole.

Makin and Tensei’s habit of responding in trollish ways is hardly a secret, they are both quite open about how they engage with others. The important part is of course that there is no evil behind it, at least as far as I can tell. To them, perhaps this is simply normal social practice. If they were regular users it would be less problematic, but because they both exist in positions of authority over others it gets more complicated: ostensibly they should be trustworthy figures, but such behavior makes it implicitly difficult to trust them.

I may be overcomplicating it still; rather than typical socialization for them, perhaps it’s just a matter of boredom. The idea of consciously making users uncomfortable just because I find something funny leaves me utterly aghast, so I can’t really appreciate this if it’s true. I tend to avoid things unless I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it won’t make anyone upset.

Yet, there is the intractable problem that a variety of users will get up in arms about completely worthless things. While I’m generally not as concerned about the side that openly tries to be noble, it would be remiss of me not to point out that tyranny through virtue exists as well: having to capitulate to paranoia or worrywarts is arguably just as great of harassment as being forced to endure taunting and petty hectoring.

I hate to get caught in the trap of centrism, both because it tends to be unhelpful ambivalence and because more extreme positions try to present themselves as being centrist to avoid criticism (I’ve had discussions with Toast like this plenty of times, actually; the location of our Overton windows can have infuriating discrepancies). Nonetheless, I am caught between two interpretations of how socializing should work and neither of them really work in all cases. This brings me to an unrelated but similar idea I’ve been mulling over lately.

In mspa-lit it feels like a disproportionate number of conversations involve making fun of various philosophical concepts. This may be related to numerous users watching The Good Place right now, a show that apparently deals heavily in such ideas--it feels like such discussion always been the case here, but perhaps I’m only thinking about it openly because of an unusually high amount of discourse on it at this moment.

It’s hard to say why I’m bothering to think about this at all, if I’m being honest. I suppose the original comment that sparked this line of thought was from Makin today: “this episode is shitting on effective altruists hard I love it.” This statement by itself was so weird to me that I couldn’t stop thinking about it for some hours. I don’t even know what exactly effective altruism is¹³⁹, but there seems to be distaste or at least some sort of schadenfreude concerning the concept.

Realistically this is just a joke that warrants little to no attention, but on an almost subconscious level the judgment bothers me; I suppose it comes across as mean spirited or even bigoted. Of course, it would be unfair of me to insinuate that Makin is the only one to engage in this: almost everyone in mspa-lit and probably the HSD as a whole has professed to some sort of bias in their philosophical views. It’s just an inescapable feature of socializing.

Nothing more for today.

---

18^th of November 2018

Today saw a rather bizarre change that I’m still trying to process the ramifications of (not because of their severity, but rather because there might not actually be that much of a difference now). In short, the NSFW server is no longer associated with the HSD and Ceru has been removed from the mod team completely.

The way this happened feels kind of asinine to me. The NSFW server has operated completely fine on its own for months now, but this morning Makin decided to visit and take stock, citing the idea that the server could be siphoning activity from the HSD. He quickly discovered that he had no permissions to check channels, which understandably frustrated him since he’s technically in charge of the Homesmut server as well.

He asked Ceru to give him perms, which Ceru did and then rescinded not but five minutes later. I woke up only a few minutes after this and quickly tried to figure out what was going on; I ended up acting as the intermediary because Ceru has historically been more comfortable talking to me than Makin directly.

Essentially, Makin directly accused Ceru of mutiny and suggested that he was too unstable to be trusted with the NSFW server, making the demand that the NSFW server’s ownership should be turned over to me instead. With this barrage in mind, I asked Ceru exactly why he had messed with Makin’s permissions in the first place. Ceru described that he was afraid of Makin deleting channels or banning users, claiming that Makin was too unpredictable to be trusted.

This led to some head scratching. While Ceru’s assessment was mostly correct, it stood to reason that Makin was still in charge of the NSFW server and therefore at liberty to do what he wants with it. Upon explaining this to Ceru, he responded that he had grown attached because he’s spent over a year cultivating the place into an active, healthy community. This made sense to me and I conveyed it back to the mod team on the HSD.

Makin positively flew off the handle at this insinuation, saying that “making a community had never been a priority” in the NSFW server, and thus the idea was completely pointless. Ceru, Ifnar, and myself were the only people who were even marginally interested in the formation of the server to begin with (besides MasterEmp of course), but none of us thought that implication had been clear. The NSFW server’s only stated function was to contain NSFW discussion, which doesn’t preclude the formation of a community.

Ifnar and I laboriously pointed out that this retroactive expectation was completely ridiculous, to the point that it seemed openly stupid: not only was it a post hoc demand, it was such an unrealistic idea that it easily demonstrated his lack of involvement. Failing to predict that Homesmut would develop some kind of group identity over time is indicative of someone being painfully out of touch with how people think or behave¹⁴⁰.

Predictably, none of our explanations had much of an effect. Makin steamrolled our complaints wholesale¹⁴¹; he went on to say that Ceru’s policies over what content to allow on Homesmut were perilous, such as an ERP channel or nudes (while both of these can certainly be seen as distasteful, there are specific measures in place to prevent any liability on the part of the server). He demanded again that the server be handed over to me or anyone who would be “more responsible handling it”. After rolling my eyes at the transparent attempt to regain some control, I nevertheless started convincing Ceru to hand over the keys.

It’s honestly not hard to talk to Ceru; he’s a nice fellow if you speak to him gently enough. He doesn’t respond well to pressure, so with people like him it just takes time, patience, and a little active listening to make them feel better about what’s going on. There were plenty of valid reasons for maintaining the connection between the servers, not least of which was that Homesmut got most of its new users through the HSD. Though Ceru had quickly spiraled into defeatism upon being removed from the mod channel, it didn’t take much time to rationalize with him and bring him back out of his mood. Makin doesn’t understand or appreciate the value of this kind of thing, and as a result his diplomacy suffers greatly.

As an aside, it should be noted that he can in fact be diplomatic, but it usually requires great effort on his part. I’ve never seen him behave properly except for when there was something of great value on the line, such as our previous partnerships with We Love Fine. Yet, when it comes to matters such as the NSFW server, which he no doubt deems Too Trivial for him to be bothered with, his understanding and patience are nonexistent. If I had to guess, this will most likely be his ruination someday¹⁴² .

Returning to the topic at hand, I spent just a little time talking with Ceru and after figuring out what he wanted, I asked what he thought of handing over the server. He said that as long as I owned it and didn’t let anything too dramatic happen, he was fine with my owning the place. Negotiations were proceeding well enough; I felt like I was doing a pretty good job of reaching an understanding of both parties, although the discussion was quite heated in the mod channel.

Makin offhandedly mentioned something else about how Ceru couldn’t be trusted, citing an instance where Ceru once threatened to “delete a server using Aradiabot.” When I asked Ceru about this, he said that Aradiabot had literally never even been on the server in question (this exchange still puzzles me so much time later, I don’t even know how to begin unpacking the information). It was at this precise moment that Makin decided to say neither Ceru or Aradiabot would ever be allowed back onto the HSD.

Negotiations fell apart instantaneously. Ceru quickly went from agreeable to in shambles, frustrated and horrified that two years of his work on Aradiabot were essentially being thrown in the garbage. This quickly turned into unbridled anger, and despite my attempts to placate him it only grew worse. Tensei started speaking in the mod chat on the NSFW server, also attempting to calm Ceru down and convince him to transfer ownership. When I mentioned negotiations were falling apart Makin backpedaled and said that Aradiabot would still be allowed on the HSD “with no destructive permissions or screening abilities¹⁴³ ”, but the damage was already done.

Ceru described that he was fed up with being treated like a second class citizen, which he blamed entirely on Makin’s¹⁴⁴ hateful predisposition towards furries. After asking for input from the NSFW server mods--described by Tensei as a hugbox, maybe even appropriately--Ceru decided to formally cut ties with the HSD and turn Homesmut into its own distinct place. A year and a half of work has been undercut significantly, and now our primary bot developer has been completely removed from the scene.

The irony of all this is that Aradiabot is still on the HSD and is being used even as I write this. Ceru wanted me to make sure that, despite his being gone, that Aradiabot would still be of use to people in the HSD. While this was a little too saccharine even for me, it’s not as if my word on this subject matters at all--Makin is the only one with the ability to add or remove bots. Sometimes I’m really not sure why I bother trying at all in these situations; no matter what I do, the result seems to be negative or bizarre. I don’t even feel upset at what happened today, just a sort of mild confusion and annoyance.

Later in the day, I learned that pictures of the NSFW server discussion in modchat had been spread outside the server to some decidedly reprehensible individuals, namely recursiveSlacker; it’s practically incontrovertible that Ceru was the one behind this information leak, which means he was likely responsible for previous leaks as well. I can’t even defend Ceru retroactively at this point, which makes my efforts feel even more worthless than they already did¹⁴⁵ .

The frustration over all of this has built, and after Ceru’s departure especially it feels as if everything in the HSD is accompanied by a significant headache. Literally the night prior to all of this, I was planning on making a secret commission to an artist to depict the mod team in a sort of Christmas-themed artwork, because I was feeling grateful towards the team as a whole and wanted to show my appreciation for them.

Such an idea feels completely ill-advised to me right now, and I canceled the plans. At the moment I no longer feel like pursuing the commission, as it feels like it would be a completely disrespectful Christmas gift. I might consider something more poignant now that the situation has changed, but in general it’s difficult not to feel rather bitter. It might be better to just leave off completely; it will depend on how the rest of the year progresses.

Nothing more for today.

---

23^rd of November 2018

Thanksgiving passed yesterday with little comment. The server was pretty slow because most people were presumably enjoying the holiday with their families, so I’m not surprised or dismayed really. On the other hand, today is Black Friday, which led to a small spout of conversation where we talked about the so-called casualties of the day: this was spurred on by a website called Black Friday Death Count, which true to its name serves to tally all incidences of injury or death caused directly by the commercial holiday.

There were some strikingly flippant comments about it all, with people such as WoC, Roots, and a couple others casually joking about the news of shootings and other violent incidents. They envisioned “games” where customers would kill each other off for marginal discounts on merchandise, which is honestly not far off from the truth anyway. Nonetheless, while I was not bothered so much by the discussion, Tera seemed rather put off.

To try and put it at ease and make the conversation less imminently disrespectful, I brought up the case of a 12 year old girl being injured in today’s Black Friday sales, mentioning that she was likely an innocent child who got dragged into a disgustingly opportunistic system by her parents. My faith in the group was rewarded, with WoC et al proving perfectly reasonable: they agreed that her involvement was obviously a sad thing that shouldn’t be joked about.

We all were also able to agree that shitty, cynical adults all in on the commercial event should be free game. Thus, the conversation went back to shitposting shortly afterwards. As it is I’m pretty grateful that they were amenable to a reprieve, no matter how brief. It’s probably yet another case of worrying too much on my part, but it seemed as if Tera was getting rather upset. I hope I was able to assuage its misgivings with the discussion, I feel bad when people get too uncomfortable with what’s happening in the chat.

Other than this exchange, I have to say that it’s felt fairly dull lately. It feels harder to maintain interest in what’s going on with the server, and my bringing this up elicited the usual round of teasing that I usually get from Tensei and Makin on the matter (recently when it looks like someone is even mildly annoyed, they’ve started saying “oh shit, they left the server” to try and make me nervous¹⁴⁶ ). I compared the HSD to previous communities I’ve been a part of, and tried to reduce what I was saying to the general idea that “the HSD is a special place and should be treated as such.”

They laughed at me for saying that. I guess I should have seen it coming, as it’s the kind of stereotypically mushy thing I would say, but I admit I was a little hurt by the response and somewhat confused. The HSD really isn’t the kind of place you can just find every day, and their continual attempts to reduce it something less meaningful bothers me. It feels like they really undervalue the place, or at least refuse to see its potential.

It truly gets bad when the idea of leaving begins to flit across my mind every once in a while. It’s highly possible that I’m confusing simple boredom for a dissipating attachment; Makin’s comment about “end of entropy” a while ago rings especially true when it comes to these doldrums¹⁴⁷ . It’s simply unhelped by their remarkably flippant attitudes, which I hate to admit is fairly demoralizing.

Makin and Tensei both seem to abjure the hell out of the idea of mspa-lit having any sort of group identity. I’m not sure if they’re denying that it has such a thing at this moment--a thought I could agree on with some consideration--or if they’re denying that group identity is valuable (which would be a truly striking display of individualism, to the point that it seems weird to me). If it’s the latter idea then I would be severely cross, but ultimately my displeasure would be futile. I can’t convince them to feel differently, and it’s probably not even advisable to try.

Their disagreement with me on this matter continues to be more confusing than disappointing; freely recognizing and associating with each other is what separates us from a bunch of strangers who have no real reason to talk with each other anymore¹⁴⁸. Why else would we still be here? This isn’t an anonymous imageboard; rather, our reputations and histories are fully on display and this naturally foments connections to each other. At every turn all I can ask is, what inspires them to think the way they do?

Contemplating over it too much is also likely fruitless. I’m holding onto the idea that this is just another brief period of malaise and not a terminal issue. Every lag period so far has been temporary, and it would be a disservice to all the people I claim to care about if I treated this one like “the end”. A lack of content has always been responsible for such lulls, rather than any real disharmony; thus, my consistent bleating about this issue is unneeded. There are still plenty of things to keep track and take stock of, which I will continue to do for some time regardless.

Speaking of which, another development on altgen policy occurred today. After much conference between myself, Shitler, Dingus, and Deus, we all agreed that cropped porn images may come back under more strict conditions: images that could be easily flagged as porn even without anything explicit (such as ahegao) would be pointless and disruptive. Thus, the images are allowed as long as they are indistinguishable from a regular reaction image.

At worst, no one will respond to this and cropped porn just won’t be used anyway. However, my hope is that this could inspire some more activity from users and that it may lead to some new reaction culture being created. The old cropped porn was predictable and painfully obvious, and maybe after some time people will be a little creative about what images they use. Then again, I’m sure that altgen will find a way to break even the most strongly worded rule, so we will have to wait and see what comes out of it.

Nothing more for today.

---

26^th of November 2018

In a rather strange turn, there was a raid on the MSPA wiki today. A few users notified me and Shitler in DMs, and we quickly conferred about what to do. It was slow starting at first, but we managed to rally the people participating in #general at that moment to help us. The immediate plan was to try and revert pages back to normal, and failing that we would get a hold of the wiki moderators.

As normal users on the wiki we don’t really have any of the tools we need to identify which pages have been edited and to what extent--after about an hour of trying to figure things out, we went with the idea to contact the mods. Collectively we were able to secure methods of contact, and we left them a message. After that, there was nothing to do but hope it would get resolved.

Luckily, I’m writing this from the next day and know how the situation resolved itself: I was contacted in the morning by a mod I had reached out to called Light6. Light informed me that contacting them was the right idea, as there’s not much regular users can do besides short changes to content. Wiki admins have a revert button of sorts that makes restoring pages trivial, so an appeal to god in such cases is really all we need to do. Still, it was good to reach out to them; making contact with other parts of the fandom is always an odd experience, but refreshing and potentially useful. I wonder if I will ever talk to Light again.

Today we also happened to reach 12,000 members. This milestone has been stubbornly beyond our reach for a while, with an abysmal rate of user gain over the last several months. Nonetheless, we broke through the ceiling and Nights made a nice bit of art to celebrate. In some ways, it’s a tangible goal that I was looking forward to passing. It’s an indisputable sign that the server is growing, at least in one way. If Homestuck ever comes back, or if something even tangentially related occurs, then I expect this place will positively explode with activity.

Concerning individual people, there has been some friction with a user named Monte-Velle, who was recently banned from mspa-lit for being too sociable when Makin happened to be watching. I’m not too familiar with Monte and a few people have claimed they’re mean spirited to a fault, but previous interactions with them have always been friendly and peaceful enough for me.

The particular problem tonight involved the Patreon-associated #deltarune channel, which was given to Monte after the actual channel was shut down. At this point in time, the claims of Monte being rude seem more substantial; I’ve mostly chalked it up to being frustrated with the mspa-ban, but they’ve gone so far as to pick fights with people. Tonight, they had one such fight with user5 over the Deltarune channel.

The topic of the argument itself is exceedingly silly: directly prior to the main #deltarune channel being hidden, User5 or Monte pinged Makin for ownership of the new version. User5 claimed it had been him, and Monte was growing increasingly irate over the insinuation. They threatened ban him from the channel if he kept undercutting their authority. In a somewhat puzzling exchange, User5 asked me to check the archived channel for evidence as to who had actually pinged Makin.

After confirming that it was indeed User5 who had done the deed, I posted the screenshot in #deltarune and Monte mysteriously disappeared for the rest of the night. They had mentioned something about drinking; I hope that they’ll be alright, and I’m starting to think of ways to talk with them and calm them down. It’s been a while since I’ve done this for anyone, but maybe if I help them improve enough I can get their ban removed and restore their mood.

If I’m being honest with myself, I’m almost certain Makin won’t go for it. Not only does he not care enough in the first place, but the unstable mood and excessive rudeness towards people in general doesn’t really paint Monte in a favorable light. If I think about it further, I’m also kind of hesitant to begin this process in the first place: advocating for people has become undesirable after the situations with recursiveSlacker and Biscuit. Seems like sticking my neck out for people only ever gets me in trouble¹⁴⁹.

Nothing more for today.

---

29^th of November 2018

#general’s culture seems to be developing more as time goes by. It’s far more socially oriented than before, with people like AnionCation specifically guiding chat in the direction of open, direct, and close interaction. However, the nature and behavior of #general seems to vary significantly depending on when certain key figures are present. Contrary to Anion’s direction, Godfiend (previously known as $trider) pushes lighthearted mockery not unlike #altgen or #mspa-lit. Thus, at different times of day #general can have markedly different culture in action.

Unrelated but pertinent: for some days now, Andrew has been posting a gachi edit he made that involves WoC and myself. At first I was more or less ambivalent about this drawing, but it has grown increasingly uncomfortable to see. WoC was made very uncomfortable about it from the start, and the tension finally broke into confrontation today.

The edit itself, which I will not post, involves WoC spanking me fiercely (just writing it out like this made me cover my eyes in shame, honestly¹⁵⁰). I’m not sure why we let it go on for as long as we did, but nonetheless we started furiously discussing it in the mod chat. There was some initial confusion about whether this was worse than WoC’s typical gachi posts and why, but the overall point was simple enough: posting unsolicited edits of real people, especially porn, is a weird and unwelcome thing to do.

After deliberating on it, I went to directly ask Andrew to stop posting the edit and explained that it made us uncomfortable. He was taken back by this: although he thanked me for being direct and open about the problem, he also went and complained to WoC for not bringing up the problem sooner. While we were content with a warning before, this perceived “victimblaming” made WoC thirsty for blood.

The confrontation with Andrew only worsened, who was furious at the lack of communication. WoC and I conferred some more, taking his reaction into account. We decided that giving him a temp ban was necessary: a warning first is important, but if it proves ineffective then more substantial punishment is in order. Andrew was thus banned from the HSD for one week. To my frustration, I somehow ended up with the task of explaining all of this to Andrew. I’m not sure how, since I wasn’t really the offended party--it may be that I was the only one able to physically talk to him, due to Discord’s friending system. Either way, the headache worsened as I explained our decision.

He was clearly distraught but at this point (near 3 AM or so), but I was way too tired to guide him through understanding it. After some more perfunctory statements I went to bed and let him stew. I hate confronting people in this manner, but after a point it becomes handholding and helps no one. Hopefully he’ll learn from this and we won’t have to deal with a similar problem in the future.

Nothing more for today.

---

2^nd of December 2018

Very early in the morning, there was a flare of talk about how channel quality has fallen without the presence of Revlar. The argument was framed around two specific viewpoints: the first asserted that Revlar actively engaged in “intelligent conversations” that were provocative; the other insisted that Revlar was overly antagonistic and--no matter what the conversations may have been about--he made things worse with his overall demeanor.

I’m torn: I agree more with the second point than the first, although I do think both are true. Yet, I played at least some part in his leaving, and I’m trying to recuse myself from talking about his leaving (I’m failing spectacularly, but trying nonetheless). This all stemmed from the idea that mspa-lit has simply been #general-lite lately, with people like Tensei and Nat openly disparaging people for socializing too much.

Usually I’m able to weather such complaints, but after some growing tension I snapped a little bit tonight: I grew so fed up with this conversation that I manically vowed to mspa-ban anyone who spoke even passingly about such “general topics”, or engaged in any sort of socializing¹⁵¹. In a vindictive mood, it seemed clear in my head that people complaining about the channel quality would realize their foolishness if the channel was simply dead instead.

I saw in my mind’s eye a channel where discussion was indeed high quality, even though it would only be two or three people sending 20 messages a day. Or it would be Makin liveblogging things to himself ad nauseum without interruption. Yet, in just a few hours after my moodswing I calmed down and saw the futility/purposelessness of this. It was a silly idea to begin with, fueled by anger rather than reason.

I don’t really know what the answer is to fixing channel quality, but at every turn it seems I’m being forced further into ambivalence and apathy. The solution seems to be to not care at all, but without that there’s no point to being here. I guess I’m just an idiot after all¹⁵²; Nat and others are no doubt laughing at me for my outburst, a thought that bothers me still more. Sometimes I wonder what the fuck everyone’s deal is, really.

Nothing more for today.

---

3^rd of December 2018

Today, we achieved widespread awareness of Tumblr changings its terms of service. There have been rumblings in the past week or two, with various blogs being taken down without explanation. People were already beginning to connect the dots, but there was an official post that clarified what exactly was going on: Tumblr is removing all “adult content” from their platform effective December 17th.

Tumblr has had problems with its reporting system for years. There aren’t enough humans working to respond to problems, and so all sorts of vile content remain up despite common complaints: child porn is a huge problem on Tumblr that’s been largely known about for a long time. This malpractice has finally caught up with them though, and the Tumblr app was taken off of the Google and Apple app stores for failing to clean up properly.

Almost predictably, the Tumblr administration’s response to this was an insane overreaction. Rather than simply boning up and dealing with the actual problem, they have elected to remove all adult content period. The full content of their change in terms is available in the link above, but as a brief overview: photos, videos, GIFs, and illustrations that depict sexual acts are no longer permissible. Weirdly, “female-presenting nipples” are no longer allowed either (except if involved in breastfeeding or recorded birth demonstrations??), but art such as nude statues, “artistic illustrations”, and writing are still allowed.

Within minutes of the post going up, the common consensus was that this will lead to the death of Tumblr. As mentioned before, the mass deletion of Tumblr blogs with NSFW content on them has been in progress for some days even before the official announcement. Makin recently noticed a sharp uptick in unique visits to the subreddit per day (somewhere in the realm of 100,000 apparently), and after some deliberation he decided that Tumblr being laid waste to is responsible.

If this is true, then the mass exodus is just now beginning. It’ll be interesting to see how the face of the Homestuck fandom (and indeed, fandom culture in general) changes in the wake of this development. I predict a general increase in activity for old websites dedicated to specific forms of entertainment: deviantart and the -booru realms will see an increase in use due to how easily they facilitate art-sharing; Archive of Our Own will most likely see an increase from writers.

Major content aggregators like Reddit will probably see some increase as well, but fandom politics between Tumblr, Reddit, and 4chan make it difficult to tell what will happen. My gut instinct says that 4chan will see marginal to no changes at all, while Reddit will probably be influenced at least a little bit (there is less established animosity between Reddit and Tumblr, and the nature of these websites are a lot closer than 4chan’s anonymous imageboard system).

Newgrounds is likely also going to experience some sort of revival: NSFW artists already have very few places to go and showcase their work, and Newgrounds practically built its reputation on being one of the first major websites that allowed such content. Regardless of my predictions, I’m actually curious to see what the long term ramifications of Tumblr’s downfall will be. They might limp along for some time yet, but they will almost certainly fade into obscurity over the course of the next year, at the longest.

More related to the HSD specifically, there was yet another mod altercation involving myself. At some point during rather animated discussion in mspa-lit, Makin and Nat started to rip on Putnam and Tipsy. I mostly refrained from saying anything, as I’m trying to deliver on that promise of not interfering with conversation so much. Makin stopped teasing after a bit, but Nat continued into a harangue that became offensively excessive.

After considering it for a bit and with prompting from Tera, I mspa-banned Nat for an hour or two. I didn’t expect much to come out of this, but it quickly ignited another discussion in mod chat about whether or not my action was permissible. After explaining the mod hierarchy (as elaborated at the very beginning of this document: Makin > mods > pseudo mods), Tensei interceded and claimed that there was absolutely no precedent to suggest that full mods have ban authority over pseudo mods. I rebutted that such is how it’s worked since even before I became a mod. I became rather annoyed, because even without precedent this has pretty much always been the case: full mods are specifically supposed to have purview over the actions of pseudomods.

Makin stepped in and said that my actions were acceptable in this case because he wanted to ban Nat for behaving “like an edgy 15 year old”. Then for future reference he said, “please don’t ban pseudos randomly unless I agree with it”, which unambiguously cemented Tensei’s viewpoint as the operative procedure for future situations like this.

For once, my overall aggravation didn’t really increase after this altercation. The upset of what I had assumed was standard protocol was met with not much more than mild annoyance, and that quickly gave way to apathy. Now that some time has passed and I’m not in the thick of it anymore, it’s easier to swallow the idea that I have no ground to stand on here. It’s also easier to contemplate whether or not I should actually give a shit about this in the first place.

In truth, I can’t give less than a rat’s ass about the structure of mod hierarchy. At this point I’m mostly just worried about Nat’s sporadic outbursts. I’ve lost track of how many times she’s gone off on people with little to no prompting, and it’s led to repeated reprimands. If she doesn’t reign it in soon she’s going to get dismissed during the next Reckoning, or possibly even before then. She has interesting input and I enjoy talking with her, but this aggressiveness is going to get her shitcanned if she doesn’t knock it off.

I’m not really sure if I can do anything about it; she seems to hate it when I try to help. I’m not sure if I specifically did something to piss her off or if she hates my overall attitude, but I’m largely forced to standby and worry that she’ll go too far one of these days. I sometimes think she must be under some kind of duress, but she refuses to talk about it. I say “I hope” a lot, but nothing else quite seems to fit: I hope that whatever is happening here will improve soon.

Nothing more for today.

---

5^th of December 2018

Yesterday, Makin had a nice joke to himself. In the middle of the day he created a new channel called #shipping and dumped it in the Homestuck channel category. There was absolutely no warning or guidance on what to do with it, and so we gradually attained awareness of it over the next ten minutes or so. Spiral picked up on it first, and the ensuing reactions were roughly what one might imagine.

There was a scramble to organize the channel, which within seconds of being created had succumbed to the worst shitposting. Exacerbating the madness were roving, confused individuals who somehow didn’t understand what the purpose of the place was from the title alone. Spiral, Ifnar, Nights, and Toast all stepped in to try and get the channel under control. I watched the madness unfold, trying to figure out what Makin was playing at.

To their credit, the aforementioned mods were doing an excellent job. Within only a few minutes they had curbed most of the shitposting and were trying to figure out working parameters for conversation. They agreed on not having any shitposting, and automatically began to reroute shipping talk from the other channels in the category. A description and rules went up, and things seemed to stabilize rather quickly.

On the other hand, their reactions were interesting: Spiral was absolutely furious at having the channel dumped on them with no warning or instruction; Toast insisted that it was a test “from makin on high”, setting to work on it since it was quickly deemed to be within his and Spiral’s responsibility. Ifnar was studiously enforcing the newly imposed rules and doing his best to maintain order; between the three of them and Nights, the channel was in working order within half an hour.

Throughout this process, Makin was wholly absent. He hadn’t said a word since before the channel went up, and Spiral was increasingly irate about his lack of direction. Then, once all the work had been put in and things had settled down, he said: “oh I just made this channel to delete it later,” and then in five seconds the channel was gone as if it had never been.

I have no doubt that he had been watching the entire time, waiting until the precise moment where the chaos had been minimized just so he could get a laugh out of it all. It was admittedly pretty funny, although I can’t remember if Spiral was also amused or just all the more pissed at being jerked around. I was also annoyed, but only from a statistical viewpoint: the channel had already experienced some 500 messages, but since it was actually deleted I have no way of verifying exactly how many had been sent and thus my count for the day was ruined¹⁵³.

This aside, recently I’ve been trying to talk with a few people more often. Surprisingly I got the opportunity to talk with Tera’s SO. Historically with the name Arcane and recently gaining the nickname Aya in #general chat, she has been around for over a year and a half but only recently attained some recognition. She mentioned being self-conscious about this before, but seems to be increasingly happy with the friendships she’s forming with other #general denizens.

Aya has attempted to push into #mspa-lit in the past but found the discussions there to be kind of impenetrable. It may be that the people themselves were too brusque, because after some prompting she seems to be eager to discuss and learn many things--a running joke between us now is that I’m teaching her botany, since she seems curious to know a lot about plant science. Overall, she seems very receptive and fun to talk with.

With some effort and patience, I’m sure that she could make a fine addition to the channel. Then again, her previous excursions led to an impressive amount of flirting between her and Tera; it’s a good thing Makin wasn’t around at the time, or else there would surely have been repercussions. However, it’s also worth pointing out that his prudish tendencies have grown so prevalent lately that they’re actually becoming groan-worthy.

As mentioned in a recent post, I’ve also been taking some time to talk with Monte lately. Their aggressive tendencies have been worsening lately, and although it’s highly inadvisable I decided I want to try and help them out. Talking with them has helped me to understand exactly why they’re behaving in such a fashion, and I’m trying my best to listen and be a good guiding force. The rudeness came to a peak today after a confrontation between them and Anion.

Not to soften it too much, but there is some rather unpleasant history between Monte and Anion. I don’t know all of the details but it’s clear that Monte, in their own words, fucked up tremendously in the past. They view their own actions with embarrassment and remorse, and Anion seems to treat them with disdain. A brief spat turned into a larger fight when Anion began to openly call out Monte for history in an unrelated server.

This came across more as being deliberately spiteful than anything else, so Anion was banned for two days due to initiating witchhunts (extended to three days upon her request). I don’t know the exact extent of the history between these two, but I’m really trying to angle this towards a peaceful resolution for both parties. I can’t tell how sincere Monte is yet, and Anion seems almost gleeful when stirring this particular pot. It could be that there’s too much bad blood between them for anything positive to come out of it. I really hope I don’t get burned trying to help out again.

In the more abstract, I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of interaction between what I will deem the cynics of the chat--including figures like Tensei, Makin, Toast, and Nat--versus those I will call naive participants, such as myself, Tera, Tipsy, Spiral, and a multitude of others. Obviously because I place myself in the latter category there is some bias involved in this, but I feel like my thoughts hold to some degree (I made both terms vaguely disparaging to discourage this bias anyway).

It feels like there is a symbiosis of sorts to be considered here. A lot of the time, it feels like the cynics derive enjoyment at the expense of the naive, taking advantage of their earnestness in order to pull off innocuous jokes in some fashion or another. This in turn tends to aggravate the naive members of the chat to varying extents (Tera and Tipsy seem to make their peace with it quickly, whereas Spiral and I get more worked up depending on the severity of the prank).

Conversely, I think that the cynics provide a good deal of contention that makes conversations more interesting. While some of their contributions are questionable, they are at their heart usually well-intentioned and genuinely thought provoking. It feels like it may border on contrarianism sometimes, but Tensei especially has a very pronounced point of view that is solidly defined. It’s critical to maintain a diverse range of opinions in order to make conversations as entertaining as possible.

However, significant problems arise from this dichotomy. Often the naive participants, especially myself, become angry when the wool gets pulled over their eyes too much. I can’t speak much for the others I listed, but increasingly often I’ve considered stepping down from my position and leaving the server when I get upset with what’s happening. Thankfully I realize this wouldn’t help soon afterwards, but this thought gets more pronounced with each subsequent incident. If this proves true for the others as well, then eventually the cynics’ shenanigans would deprive themselves of effective targets for their japery, and slow things to a crawl.

However, when the naive get too angry it can lead to overly harsh reprimanding over what are typically innocent jokes. We like to say that one shouldn’t joke about things that make people upset, but at a certain point our anger is demonstrably silly. Yet, it doesn’t stop us from yelling at the offending individuals in question, which can lead to genuinely hurt feelings. Sometimes I worry that the difference in our viewpoints will lead to friction too great to overlook.

Returning to the idea of symbiosis, what I mean to suggest with all this is that there’s a delicate balance to maintain between these two groups of people. The cynics tend to mix things up and make conversations more engaging, but the naive act as fuel for the conversations to begin in the first place. If the cynics grow too strong then it makes people leave and leads to an overall decrease in activity, and if the naive grow too strong then it leads to a hugbox and boring repetition of stale talking points. Both of these outcomes lead to a sharp decrease in entertainment value, and overall enjoyment of the channel suffers.

If I were a social engineer¹⁵⁴, my primary focus would be on optimizing this relationship to ensure the maximum amount of entertainment for everyone. Unfortunately I don’t have that power, and I strongly suspect no one in the chat really does. That having been said, we seem to have done okay collectively so far. I’ll just have to be faithful that things can continue without destabilizing too much. At the end of the day, everyone here must be reasonable enough for that at least; why else would we be here otherwise¹⁵⁵ ?

Nothing more for today.

---

6^th of December 2018

We discovered a change in the Hiveswap/Friendsim website today. It seems as if all mention of Hiveswap: Act 2 has been scrubbed from the website, which has prompted an outbreak of disbelief and mild anger. In fairness, we half expected something like this to happen anyway; the general sentiment seems to be more disappointment than anything else.

I think most of us are simply stunned that the Hiveswap situation somehow keeps getting worse. User Xoro mentioned: “hiveswap is probably the most majestic trainwreck ive ever witnessed / its still to this day keeps getting worse somehow”, to which Spiral commented: “maybe it'll get better by the time i'm in a retirement home”. Act 1’s delay over a course of nearly 4 years has already sapped the community of its patience, so it’s no surprise that more signs that the property being mishandled is growing intolerable.

This response isn’t universal though; while most people who even bother are indeed upset, others like Mines are far more reserved:

this isn't a confirmation that act 2 is dead / it's not a good SIGN but there is still a chance of it / … / what it DOES show is that they prioritize friendsim advertising over hiveswap advertising / which isn't good since friendsim was just something to tide people over initially.

The best case scenario is that both the Friendsims and Act 2 are being developed together, but grim reality suggests that the redesign means Act 2 is dead. We are all hoping beyond hope that such is not the case.

Nothing more for today.

---

---

10^th of December 2018

The end of the Friendsims is nigh. There is an increasing amount of speculation as to what comes next: will another batch of Friendsims be announced? Will there be some news about Hiveswap, positive or negative? Might there even be a rare newspost from Hussie himself? These things, especially in conjunction with the mysterious change in site design, is at the forefront of everyone’s minds.

Yet, if history is any indication, it is more likely that none of these will happen. Indeed, the most likely scenario is arguably the worst; receiving no news at all is a very distinct possibility, and one that will only serve to make an already unsatisfied fandom even more agitated. At this point, it seems that the only reprieve from boredom available to us is what we pursue ourselves.

To this end, Makin has reminded the server of the upcoming reread starting around February. This seems the most obvious and effective way to reinvigorate interest, at least temporarily.

If that weren’t enough, though, he’s promised that he will be “pulling out all the stops” for the occasion, seeing as the reread should culminate on the 10th anniversary of the comic. Among other things, he’s already resurrected the fabled “BECOME A BABY” ads on MSPFA. The mystery of who was responsible for their appearance last time remains unsolved, but Makin has openly coopted them now.

There’s no telling how much else he’ll actually be able to do to generate excitement—I would be surprised if he didn’t have some tricks up his sleeve. Even outside of his influence, the server feels like it’s hit some stride recently. Activity is consistent and, dealings with WP aside, the fanbase seems somewhat content. There are some small stirrings in the community as the year nears its close.

Nothing more for today.

---

11^th of December 2018

An interesting development: old user Mad Dog dropped in today. They disappeared probably about a year ago at this point, and it was rather comfy to reacquaint ourselves with each other. Mad Dog is given to a very incisive brand of shitposting that has garnered some frustration, and that behavior was quick to come out upon rejoining our fold. They are also of a more adult persuasion than most of us, turning many bents in conversation toward more mature topics than we tend to discuss. This with the shitposting is a dangerous combination; they’ll have to tread lightly or Makin will be quick and loose with the banhammer.

With the preference for explicit discussion, Mad Dog was dismayed to see the NSFW channel had been wiped out some time ago. Indeed, most of the others from that crowd had also moved on, such as Dickle. These things, once remarked on, sparked some fervent discussion of things they’ve missed out on. We also tried to remember which users exactly had come and gone in the last year, which led to a brief roundtable discussion about the reason all of us started using mspa-lit.

The wide range of people mspa-lit has accrued is interesting, especially when one considers the various ways they found their way here. Gnawms, for instance, mentioned that he started using the channel because his friends from CANMT spoke most often here (a group which is now almost completely silent, given the dry spell in content). As might be expected, most of us found our way to the server through the subreddit, although there have been an increasing number of people who have arrived from other places—an increasingly common source is the Homestuck Amino group, which is a cause for some concern.

Aside from Mad Dog’s reappearance, there was little of note. James Roach made a tweet that at first glance seemed rather aggressive, but with even the slightest examination becomes rather benign (this is a good rule of thumb for looking at posts from James Roach, in all honesty). People are wary now that the Friendsims are nearly over, and it seems more and more likely that there will be no news of what comes after. This is not surprising, but definitely disheartening. Yet, we’ve subsisted on basically no official correspondence whatsoever for a long time now. The server will be more or less patient as always, waiting for the next morsel we can get our hands on.

Nothing more for today.

---

12^th of December 2018

Today was rather unfortunate. The server in general was fine, but for some reason I was caught up in a terrible mood and had little urge to repress it. I snapped at Makin early in the day, who had been messing around with users in a way that I saw as harassment. I told him point blank that his casual rudeness was “pissing me off severely,” although I’m not sure if he took it seriously. He continued in the regular fashion.

After this initial vent, it only got worse. After witnessing Makin bully people out of mspa-lit for the exact same things he was doing, such as soapboxing or being an overall twat, I lost it and began a petty campaign to try and illustrate his hypocrisy. The channel is usually reserved for the shill list, or more generally “anything that doesn’t belong in a different channel.” With this in mind, I began strictly enforcing the rules.

This involved warning users once if they posted anything that could possibly belong to a different channel, such as media discussion or science. At first people thought it was an ironic gesture, although as it continued their unease grew. People began to ask if something was wrong, to which I would only reiterate that I was enforcing the rules of the channel. After half an hour, I started actually banning people and the atmosphere became rather uncomfortable.

Qweq, Multivac, Andrew, and a variety of others began to message me to see what was going on. I maintained that I was only enforcing the channel rules, and then after some more of this rigamarole they started to grow upset and called me out as disingenuous. Tera requested that I be mspa-banned until I stopped, but I ignored it and kept up my pretenses.

After going in this fashion for about an hour, Makin removed my moderator role “until Drew stops behaving like a child.” I was so frustrated that I refused to admit I had gone too far for some time, but eventually my anger caved in and I was simply tired. I stopped posting in the channel for the rest of the night. It was the first time on the server that I had negatively impacted others on purpose, and realizing that made me feel deeply ashamed.

Makin eventually remodded me later and, to my surprise and gratitude, no one has really given me a hard time about it. A few people mentioned that they were just happy I had given up the ghost; most understand the kind of agitation that I’m going through, and given how difficult it is to deal with Makin’s chicanery on a regular basis they had suspected something like this would happen sooner or later. Any further explanation would be attempts to excuse my actions, so I will end only by saying that I’m very disappointed in myself.

Nothing more for today.

---

14^th of December 2018

The last Friendsim came out today. Interestingly, it came out later in the evening due to delays, as there was a gamebreaking bug that the developers needed to fix immediately before releasing. As the game was delayed into the later hours of the evening, the userbase became increasingly agitated, amid fears that the game was actually cancelled.

#final-friendsim was unveiled as the place for discussion of the final route, although for some time it was nothing but a haven for some of the worst shitposting we have ever seen. It eventually became so extreme that Makin broke the seal and activated slowmode posting, putting it at the maximum time possible: 120 seconds between posts per poster.

Rather than calming people down, it only seemed to make it worse somehow. The volume of shitposts was certainly lesser after enacting slowmode, but the quality of posts plummeted even further down than it already was. In this manner the channel continued for some four to six hours, and most other users relegated the channel to “toxic waste” status.

Despite this quarantine, the mood seemed to spread a little bit and people in #general and #mspa-lit were becoming somewhat slaphappy as the night progressed. Amusingly, even WP members on Twitter such as James Roach and Trace were posting about the delay. To my delight, it was all rather lighthearted: jokes were tossed between these individuals with no real trace of animosity or blame. There was some positive engagement with the fans, and everyone seemed to be in a jovial mood despite the circumstances.

Then, around 9 or 10 PM EST, the final installment came out. It was practically torn apart by fans eager for content, and by all accounts people seemed rather pleased: without going into too much detail, there is a secret or extra ending to the Friendsim if you purchased and played the previous installments, and almost everyone I talked to found it to be beyond satisfactory. Though some of the previous episodes appeared to be completely unworthy of note, this seems to be a proper end to the year-long episodic story. By all accounts it is a good day for the fandom.

Nothing more for today.

---

15^th of December 2018

The general opinion of the last Friendsim appears to have soured somewhat; more critical circles have pointed out some sort of transgression or fault with one of the characters, who has been the subject of great interest ever since the Friendsim was first revealed. To my understanding, this character was written or at the very least implied to be trans, but their portrayal in the actual episode seems to have offended a number of people.

The source of the controversy is actually two-fold: this character was implied to be trans when Cohen was attached to Hiveswap and the Trollcall was freshly announced. In the present day, however, that trans status is somewhat ambiguous. The idea that they’re trans is derived from a conflict in the inherent qualities of the character itself, rather than through an overt statement to that effect. Thus, the lack of concrete representation that people expected has nettled some.

Further, the nature of the character is decidedly negative: they are painted as, in a word, a scumbag. Coupled with the expectation that this character would be trans, this sort of design shocked people and was arguably the more offensive cause of the controversy (even even though it’s predicated on an ambiguity).

If I’m not mistaken, the exact characteristics furthered the upset: apparently the character in question consists of a collection of negative stereotypes that are commonly spread arguments against trans people. However, there is some back and forth as to whether this is an accurate complaint, where the opposition claims that people are disproportionately upset that “the trans character was portrayed negatively.” I’ve firmly stayed out of the debate, as I have no real opinion on the matter.

For what it’s worth, that debate isn’t very heated on the HSD apparently. Spiral commented that the discourse has been exceptionally fierce, but mostly in places outside of the HSD. Other, smaller Discord servers, and the Tumblr/Twitter sections of the fandom are where most of this furor is happening. In these places, the character in question and the people who wrote the Friendsim episode are being lambasted.

Here, however, aside from some mild discussion there didn’t seem to be any sort of outrage. This was specifically pointed out as a good thing: in the past we have usually been a voice of discontent with all manner of developments, so the fact that we’re an island of calm in all of this uproar is a nice change of pace. We’ve made our comments, and now I assume most of our users are simply waiting to see what happens next.

Nothing more for today.

---

16^th of December 2018

Makin decided to make a few of the archived channels available for public viewing, “for those who want to learn more about the history of the server.” These channels are: #friendsim, #old-secret, #sbahj, #read-tnc, and #aaa. The full list of archived channels is rather extensive, so I won’t list them all here, but it consists of over 30 channels (including two copies of #general2). Although these channels basically don’t matter, I felt that it would be interesting and slightly informative to run some stats on all of the archived channels as well, though it will be much briefer than the records I’ve been keeping for the main server.

As of this entry, the server has 22,598,350 messages. The hidden channels together have 2,014,280 messages, comprising about 8.91% of the server’s total. Of these, the top five hidden channels by message count: #hangout at 815,524 (of the 2 million messages, 40.49%), #nsfw at 525,561 (26.1%), #radio at 203,703 (10.1%), #illuminati at 136,882 (6.8%), and then a near tie for fifth between #secret at 88,018 (4.4%) and #friendsim at 84,836 (4.2%).

Of these, the #nsfw channels (which I combined statistically) are not viewable publicly for obvious reasons. Less obvious is that there is a lot of compromising information of individual users in there alongside all the pornography, so keeping them hidden is as much to protect the other people involved as it is to protect the server’s status. More confusing is that #hangout is also hidden from public view--in order to take its data I had to give myself the affiliated pseudomod role. I’m not sure if this is an oversight or if Makin has elected to keep it hidden for some reason.

Ignoring these, I’m very pleased to see the overall development: anything that renders information more freely accessible is a worthwhile effort. It’s a significant move towards transparency and the dissemination of cultural knowledge, which is basically what this document is all about. Hopefully people will be emboldened to seek out information at its heart now that the channels are searchable.

Nothing more for today.

---

20^th of December 2018

About three days ago, on the 17th, Tumblr officially enacted its policy to remove NSFW content from their website. While it hasn’t exactly been a boom, over the last few days the usercount is definitely increasing more swiftly than normal. Between Tumblr’s policy change and the BECOME A BABY ads, the last few weeks have easily outpaced the last six months in terms of user gain.

Additionally, there does seem to have been some interest from Makin revealing the archived channels for public viewing. In mspa-lit, the topic of the NSFW channels themselves came up. While everyone present understood why they were still hidden, it was asked why we leave them on the server if they present such a problem. The most likely explanation I was able to provide by myself was that--by themselves--they comprise about half a million messages. Makin isn’t going to be okay with getting rid of that sizeable chunk, almost an entire worth’s month of messages, unless mandated by Discord proper.

In the course of this discussion, an old running joke was brought up. In the past, we’ve talked about a channel where full moderators share nude images with each other as a rite of passage. To be clear, this channel does not and has not ever existed; we’re simply fond of trotting the joke out at opportune times to throw users for a loop. I’m loathe to ruin the joke by writing about it here, but more chances to use it will appear regardless.

What usually happens is that #mod-nudes is brought up tangentially, usually by a user who is in the know. This prompts people who have never heard of it to chime in, confused or surprised. Whichever mod is present will then “confirm” the news by posting a screenshot of an appropriately titled channel name as fast as possible--after becoming a bit more savvy, I set up a fake channel in a different, private server. Before I would have to quickly come up with a manipulated image, which ruins the illusion if it takes too long.

No matter how many times it happens, at least one person is fooled by the exchange, especially newcomers. It’s been a while since the joke has come up, so this time we even managed to trick Tera into thinking that it was real. Thinking back on tonight, I don’t know if we ever actually revealed that it was a joke. We should probably inform everyone who was present that it isn’t actually real.

As it is, #mod-nudes has been a running gag for literal years now. I don’t remember exactly how it got started, it’s likely that it originated in a different place and then someone like Toast brought the idea with him. It never gets old to witness the shock from people not in on it, and in the end it’s just a harmless bit of fun. One can’t ask for a better prank.

Nothing more for today.

---

21^st of December 2018

Makin held another survey today. It proceeded much as usual, with the assorted teasing and making fun of responses (at one point taking the time to call out a post saying he shouldn’t make fun of responses). #survey was dragged out as is customary, and this time there appears to have been a few substantial changes.

Most notably, Makin has created two new channels: #mspa-other for discussing works like Problem Sleuth, and #writing for obvious reasons. People have wanted #writing for a very long time, but we’ve resisted the demands of the masses up until now because #mspa-lit already exists and is a close enough topical interest (at least in theory). He also reorganized the channel categories to make things a little less cluttered.

For convenience, here’s a changelog of how the server’s most used channels look:

General category now consists of #general, #altgen, #serious, and #botspam;

Homestuck category now consists of #homestuck, #hiveswap, and #mspa-other;

Creative category now consists of hs-art-cosplay, art-cosplay, #oc-hell, #writing, and #music;

Interests category now consists of #gaming, #western-media, #eastern-media, #mspa-lit, #science-math, and #coding-tech.

The inclusion of even more channels will surely agitate those who complain about “channel clutter,” but at this point most don’t care about how many channels there are as long as it’s organized properly. That having been said, #mspa-other and #writing are only here as long as they remain active; if they drop significantly in activity then Makin has sworn he’ll get rid of them. Time will tell how this arrangement works out.

Nothing more for today.

---

23^rd of December 2018

There’s been a brief flare up in tempers today, as the subject of mspa-lit’s quality was brought up once more. This has been discussed increasingly in the last couple of weeks, and we appear to have hit some sort of limit for how much people will tolerate the monotony of repeating the topic. It’s become a source of annoyance for most, no matter which side one happens to be on.

Andrew specifically has become more frustrated at people who initiate these discussions but then do nothing to help increase the channel quality themselves. Others, ironically, became upset with Andrew after he stated his opinion a few times unsolicited. I have to confess a growing apathy about the channel being slow, which is at least a step up from the anxiety of before.

Significant complaints involved Makin being hypocritical about policing discussion and restrictions on what could be discussed. After some back and forth on this issue, I began advocating that people move to a different channel such as #general where they won’t be handled so disparagingly. As could be expected, no one actually ended up moving, so the issue remains unresolved and unmoving.

In a way, I sympathize with Andrew: it feels as if this controversy has come up multiple times over the last four months, if not more, and absolutely nothing has been done on any side to actually fix it. Everytime it’s discussed we end up coming to an understanding or agreement on the causative agent or agents, but then no one does anything differently. It’s stagnation in its most sincere form.

Mspa-lit seems to be partially sustained by, maybe even relying overly much on, a particular unwillingness to talk in other places. There are few to no reasons why we can’t take discussions to their proper channels, except perhaps that we would crowd out discussions already in those places. Otherwise, even with Makin encouraging us to go somewhere else with certain topics, they simply resurge later. It’s not out of a directed malice that this happens either, it’s a completely organic interaction.

That having been said, “allowed topics” in mspa-lit have become somewhat predictable and increasingly boring. There are very few things on the Shills List that aren’t complete, such as Worth the Candle, and updates are rather sparing. Normally this would mean that there’s little reason to stay.

This frustration compounds with the fact that other channels are also frequently boring or flooded with people who are not fun to talk to, usually because of a lack of experience or maturity. Dap summarized all of this in one short phrase: “Outside is kids, inside is a circle jerk”. This is not to say that the server is in any sort of immediate peril or strife, it just seems that morale is approaching a low period right now. The lack of content is tearing us apart from the inside.

In sharp contrast with this prognosis about mspa-lit in particular, general and altgen both are experiencing significant spikes in activity. They’ve been surprising, with many days approaching or even surpassing 10,000 messages in each. At any point in a given day, there seems to always be at least one person talking, which is a good, basic goal to strive for with channel activity.

That having been said, I feel the need to contradict a recent entry I made regarding the culture of each channel. I mentioned that it feels like the server has begun settling down recently, but after taking a much closer look at each of them the opposite feels true. It’s difficult to pin down any sort of cultural framework.

The reason for this is because, even with the increased rate of user gain over the last few weeks, most of the users who join don’t actually talk. It seems that most accounts will say a few messages or nothing at all. Before, such users would leave after some time, but now it seems most are content to float around and lurk. All of this is to suggest that the userbase is somewhat transient right now.

This could be a huge problem in the future if we lose what userbase we have; lurkers don’t have any loyalty to a place, nor do they contribute anything themselves. If the solid group of users that post now stop or go elsewhere for some reason, then not only does activity slow down, but there isn’t really anyone to replace it. Cultivating users who are consistently active is difficult but nonetheless important as insurance against an uncertain future.

---

27^th of December 2018

The last few days have gone by without much fanfare. It seems many people (including myself) have been somewhat scattered due to personal obligations; we aren’t as readily available as we normally are. Despite this we have been able to do a few things to keep ourselves occupied and entertained.

Christmas itself was a quiet affair, although a number of us including Tensei, Null, Qweq, and Tera celebrated by watching Krampus together. We’ve also been meaning to start watching Seinfeld, but no real attempt has been made through a combination of laziness and forgetfulness on my part. I’ve also been trying to get people to watch Disney’s Fantasia, in the hopes that the synergy between audio and visuals would serve as some sort of inspiration for artists here. While Andrew and Qweq seem eager to watch, most others are resistant to the idea.

Nights has begun streaming Wind Waker, which we are all very pleased to watch. I have been hesitant to stream again due to criticism from Makin and others that it’s taking up too much time, which it honestly was. Having others get involved in the process is critically important: no one person should be occupying the majority of people’s time when it comes to entertainment like this, otherwise it becomes akin to a monopoly and everyone suffers.

Joyously, Niklink returned a couple days ago. The effect of his disappearance was felt within even just a few hours--he has a very peculiar way with words that no one else can quite match, and is often the source of great humor for all who are present. He mentioned briefly that he disappeared for reason related to his studies; I’m just glad that he wasn’t avoiding the HSD due to some offense on our part.

It’s a bit premature to speak precisely on the matter, but after a long six months of vague instability and lowkey agitation, it feels like the server is beginning to settle down. There’s no telling to what extent people may have consciously recognized this, but it seems that the major channels are approaching a new “normal;” the behavior of regulars in each place has become predictable once more, and thus it’s easier to understand and engage in what’s happening if you pay attention.

I mentioned this in the last entry as well, but the worst times on the server are when everything feels transient and unstable, especially when it seems there is no solid userbase. This idea has been mocked consistently: Makin for instance openly admits to forgetting who regulars are, or--possibly even worse--feigns ignorance of them entirely. It is difficult to tell which of these is more true at times, but a more cynical mind will probably have no issue deciding.

At a glance, it seems that there is a rotation system in place: new users are inculcated by users who have been around long enough to be familiar with the culture and rules of the place. Users who have been around the longest grow increasingly frustrated and bored with their channel of residence until they eventually leave. This makes room for yet more people to join and contributes to a sort of cultural drift. That drift gets more pronounced as each “generation” of user comes and goes. It is much how a plant does not seem very different from day to day, but a snapshot comparison of the beginning and end of its life reveals striking differences.

I wonder about new crops of stable users. The things I feel like asking most are how do they find this place, and what compels them to stay? It is counterintuitive that our usercount is rising substantially even now (although obviously it’s helped by Tumblr’s continual death spasms). I’m comfortable chalking up the latest growth spurt to a confluence of factors, including Tumblr’s self-immolation and Makin advertising the server more.

As for why they stay, Homestuck has been finished for nearly three years now, which renders it increasingly untenable as a source of inspiration. My preferred answer is usually that the sense of community keeps people coming back, but there is a problem with this theory: it necessitates the idea of people talking as frequently as possible, especially when they first join.

Instead, despite the total population rising continuously, we’re experiencing something of a decrease in participation from new users as time goes by. There is a disproportionate number of people who join and never speak even once; it used to be that such people left after a few days, but now they seem to be lingering. It is possible that a large number of them choose to lurk only, and others only stay for news announcements. Otherwise I’m not sure what’s responsible for the trend.

As it is, this isn’t exactly cause for concern. While new users speak less often, older users and regulars appear to be just fine. We continue to take the strong rise of the server population as a good sign, and generally attribute the lack of participation to a corresponding lack of material to discuss. If we receive any proper news next year about Homestuck as a property, I wonder what the server statistics will look like compared to now. The new year could be full of interesting developments.

Nothing more for today.

---

31^st of December 2018

It’s the end of the year, so I wrote an analysis of the server and channel activity that is now in the Related Materials in Appendix D under “Assessment of Server Activity”. It includes a brief explanation of where to find the information proper and how to read it, as well as some notes on important trends for 2018 and to a lesser extent from 2017. Hopefully this will be useful or at least interesting for a few people.

There have been great waves of accounts joining over the last few days, but unfortunately it seems that most of them are not genuine people. After examining it for some time, we’ve determined that most of them are actually bot accounts through commonalities in the usernames (such as a generic name followed by a string of numbers) and similar account creation dates, usually only a matter of minutes before joining the server.

Makin has been banning these accounts himself, which he is growing frustrated with due to the sheer volume. It’s been slow-going because we don’t have an easy way to ban them; Discord needs you to right click their name to ban them swiftly, which is only possible if they’ve been “mentioned” or talked in the server, which most of these accounts haven’t. Otherwise, banning them is a manual process in the server settings that can be a hassle.

Makin asked us all to help as well, although Tensei in particular has mostly refused due to the difficulty in banning the accounts (shame!). The rest of the full mods have been trying to assist if we notice something is up, especially when Makin’s not around himself. Between all of us we’ve been able to avoid any serious raids or problems. It’d be very awkward, but we’ve considered reaching out to Ceru. He could modify Aradiabot so that it automatically mentions new users when they join the server, which would expedite the process significantly.

Otherwise, a user named V joined the server and talked briefly in mspa-lit, referencing a long-dead meme that was emblematic of James Roach. V also happens to be the name of an anonymous writer for a few episodes of the Friendsims. Between the name and the use of a vaguely obscure meme that has been out of use for over a year, some of us speculate that the writer and this visitor are in fact the same person.

That having been said, we didn’t have much time to openly entertain the idea. The user commented that it was “boring” here, probably because there was no active controversy or discussion, and they left. It was a brief flurry of excitement for us all to discuss; it may not need to be stated, but we all thoroughly miss the days of involvement with content producers.

We also briefly tended towards the mystery of who V really is. I’m on the record saying that I hate it when people gremlin other users who specifically want to remain anonymous, though: I don’t like it when people do it to Makin, and I don’t like it when it’s done to random users or people associated with the fandom somehow. After a little discussion on the topic I shut it down with extreme prejudice in an effort to keep people from being insensitive.

Other than the stir from Maybe V joining and chatting, today has been a little slow. Most people are out celebrating with their family, as is to be expected. However, I’ve noticed that no matter how busy or silent they may be throughout the day, most of the regulars in #mspa-lit and even #general and #altgen will chime in “Happy New Year” when the time comes for them.

I’m glad to see people keeping this place in mind even when they’re preoccupied: I assume that it means they’ve made some friends, or even simply enjoy their time here. Even though 2018 has been rather rough in places, there’s still plenty of reason to come and spend time in the HSD. I look forward to the next year, and I earnestly hope that everyone here will be able to enjoy themselves for the holidays and all of 2019.

Happy New Year; nothing more for today.

---

2019

1^st of January 2019 - Skaianet ARG

In the early hours of the morning, various users discovered a significant change: the What Pumpkin website now automatically redirects to skaianetsystems.com. Ignoring the actual content of the website, this change was met with some confusion and amusement; most assumed that WP had simply neglected to renew their ownership of the site and that it must have been taken over by a random guy for laughs.

However, the official WP Twitter account also changed, matching the name and aesthetic of the website. As more people noticed, the confusion turned to a breathless excitement. What could this change possibly mean? For a little while we were at a loss. The website consisted of little more than a countdown to the 13th of April 2029, the 20th anniversary of Homestuck. The only other thing of note is a global map with red dots that we soon realized were meant to correspond with meteor strikes (the 13th of April 2029 coincidentally also corresponds with a flyby of the meteor named Apophis).

Both of these things, while interesting, were thematically in keeping with material from Homestuck. People were curious and interested in the change, but there was little else to do with it at first. Before long though, a few began to look deeper into the website’s code and discovered hidden content deemed “cursed files." As soon as we got our hands on these, everything in the server kicked into maximum overdrive.

There are three individual sets of information that were all interesting for different reasons. The one most people noticed first was called “dark web cache” which contianed a set of images, all of them what we refer to as “shitty wizards.” These images are all titled “CRITICAL_ASSET” followed by sequential numbers, and they were created or last modified on the 8th of December. Also in the folder is a readme file, which claims:

BY ILLEGALLY HACKING INTO THE DARK_WEB_CACHE FULL OF ILLICIT_WARES WHICH HAS BEEN EXPLICITLY BLACKLISTED BY THE GOVERNMENT, AND STORING THESE CRITICAL_ASSETS ON YOUR DEVICE, YOU HAVE OFFICIALLY AGREED TO ALLOW YOUR DEVICE TO BECOME A CRITICAL NODE IN THE SKAIANET SYSTEMS BLOCKCHAIN.

This is followed by a very specific set of instructions to get rid of the files in order to have one’s computer removed from the blockchain.

The next set of information was a collection of text files called “Forbidden entries”. There are 36 individual plaintext files that collectively appear to be a set of journal entries about an esoteric online community that contain backstory to some of the more cryptic elements of Homestuck. Naturally, the community set upon this information like wolves. They get progressively stranger, including some material concerning a feud between that universe’s Einstein and Hitler.

The more interesting and informative texts aside, there is already a large number of people who find those particular excerpts in poor taste. The exact nature of the feud is complicated and I won’t discuss it in any great detail, but one interpretation from the text is that Einstein could have prevented the Holocaust in that universe. It is common anti-semitic rhetoric to claim “Jews could have prevented the Holocaust”, and those more sensitive to the issue are genuinely outraged at the insinuation in these files.

A number of people are even saying that they fear Hussie is a closeted anti-semite, preposterous though it may be in the grand scheme of things. The discourse on the HSD is bad enough, but the Twitter Homestuck has erupted into complete chaos over the entries. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out given Hussie’s history--on the one hand he tends to shut down what he views as irrational or overblown responses, but he has also capitulated to mass shock and upset before.

The last piece of information is a text document called “Coordinates.” While the map I described on the website itself has many red dots, most if not all of them are completely meaningless. The GPS locations found in the text file, though, seem to mean something. As opposed to the 100+ tagged locations on the map, the file in question has 39 individual coordinates.

In order to discuss this in a more organized and constructive fashion, we’ve taken a few steps: Makin created a new channel, #skaianetsystems, to discuss the developments. He had me create a mega thread on the subreddit for people to discuss it there, with a link to the Discord saying that we have a live channel as well. It didn’t take more than ten minutes for the thread to take off, with us calling it the “Skaianet Systems ARG” (saying it’s an ARG may be somewhat premature, but the name has stuck and we’re not sure what else to call it anyway).

Alongside the thread itself booming, the Discord server has seen an outrageous amount of activity over the proceedings. There is nothing short of a bona fide frenzy in place with people scouring the website for as much information as possible, subjecting it to various analyses, and then comparing it with what we already know from the story and author’s notes. Someone has already found retroactive explanation for the text entries in a piece of commentary from one of the books: Hussie mentioned there and a few times before that he has notes on background lore for the story.

A user named Kittenchilly has created a document to collect and theorize on all of the information and the proceedings of the event, which has been instrumental to newcomers as well as people who are actively working on the ARG; they’ve also been made the janitor of #skaianetsystems to help clean up shitposts and off-topic posting, of which there has been a lot; it’s hard not to be excited with this news.

The blaze of activity and coordination has been absolutely amazing to witness: like an ant colony that’s been disturbed, the HSD is positively swarming to find out whatever it can and make the most of this development. Makin found a chance to be smug as usual, citing the astronomical increase in users: “I predicted this yesterday / blamed the lack of content / and I was proven right once again.” Yet, for all of his posturing I believe that I detect the faintest bit of relief, too. No one in their right mind could hold it against him, though; it’s just wonderful to see the fandom active again.

Nothing more for today.

---

2^nd of January 2019

Following up on the Einstein/Hitler controversy from yesterday, Hussie has written an extensive apology for content in the ARG that people pointed out as offensive (the text of which, alongside all of the content from the ARG itself, has been mirrored in the Related Materials). Though this apology seems sincere, its very existence has prompted even more discussion about whether it was even needed.

There appear to be two main camps: the first believes that the lore concerning the Holocaust was completely impermissible, and while they’re grateful for the apology there is still much anger in the air over the debacle; the second camp believes that the response from fans, especially on Twitter, was completely disproportionate. Further, while most agree that the apology was a smart move, there is some pronounced indignance at the claims that Hussie is behaving anti-semitically.

As if this wasn’t enough, V themselves also posted on the matter. While not an apology, it is an extensive explanation over how and why Hussie released the text files as he did. This has also contributed towards calming people down, although it did prompt some more discussion over who V could possibly be. As I mentioned last time, however, I saw fit to completely shut down this particular avenue of discussion; I will not abide by anyone purposefully or aggressively gremlining the identity of people who would prefer to remain anonymous.

While I’m mostly keeping myself out of the discussion, I lean more towards the camp that believes the outrage is overblown. When discussing this with the rest of mspa-lit, Niklink commented: “drew you don't get it though / we're really bored.” Joke aside, it’s worth wondering whether the response would have been so huge if we had more content to tide us over in general.

Personally I’m worried that the backlash will discourage Hussie from creating more content somehow. We’ve already been so starved for information like this that we’ve been tearing through it nonstop since yesterday morning, and I don’t look forward to going back to basically nothing. Even without the upset we would probably return to that state, but the response may prompt Hussie to--at the very least--reassess how he puts information out there, and delay anything else he might have in the works.

As for the ARG itself, it seems we’ve already hit a dead end in our search. Cryptographically there doesn’t appear to be any information tucked away that we can unlock, so our options of what to do at this point are limited. My earlier comment on not calling this an ARG may be justified, as there’s been very little in the way of actual augmentation or real-world involvement.

Except, that is, for the coordinate file. A few people have tried to check out red dot locations that were near them, but with no real direction and to no avail. The GPS coordinates in the text file have been matched to real world locations, and a token few of them seem reachable. It’s remarkably unlikely that anything actually exists at these locations, so risking life and limb to get to them is unacceptable. We’re exhaustively stressing caution and that no one actually visit these places except if safe beyond reasonable doubt, but unless some enterprising fellow strikes out we’re at a standstill.

Nothing more for today.

---

3^rd of January 2019

In order to handle the increased amount of activity (as well as assist with problems like the constant onslaught of bots joining), Spiral was turned into a full mod today. A dousing of congratulations from people in mspa-lit followed, although I feel badly for Toast. He’s been around and recognized far longer, and being passed over for full mod in favor of the other homestuck channel pseudo must sting. To his full credit he shows no signs of envy or upset, and I must admit I’m happy to have another person who gets serious more often than not on the team.

In regards to the ARG, there was an unprecedented development today. People have been checking and rechecking each of the coordinates in the text file to find viable locations to visit in the future. As it happens, one of our users SneezeGunSatan is an active hiker living in California, and has already gone on a trail that passes right by one of the locations. After ensuring that they would be capable and safe, he went out to the trail today to see if anything was there.

Throughout the previous two days, it was mostly accepted that there wouldn’t be anything at any of the locations. What we’ve already got has been more than exciting, and WP doesn’t exactly have a bottomless treasury to work with when it comes to these silly extra projects. Imagine our surprise, then, when Sneeze reports back with a picture of a teddy bear and a giant letter E on a piece of paper smack dab in the spot we were looking at.

At the first sight of the image, #skaianetsystems practically exploded. What had already been a constant fever pitch for two days suddenly became complete pandemonium. Madness overtook the community for a glorious hour or so as people celebrated the discover. It took some time for us to regain their senses; the subversion of our sober expectations was too incredible to overlook.

BearE, as the teddy is affectionately being called, was instantaneously converted into a meme on the server and subreddit. With his discovery, people are even more ravenously scouring the locations to see which are viable candidates to explore. To counter this, we’ve stepped up our warnings not to go to any of these locations: most of the locations are in completely inhospitable places such as the Arctic tundra, in isolated deserts, or even underwater in a few spots.

It’s also not certain whether BearE was actually planted there for the ARG or if we’ve simply been “gamejacked.” There’s been no word from WP officials about BearE, so there’s no way for us to tell if his appearance was a fluke or if it was intentional. Hopefully no one will get any terrible ideas in the meantime.

Assuming that BearE is genuine, it doesn’t really clear up anything. What all of this means or is for is completely unclear, although it’s fascinating to watch it unfold in real time. Since the bear was discovered, people are coming up with all sorts of ways to still explore while avoiding danger themselves. Gnawms has brought up the idea of using drones to remotely explore designated spots, although as mentioned there is still a problem: most of them can’t even be reached by conventional travel, or they’re located on privately owned land such as farms.

Desperate for more clues, Sneeze will “conduct surgery” on the bear tomorrow to see if anything is inside it. The E is likely part of a wordpuzzle, such as when FFBF distributed the giant letters to fans that spelled out “ANDREW HUSSIE.” Though theorizing is still heavily underway, #skaianetsystems has largely been abandoned for such purposes due to the insane amount of shitposting that followed since BearE’s discovery. Instead, #skaianet-serious has been opened so that major updates can be communicated rapidly, and as a safe haven for people who are earnestly attempting to learn more.

Nothing more for today.

---

4^th of January 2019

As they said they would, Sneeze opened up the bear and posted a video on Youtube as proof. Unfortunately, as expected there were no further clues nestled away inside BearE. It’s to be assumed at this point that the chase is over, and we will simply have to wait for any new developments from WP directly. No one is really sure what comes next, but with luck we won’t have to wait long.

It seems that someone did end up reaching out to WP staff on Twitter about BearE. Cutting him open turned out to be unnecessary: we were basically unaware of it until today, but V commented that BearE’s presence on the California hiking trail was a complete coincidence and reiterated that WP has placed nothing at any of the described GPS coordinates.

There were a few revelations from this. Gnawms commented:

... this confirms at least one of two things / 1) wp really doesnt care enough about the safety of its fans to let makin or anyone else know not to try to go for these coordinates / 2) wp has far fewer lurkers here than we thought.

Makin and a token few others are fond of saying that WP has accounts in the HSD, but instances like this don’t really inspire confidence in that idea. I’ve always thought it was a nice idea but not really convincing. As for the first point, no one may have told us but I feel we did a fine job of taking care of people on our own. It would be nice to have some word sooner from officials on matters like this, but we’re not fledgling infants unable to make basic decisions or realizations on our own. Thankfully.

Aside from this, there hasn’t been very much to do with the ARG; it may be winding down, although four days was more than I thought we’d get from it. Instead, I’d like to describe a chance encounter between a relative newcomer and tmtmtl30 that spanned for a good hour or so. Before I can do that though, I need to describe a specific aspect of how the server works: the role color system.

Way back in the very beginning of this document, I do already mention that Discord has roles you can give to people which can have unique colors and permissions. For a long time, the way that people could gain a given color role was to request one from Aradiabot. At some point in the last year, though, the list of roles was expanded and it became impractical to expect users to know every color off the bat.

Instead, DeltaPsi worked to create a much more intuitive system where people could see all of the colors laid out together and click to choose the one they want. This is done through the 72 bot and the reaction system on Discord, and the resulting system was placed in #welcome so that newcomers would see it more easily. Every time someone clicks on a given reaction, 72 will remove their react and simultaneously give them user the corresponding color role.

This is important because each reaction has “1” next to it, which is part of Discord’s system to keep track of how many people have reacted the same way. 72 automatically removes the additional reactions to avoid abuse from people who would spam the reactions as fast as possible, ensuring that they will only ever have one color role and not bog down the system. It also doubles as aesthetically pleasing: having random numbers strewn about the page is annoying for more sensitive users.

Which brings us to today. The new user, SunLunette, reacted with a dark blue color, but 72 stuttered and they did not actually receive their role. Subsequently, the react on #welcome did not go away. It’s unknown how long it’s been there, but today tmtmtl30 for whatever reason was looking and noticed the “2”. She immediately pinged Lunette in mspa-lit, pleading with them to fix the mistake.

Lunette was understandably confused. It took several minutes to actually help them understand what the system we were describing is, and why tmtmtl30 was agitated. Instead of removing their reaction, they simply joined in on messing around with the rest of us in the channel. Tmtm’s begging grew more fervent with every refusal to fix the error, approaching lunacy before long.

It’s a rare event in mspa-lit, but occasionally everyone involved will be so whipped up by a joke that it essentially becomes a circus. Tmtm and to a lesser extent Lunette both served as great entertainment for the next hour--tmtm’s deadpan served as a particularly effective catalyst for humor. Both of them took it well though; Lunette in particular seemed to enjoy their time, and though they don’t seem at all interested in the shills I wonder if they’ll bother to come back more in the future.

Nothing more for today.

---

5^th of January 2019

The fandom has started properly processing the news that BearE was not part of the ARG. There is some amusement and confusion as to what we might have stumbled on, with some people expressing regret that we’ve probably disturbed someone else’s project. That having been said, an alternative explanation--and more likely depending on your perspective--is that it was planted there by a particularly motivated fan.

Some really dedicated sleuths determined that BearE was sold local to the area the trail is in, which means someone probably bought the bear and brought it to that location shortly thereafter. The E could have been included to make it more stereotypically ARG-like. Then again, this all feels less feasible to me than “we interfered with someone else’s thing entirely,” but it’s hard to tell due to the preciseness of the location. Some people have floated the idea that Sneeze, the person who found the bear, planted it himself, but there’s not much else to be said if that’s the case.

A series of unrelated notes: Makin believes that we will receive more information on the 11th due to the layout of information in the ARG. When asked why he feels this way, he pointed to the content of the READ ME file and the collection of shitty wizard images. The set of instructions says to delete one image per day at a specific time, and going from the day the website went up that should culminate on January 11th. This will almost certainly lead to nothing of substance, but it is nonetheless a small shred of hope to hang onto.

At some point, Gnawms commented that Discord has pushed out an update letting mobile users gift a subscription to others, following desktop from about two weeks ago. Users have been clamoring for this capability for some time, so the fact that it’s here is appropriately exciting for a few people. However, this discussion gradually shifted into the topic of Discord monetizing their service and turning towards profiteering.

For some time it was apparent that Discord was losing money, but it’s not unlikely that--with the newfound ability to finally gift other users Nitro--they may be turning a profit now. User5 ended up joining the discussion at some point, insisting that Discord has been making money in the same way that Facebook does: selling private information of people to various groups, especially advertisers.

This reminded me of information I’ve read recently that said it’s actually very difficult for researchers and the like to access information from Discord. This is because, in order to access any information from the service, you must already be in a server of interest to pull the data. When I said as much, User5 retorted:

how do you think they make their money / they SELL the data / ... / they realized that facebooks whole culture of like posting ur real life name and face / wards off alot of people who are emotionally-savvy about how fucked up that is / but not computer-smart enough to know that / … / discord: a whole new poster base / way more crazy stuff / since its for "gamers" / who are more partial to sort of pseudo-anonymity / than ‘normies’.

This insight may have been obvious to some, but the comparison between Discord and Facebook is vaguely fascinating. It makes sense that Discord would have taken up such a niche: it occupies a very specific spot where it appeals to people who are more familiar with the internet, but who still appreciate a significant level of accessibility and customization. For some reason I’m reminded heavily of the XKCD comic about subcultures; there is no end to the diversity of human preference.

Switching gears again, Tera has felt somewhat unsteady in its position for a while now. It’s been getting some vibes that Makin has wanted to demod it, so I suggested it ask matter-of-factly to see if such was the case. Unfortunately Makin responded ambiguously, saying at first: “there’s no one to replace you with.” The answer itself being a bit of a waffle, he clarified by saying that Tera doesn’t involve itself very often in community matters, nor does it show a pronounced interest in Homestuck or developments concerning the property, which is a problem.

Tera responded by saying that it’s just the recent developments that it’s not too interested in, and the discussion mostly petered out after that. I find the explanation somewhat insufficient since there are plenty of mods who don’t express that much interest in Homestuck anymore, but I left it alone. However, Tera seems even more stressed out after the confrontation.

I enjoy having Tera on the team and I hate to see it so worried about such things. It’s resolved to find ways to get more involved and improve, saying that being able to take care of #art-cosplay really motivates it in a lot of ways. I suggested that Tera read the rest of the shills list, since that usually mollifies Makin well enough. As long as it does even just that, I imagine it’ll be enough to prevent this from becoming a bigger problem in the future.

Nothing more for today.

---

7^th of January 2019

Things have quieted a bit since the ARG has cooled down, but things are still plodding along faster than they were before. Admittedly, mspa-lit has been distracted suddenly by the appearance of a major Dark Souls mod; channel discussion has mostly been given to that, and whenever mspa-lit gets its hands on something shiny there’s usually little room for other things. That having been said, everyone is still in a fairly good mood post-ARG.

The main exception was a brief altercation that happened today. Cookiefonster rejoined the server sometime in the last week or two, and has been engaging fine for the most part. Occasionally, though, he will comment on people from WP who are disseminating news about Homestuck, especially V. The comments go back at least since the beginning of the year, where he’ll chime in with a complaint almost every single time V is mentioned.

At first people were content to ignore this; Cookie has always had his moments where he becomes irascible, and is actually somewhat infamous for inane bitching. Things came to a head today, though: Griever, who of all people is generally regarded as very docile and agreeable, came out swinging: “... it's REALLY annoying that EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU COME ON THIS SERVER it's to complain about something that doesn't even make any god damn sense.” For a second, conversation stopped as people processed this outburst.

Even Tera was somewhat taken aback: “holy shit griever / idk why but i never expected to see you genuinely irritated,” with others mumbling agreement and then also joining in on criticizing Cookie for his chicanery. I also voiced my problems with his behavior, but in retrospect I feel bad about it; I never really enjoy it when one person gets ganged up on by a number of people. It can be appropriate and even satisfying depending on who it concerns, but Cookie isn’t really someone who qualifies: he’s not a menace, more just a casual moron about specific things.

On a more positive note, the Best of the Subreddit 2018 results finally came in. Each year, Reddit will contribute free awards for communities to dole out to their members that they deem worthy. The Homestuck subreddit has a small competition where users vote in certain categories, such as Best Cosplayer or Best Fan Project.

It’s been a bit hectic this year; AberrantArtificer has historically been in charge of the contest each year, and he does a quality job each time. This year he was a bit late due to sickness and business he had to take care of, but today he put up the results of the contest. It’s a wonderful tribute to the users of the community, to see their posts put up and celebrated at the end of the year. I’ve even covered a few of these things, such as The Genesis Project from 2018.

With the contest results posted, the last vestiges of 2018 are basically behind us. The ARG may be dormant for now, but if there’s even the faintest semblance of regularity to it, then it will rejuvenate us like nothing else. The first piece by itself netted us nearly 1,000 new users and increased activity nearly two-fold for the server in those first few days. I’ve said this before, but I’m looking forward to the rest of this year. Hopefully 2019 will be a good time for everyone.

Nothing more for today.

---

10^th of January 2019

Today was, on the whole, rather unremarkable. Yet, it felt strangely engaging at points. There were three instances of group behavior that I’d like to remark on in some detail: the first was a protracted, pleasant discussion about one of the shills called Three Worlds Collide; the second involved another extreme pile-on with Cookiefonster; and the last involved a complete degradation of the channel to shitposting.

The first instance took place a few hours into the afternoon or so. Three Worlds Collide is a short piece by Eliezer Yudkowsky that features humanity far in the future, at a point where it’s virtually unrecognizable when you look closely. It compares these future humans against two alien societies that are by themselves fully functioning, but all three factions possess some idiosyncrasy that makes them fundamentally incompatible with each other. The story explores the interaction between these cultures, with a couple different endings based on the reader’s choice at a key moment in the story.

Details of the overall story aside, Yudkowsky purposefully made humans less recognizable in order to reduce readership bias towards them. There are a number of details that serve this purpose such as the structure of leadership, the way the economy works, etc. However, one of the things that sticks out most to people who read the story is an almost errant comment that appears much later, suggesting that at some point in the distant future rape was legalized.

Understandably, as soon as people become aware of this element in the story they become very uncomfortable. The topic has come up in mspa-lit before, but not extensively to my knowledge. Today, we started discussing it after user John Smith brought it up, saying that he thought it was a tactless and ineffective way to alienate humanity of the future. This kicked off a lengthy discussion about the merits of the story, and whether or not that particular feature was acceptable and/or effective.

With a topic like rape, it’s extremely easy for people to get heated unless it’s handled fastidiously. Even serious and purposeful discussion of the topic can lead to people becoming indignant, and the atmosphere can be ruined in mere seconds. Amazingly, that did not happen today; even though John was categorically put off by the literature, he was able to discuss it in reasonable enough terms. What followed was one of the better conversations we’ve had in a long time, I feel.

The details of that conversation aren’t important (as well as being somewhat long-winded), so I won’t elaborate on it much in that regard--the end result of the discussion was also kind of anti-climactic, as neither party to it really shifted much in their position. What matters more is that we were able to talk about it for something like an hour or even longer in a serious capacity, and through even just a casual discussion we were able to help each other come to a deeper understanding of the source material.

Most of the discussion actually consisted of us trying to determine why John didn’t like it to the degree that he did. While most of us were similarly kind of uneasy about the concept, none of us thought it was in poor service to the story: John was trying to insist that it was not interesting enough to be justified over some other strange development in human culture. However, he was caught up in these words later when he said it lead to interesting discussion, so we called him out on his contradiction. I suggested that the real reason he was opposed was because it simply offended him too much, which would be a completely understandable (if not necessarily justifiable) criticism.

This is where the conversation came to a stand still, and Makin suggested we move on since it appeared that we wouldn’t make anymore headway. I was initially upset by this; it felt like we had been making some progress in understanding one another better, but ultimately I didn’t want to hold the channel hostage. Truthfully, I was pleased with the discussion already. It’s not very often that we get to truly stretch our argumentative muscles; most “debate” in mspa-lit has been less actual debating and more fiendish baiting, so this was a very nice change of pace.

After this the channel calmed down for a while. Things perked back up a couple hours later, especially after Skyplayer brought up an old Foxtrot comic with a shout out to Homestuck. After confirming it was real, Tensei poked fun by calling Foxtrot another calarts comic. This is completely standard fare, and I’m willing to bet that almost no one even outwardly recognized the comment. That is, until Cookiefonster saw it.

Cookie is on record as hating the calarts meme. This is the more polite way of saying that he appears to have some sort of compulsion to obsequiously state his dislike of the meme at every given opportunity. It has grown into a very sore spot for anyone who happens to be present, and inevitably his response came: “also calarts meme is still HORRIBLY unfunny, is making those memes how you become a hsd mod¹⁵⁶,” and at that precise second the amiable atmosphere of the chat practically disintegrated.

I complained in a previous entry that I don’t like it when dogpiling happens; I think it’s a petty activity that usually doesn’t amount to much besides mild annoyance in all present. However, it felt somewhat deserved today, and I’ve never seen it quite this bad. Griever’s pleasant demeanor fell away again, literally asking, “can you please leave this server” which prompted a large array of agreement from other users present.

Tensei and I even discussed the possibility and ramifications of simply banning Cookie at this point. I wouldn’t even mind doing it just for Cookie’s sake, as there appears to be no good will between him and anyone else here. I’m not sure if this has always been the case with him and I didn’t see it, or if Cookie has grown more irritating as time has gone by. Either way, there isn’t a lot to be gained from keeping him here if it’ll only lead to more chafing.

My main worry is that, if we actually ban Cookie, it will be a reinforcement of the casual way in which we banned Biscuit too. Banning people isn’t a tool that should be used with such impunity, just because we happen to dislike a person a lot. It’s an unfortunate quandary that I don’t have the philosophical chops or willpower to really hash out, and I suspect none of the other mods feel like doing so either. If it gets worse, I don’t see any other realistic outcome though.

The last thing that happened today was a strange perversion of the chat that was so extreme even I noticed it with little effort. The conversation with John Smith from earlier had been polite and tidy, with little to no mockery or interference. Directly after the Cookie conversation with no prompting, Griever said: “hey drew do you want some fucking smut?” Though this didn’t have much to do with what came after, I identify it as the point the channel began descending into hell for the night.

Poorly crafted “jokes” started coming out left and right from various people, such as pinging Cookiefonster repeatedly to the point of extreme rudeness. The “holy shit guys [user] left” meme was spammed en masse for a time, and then somehow the topic switched to intraserver raiding. Apparently, back during the earlier generation of altgen, users from there would lead raids on other channels within the HSD. There was some talk about reinvigorating such activities, which I immediately shut down.

This madness then simply transformed into conspiring to get mspa-lit hidden by being as terrible as possible. Only one person, N’zoth, actually suggested this seriously as far as I can tell, but Gnawms, Reti, Tori, Soup_main, and even Tmtm to some extent were all contributing to the lunacy. It was actually something of a trial to get them all to stop, for some reason everyone was taken by the desire to act like complete jackasses.

Though this sort of thing does bother me a little bit even under ordinary circumstances, my typical response is usually ambivalence or even to join in a little bit. However, I think that my expectations had been raised by the discussion we had with John earlier in the day. I was unusually agitated by the complete bullshit playing out tonight, and on my mind were the words of Tensei, Nights, and a few others: it has been suggested a lot recently that mspa-lit’s quality has deteriorated.

Normally I would wave this off, being more concerned with the level of activity rather than the quality, but after the manic rise in shitposting from tonight I’m more inclined to agree. The balance has tipped too far in the direction of quantity, and something is going to need to be done to bring it back up to par if this continues¹⁵⁷. I hate to say it this way, but there does appear to be a certain few key individuals who can be blamed for this. As I just said, I don’t like the idea of banning people for arbitrary and selfish reasons, but I would not be surprised if it comes to that in the future.

On a lighter note, I was lurking in #general later at night to see what people were saying and what the atmosphere was like. It was surprisingly active given the hour, although at one point N’zoth said “HSD is dying,” which anyone should know triggers a deep-seated fear in me. After remembering I literally keep track of this information on a daily basis and that his claims are basically unfounded, I calmed down and decided to hang out with the channel proper for a bit.

Makin himself came up in the discussion, and it seems that there is close to no one in #general who actually knows who he is¹⁵⁸ or anything about his history. Even if only by waiting, it seems that Makin has largely outrun his controversial past with the general populace. It’s likely that the only people in the server who remember such things--or indeed, know Makin at all--are the ones who hang out in mspa-lit habitually. What this means for the future is unclear, if anything.

I’ve often wondered about how our community would end up, fearing that it might be ripped apart by some fierce discourse or other hostile means. It seems that my worry was misplaced, as usual: I would say that it looks like our culture will simply fade away as time passes, but in a way it looks like that’s already happened. Going back to look at my first entry, the 9th of July in 2017, it feels almost completely unrecognizable. The cultural shift across “generations of users” that I described in a previous entry has already come to pass.

This is rather sobering, but at the same time reassuring. I don’t suddenly care less about the place; as saddening as it is to realize that things just aren’t the same anymore, there is still a core of people and reasons that I spend my time here. At this point, I’m actually more curious to see how things end up than ever before. Despite all the more difficult times, I’m glad that I’ve been here to experience the good times too. I look forward to seeing what happens in the future.

Nothing more for today.

---

11^th of January 2019

Despite hopes to the contrary, today came and went with no apparent update to the Skaianet Systems page. We held out until the very end of the day, but at a certain point most of us had already given up the ghost. It wasn’t exactly unexpected, but it was still a little saddening; I was personally looking forward to another burst in activity, and I can tell people are starting to get a bit bored again.

The most likely scenario is that nothing was ever planned to be released today, and that we simply psyched ourselves out into thinking it would happen. This has happened enough times that it wouldn’t be surprising at all if it turned out to be true. Alternatively, there is still a modicum of fear that something was planned and then Hussie was scared off due to the response to the original batch of information. If it ever comes out that this is the case, then immense upset at the portion of the fandom responsible for the overreaction would be sure to follow.

For now, the question is what to do with the #skaianetsystems channel now that it’s essentially dead weight. Hiding it seems inadvisable for now, as people are still using it for speculation and other reasons. Makin deemed it appropriate to convert it to #alt-homestuck during inactive periods for the ARG. If the Skaianet Systems website should update it again, then the channel can be rapidly restored to its original function and all should be fine.

The exact difference in activity levels between fresh updates and stagnant periods is rather stark with all of this. Never before has the drop in participation been so pronounced as with this ARG: the server was positively aglow with energy for the span of a week, and then over the course of another week it dropped about a third to a half of what it was during the peak of the ARG.

That having been said, it’s not even cause for much concern: the level of activity we’re at right now is far more sustainable, and actually somewhat better than it was through the last few months of 2018. It’s just such a massive, obvious difference that it attracts attention. I’m not even strictly sure that it’s better when it’s more active; I also mentioned recently that a better balance between quantity and quality must be struck. That having been said, it’s impossible to deny that consistently increased activity makes the place feel more engaging. I suppose we’ll just have to keep our eyes peeled for more information.

Nothing more for today.

---

14^th of January 2019

The release date for the fifth Homestuck book was pushed back from June 12th to September 10th last night. The news has been received with a mix of extreme disappointment and the more carefree response “I figured this would happen.” It was only a matter of time before something like this happened, but such realization doesn’t make the reality of it any easier to stomach.

Two reasons for this change immediately came to mind: either the books aren’t doing as well as Viz wants, or Hussie is delaying the development of commentary for later acts in the story. Makin overtly commented: “I need that act 6 commentary / so he can realize he fucked up,” which most people have seriously been anticipating. There’s an increasing chance that we will simply never get to Act 6 if the books are being stunted for some reason.

In addition to this, Skyplayer reminded the chat that one of the most important Flash animations for Homestuck has been broken for some time now, with little sign that it will be fixed. Makin posits that the exact reason for the Flash breaking is mysterious and doesn’t imply malfeasance on Viz’s part. However, back in April of last year Viz also claimed it was going finish converting all of the videos into HTML so they wouldn’t rely on Youtube. However, as Sky points out: “Viz never touched the site again after April except to switch out the advertisements to the newest book.” The effort remains incomplete nearly a year later.

However, there is still a glimmer in all of this darkness. Sky comments further: “WP could have kept selling tshirts and friendsims for years still without Hussie doing anything. actively rebranding means he is working on something,” although what exactly he might be working on is completely up in the air. Makin suggests that Skaianet Systems, in tandem with the date of the book being pushed back, suggests something big¹⁵⁹ is in the works for the tenth anniversary. We can only hope that Viz is pushing the epilogue, which would be absolutely sensible given the tenth anniversary is approaching. Realistically though, we can’t rely on any assumptions.

Nothing more for today.

---

19^th of January 2019

There was a strange twist of fate today. User5 abandoned all of his usual pretenses and told the group straight up that he had decided to leave. It was not out of dissatisfaction with mspa-lit or anyone in it, but rather that he had decided he had too much baggage of sorts with his current persona. He thus wants to drop the User5 label and start anew.

This was accompanied by a lot of expected and well-deserved sadness. User5’s turnaround from an unapologetic and ruthlessly ironic troll into a genuine contributor to the channel has been absolutely remarkable to witness, and has certainly been interesting to watch for the last year and then some. Practically everyone in the channel is fond of him to some degree, and the fact that he’s leaving has struck a note of genuine sorrow in everyone there.

User5 didn’t really say much about what he planned to do in the future. Of all people, he trusted me with what appeared to be a literal hash code: if anyone appeared and claimed to be him, I could request the code to verify it wasn’t “some bastard” pretending to be him. Alongside this, he departed with some interesting words of wisdom: “dont stoop to shitty peoples level to try to be cool with them / they use that shit as ammo against u / thats all / always be real u.” And then he was gone.

As a token of respect, almost everyone who was present at the time decided to abandon their own color role and adopt black, both as a symbol of mourning and since it was User5’s color. Tmt obstinately kept her white, but not even she, aloof as she is, abstained from talking about the event in sympathy. There was some reminiscing about the conditions under which User5 first arrived (Gitaxian at one point saying, “To think all this was brought about by Hell’s New World”), and the numerous shenanigans he’s been a part of since.

There are some who refuse to believe this is truly the end of his stay here, it should be pointed out. Shortly after User5 left, Toast asked me in private how long I thought it would take for User5 to show back up again as an alt or some such. Truthfully I don’t know, although the code that he gave me to ward off imposters implies to me that it won’t be long. It may be that User5 wants to lay low and will avoid outing himself if he does this, but I can’t pretend to know what the guy thinks or does. There’s only one thing I know for sure about him: if he does stay gone as he says, he will be missed here.

Nothing more for today.

---

21^st of January 2019

Hilariously, User5 returned today in full splendor. Without even a care for the show of leaving before, in true fashion he openly poked fun at people who “mourned his passing.” I confirmed through the code he provided that this was in fact the same individual, which made me laugh: there was a lot of pomp and circumstance surrounding his departure, and in hardly any time at all he’s come back.

As usual his reasoning was amusing, and he appended the last message on his old account:

Fuck this New Account Shit!! i dont give a fuck!! id be using this old account still if i didnt already make the new account anyway!!! Fuck this stupid bullshit, im not going 2 be a Pussy Bitch about the past!! Stupid idea

This took some of us completely off guard and yet was completely in line with what we expect from him. It was truly a return to form.

Everyone who had been aware of his leaving was suitably happy with the outcome: we weathered his jocular insults as usual, lobbing a few of our own in return. His messages are more bizarre than most others’, and yet it’s more easily understood by everyone to be his own way of being friendly. I don’t think I’ve observed anyone else who can so openly mock others without coming across as genuinely rude, certainly not in the specific way he does it. Whatever the reason for his decision, it is very nice to have him back in our fold.

A fantastic development today, CANWC finally updated after a year-long hiatus. Releasing a 13 minute long animation, it’s actually possible to see the improvement in o’s handling of animation over the course of the video. In the associated thread on Reddit, I pointed out that o managed to increase the quality while still maintaining the original spirit of his webcomic; I’m no professional critic but it was easy for myself and others to see that this update was a true return to form for o.

However, even though the vast majority of people who saw it appeared to enjoy it, it seems that there are less people who saw it than we might have expected. It seems that simply too much time has passed and that people have stopped following CANWC for the most part. This is a shame, because it appears that it will only get better over time; a few of us want to try and systematically get more people interested in the fanventure again, seeing as it’s one of the few quality works we have to enjoy now. We’ll see what the future holds for it.

Nothing more for today.

---

23^rd of January 2019

For a long time now, we’ve been suffering from a critical shortage of space in the pin list. Discord allows a maximum of fifty pins in any channel, and then it caps out for some reason. For over two years now, we’ve been rather selective about what we’ll pin because we hit the cap even before I arrived. Pinning something has required removing previous pins to make space, which we’re hesitant to do because we don’t want to lose any great content.

I’ve been getting increasingly annoyed at the lack of space, so today I decided to implement a system that preserves old pins and their history as thoroughly as possible and frees up room for more pins in the future. Unfortunately I don’t have the skills to automate the process, but that’s never stopped me from pursuing tedious tasks before; I’m pleased to say that my system is in place and that the pins have already been added to since I archived everything from the past.

In fact, the system is now easier to access externally: every pin from mspa-lit has been added to an Imgur album with a short description of what it is, the date, and a direct link to the affiliated post on Discord itself. This should allow for people to explore the context if necessary, and for skeptical people to verify that certain posts do in fact exist (which could either be good or bad for us depending on the exact pin, I guess). This information has also been added to the Related Materials.

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to go check for pins that we’ve already gotten rid of previously. The Discord search function does not currently filter for messages that have been pinned (or even the notifications themselves that something was pinned), meaning that one would have to manually search for such posts or rely on memory of context to find them. Effectively, unless anyone volunteers the information, pins from before this list was made are lost forever¹⁶⁰.

Additionally, I was only willing to do this for one channel. I think most of the other channels have less pins except for general and altgen, but I’m still not willing to go through them and assemble their pin lists too. Qweq very helpfully volunteered (seemed eager, even) to do this for the pin list in #general, so that channel will be taken care of at least. Strictly speaking I’m not sure if the other channels even need it--altgen is such an enormous mess that it might not even be worth looking at, although I’m sure it would be appreciated by newcomers to the channel. I guess I would also be very interested to see some of the older memes to come out of that place.

Nothing more for today.

---

25^th of January 2019

There was a very unusual confrontation between Makin and long-standing user Dickle today. As a reminder, Makin’s patreon has a reward tier where anyone can host their own channel for $30 a month. Ever since the Patreon started, Dickle has had his own channel dedicated to discussing fanventures, especially Altgenstuck. It’s also loosely dedicated to discussing/sharing Neon Genesis Evangelion memes, although I can’t really tell how often it’s actually used for these purposes.

The channel has ambled along for a while in relative peace for over a year now. However, Makin was doing some math regarding the Patreon funds and noticed that he was coming up short. Without hesitation, the hunt for the malefactor began, and he arrived swiftly upon Dickle’s doorstep. It turns out that Dickle has not been paying the rent over a year, and has accumulated significant backpay.

Discussions commenced to figure out what exactly had happened: why was Dickle not paying the Patreon fees for the channel? After doing some looking into the matter, it seems ownership/responsibility was Dickle’s, but another another user named Bird is actually the person who was paying the bill. Bird eventually got banned for being racist but stayed in the server as an alt account and continued to pay for the channel, but at a certain point ghosted everyone and stopped.

It’s hard to verify this because apparently Bird was using Dickle’s account to pay for the service (itself a violation of Patreon’s TOS). Regardless, after a certain point the money stopped flowing and Makin claims that Dickle owes nearly $400 dollars, which he then cut in half “to be nice.” He firmly established that “180 dollars is the absolute minimum I'm willing to accept so dickle stays unbanned,” which seemed clear enough to everyone present, but then somehow the conversation began to spiral out of control.

Two more users, epistemicRelativist and ParcelPyxidis, jumped in and began insinuating things that hadn’t been clear in the conversation previously or were clearly false. Relativist in particular began claiming that Dickle owed exactly no money simply because Makin had not been actively checking to make sure that funds were going through. While it is easy to agree that Makin had been neglectful in making sure channels were being taken care of, it doesn’t absolve Dickle of responsibility in the matter either.

Despite this middling position, Relativist and Pyxidis continued to claim that Makin was the one at fault and that Dickle should not suffer any consequence from failure to pay. Makin appropriately called all this “twisty logic,” reaffirming that Dickle would in fact be banned until he paid what Makin determined him to still owe.

I took issue with this in particular, saying that the channel should by all means be shut down but banning people for Patreon-related matters seemed like a bad precedent. Makin countered: “if I let this slide no one will pay for their channels again.” I don’t think this is necessarily true, as the case with Dickle is clearly an irregular occurrence, but I effectively have no say over what happens at this point.

Yet, despite coming to this conclusion, the channel has been in turmoil for some hours now. I don’t know how or why, but for some reason Makin et al continue to discuss the matter with Relativist and Pyxidis. Makin has even renamed the channel to #courtroom to reflect the proceedings; additionally he set up a tier on the Patreon at $300 a month that says “Dickle will be saved. #fanventure-fiesta will stay up. Cities will fall. Hope survives.” The channel has officially descended into ultimate madness.

Newcomers to the discussion are calling Makin a “loan shark” for these policies and claiming that it’s unclear wording/no precedent to support the conclusion of channel closure from failure to pay. He responded by screenshotting the exact wording from the Patreon itself that stipulate that condition, and also highlighted a previous example of someone absconding from the server after failing to pay for two months of service. I’m stunned to be witnessing this kind of outlandish reasoning happen in real time from numerous people, it feels impossible that such leaps of logic should exist.

Finally, several hours later, the channel has actually been hidden and it is quiet. Dickle was unceremoniously banned until such a time as his fees are paid¹⁶¹, and the Patreon channel list is one shorter. I feel like a changed person for having witnessed such a ridiculous shitstorm. Yet, it doesn’t appear to have leaked anywhere else in the server--I would half expect numerous people to be calling for abolishment of the Patreon after this, but part of me is glad that the altercation is now over.

I’m slightly disappointed that #courtroom was removed once again, but if history is any indication it’s not a good thing in the long-term. Numerous servers have tried to implement one with varying degrees of success, often dependent on how many people are involved. #courtrooms can be very funny on smaller servers, but in bigger places they tend to draw an incredible amount of criticism: it is viewed almost as cruelty, whereas with less people it’s more of an object of amusement than anything else. I personally find it both helpful to reduce noise and entertaining in its own right, but it seems we may never be ready for the glory of a proper courtroom here.

Nothing more for today.

---

2^nd of February 2019

About a week ago, Makin put up a video that he was working on to promote the reread. He asked for criticism from mspa-lit (or we simply volunteered it on our own) so that he could fine-tune the video. He actually grew somewhat frustrated with all the suggestions we had, it seemed to be a lot of work for him. To his credit, he persisted and actually implemented a hefty number of suggestions; I think all present were able to agree that it was a good trailer (with the exception of User5 and Tera, who suggested that the music for it was an ill choice).

Today is one week before the reread begins, and he has released the trailer publicly to start developing hype. It’s seen some very positive reception from the community, with the associated thread on Reddit garnering some good attention. I recently expressed that I want this 10th anniversary of the webcomic to be one of the best possible experiences for everyone involved, and it seems like this reread is going to be an excellent way to accomplish that; everyone who has commented on it so far seems rather excited, and with the idea of an epilogue dangling in front of us, we are being tantalized once more.

Tantalize, of course, being the operative word: there is little to no guarantee that anything will actually happen, as usual. Alongside my want I also described that I’m sick of waiting for official developments from Hussie, What Pumpkin, or Viz in this matter: I suggested that I would be willing to pay for small prizes that we could give out in raffles to increase excitement and user participation, although I think this idea was rejected. Whatever the case, I’m hoping that there will be a general invigoration--I want to see the fandom active and satisfied again.

To this effect, we were talking about the state of the fandom recently and how much it’s changed since the closure of the official forums. It has been reiterated multiple times by people like Spiral that it was unimaginably big: “imagine a forum whose magnitude is like multiple times as large as this servers backlog / full of fan content,” nearly all of which has been lost except the possibility of an archive somewhere.

It’s hard to imagine that in a way, considering the server has seen over 23 million messages since it was created, but at the same time I wouldn’t be surprised; the sheer difference in activity between then and now is staggering if one was around for it. Circling back to the original topic of this entry, it is my fond hope that the reread will re-establish some of that energy; a renaissance of sorts would do wonders for the community.

Nothing more for today.

---

4^th of February 2019

Advertisements for the newest Homestuck book have finally begun. Pictures of the commentary within are widespread, although there are some stirrings: the tone and content thereof have led some (including Makin) to fear that Hussie is no longer providing the commentary himself. The commentary has become long-winded descriptions of characters with comparatively less substance in them than the commentary found in the originally released books.

After some examination, we collectively decided that the wording and some of the vernacular in use suggests that it is actually Hussie, but we also agree that it feels like less effort has gone into these books. The commentary for the first was lifted directly from the original print release¹⁶², and new commentary started with Book 2 onwards; people are starting to notice the change in tone from what was already available and now.

This might explain some of the delays that have happened, such as the next book being pushed back an entire three months. It’s possible that the time table is being shifted because of Hussie being unable or unwilling to write commentary in a timely manner: if he is slow or otherwise hampering Viz’s efforts, they may deem the project unsuitable and drop the books entirely.

This would be devastating, because the precise thing we were looking forward to was new commentary. Reading Homestuck in physical book form is a singularly inferior activity to reading it online because of all of the web elements in play throughout the story; being unable to hear the music or watch the actual animation robs the experience of a lot of its weight. Almost all of us have been buying the books strictly to see Hussie’s insights/explanations on various facets of the comic.

If he is failing to put effort into this task or--goodness forbid--actually gets them taken out of production, it will severely aggravate everyone. So many things from later in the comic remain unexplained, and denying even the chance that we could learn more about why certain things were done or resolve certain plot threads would be intensely demoralizing. I’m fervently hoping that Hussie or whoever is responsible will ensure the continued release of the books, and I’m sure everyone else is hoping for that too.

Nothing more for today.

---

6^th of February 2019

A very positive development recently: a few of us noticed that Phantos has come back, possibly only a few days ago, but we’ve had only limited interaction with him. He was and is a very fondly regarded person here, but amid the mystery of why he left, I think we have largely been hesitant to reach out in case it’s annoying to him. We wonder extensively about why exactly he left of course, but ultimately I think we’ve decided not to bother him about it. That having been said, it does seem that a few mspa-lit regulars have gone into gen to say hi to him in an effort to make him feel more welcome. I’m glad to see him well.

Less positive than this, it has been a gradually apparent truth that the quality of conversation in mspa-lit has dropped, and now there is a small number of people who are determined to restore the integrity of the channel. Nights and Tensei are open advocates of getting people to go use other, more appropriate channels so that mspa-lit isn’t dragged down with generally useless or boring posts.

Andrew pointed out that, “Furry shit is often the progenitor of garbage hours,” a sentiment that has been increasing lately; it seems as if furry content has been increasing, and predictably the push back against that content has risen. I don’t like seeing active disparagement of furries personally, but it does seem that when the content gets posted, anyone else who’s involved with that sort of thing comes out of the woodwork to participate and exacerbates the issue. If this continues it will almost assuredly lead to a blanket ban of furry content, in mspa-lit if not the entire server.

A few others have suggested that channel quality is not actually decreasing and that it’s simply been quiet lately. This would certainly track with previous developments (as I’ve repeatedly worried about in the past) especially with games coming out that people have been playing, or school being back in session.

Surprisingly, Makin went against claims that the channel quality has been bad. The reason for this is less surprising though: he perceives that regulars have been discussing the shill list more often lately than ever before. In support of this idea, there does seem to be multiple people who have asked to be put on the leaderboard, although I’m struggling to remember exactly who at this point. I wonder if this trend will persist or of it’ll quiet down before long.

In less related news, today there was a brief but animated celebration of mspa-lit history: the pin compilation I made attracted some attention and a few choice examples from history were brought up, which everyone present enjoyed reminiscing over. Nights took this one step further and made a couple of comics to memorialize the interactions in question.

Nights’ drawing ability has been improving continuously for literal years, due probably to Oceanfalls, and seeing participants in the chat rendered so stylistically brought immense joy to everyone present. This led to Spiral, Tera, Nostalgic, Tori, and a host of others discussing the ramifications of a comic based around mspa-lit’s userbase. I would absolutely be lying if I said I haven’t imagined something like this myself, although I’m sure from this document’s existence it’s not hard to believe.

Some of the interactions we’ve had are wonderful to look back on, and it’s a relief to me that others think back on our ever-growing history as well. It makes me wonder again and again though, whether anyone but those of us who have participated will even give a thought to it. At some point this place will never be discussed again, and I wonder when exactly that will be, or under what conditions. It’s strange to think that our entire existence is encapsulated, and we simply don’t know where the latter end is yet.

Nothing more for today.

---

7^th of February 2019

There was a strange altercation between Tera and WoC a few days ago. WoC is fond of pinging Tera with various nonsensical memes in an attempt to poke fun, which are usually harmless enough. However, this time WoC pinged Tera with the following text: “ i have discovered your address via legal means online,” an excerpt from a recent 4chan post (which is itself admittedly funny). However, Tera, took very poorly to this, stating later that it was afraid before the joke was explained.

Ever since then there has been some high tension between the two. The friendship between Tera and WoC has never really been good, but this seems to have made matters so bad that Tera has forsaken all contact with WoC and blocked them. Tonight WoC self-admittedly got drunk and has been attempting to apologize to Tera through a combination of sincere and ironic gestures, which may be doing more harm than good.

The lack of a single, coherent message and the unsteady history between the two has contributed to a large degree of mistrust in Tera, and it refuses to forgive WoC for the offense. It has culminated tonight in WoC trying to maintain a working professional relationship and failing spectacularly. Witnessing their back and forth with seemingly no hope for a good resolution has made me very sad. WoC’s joke was decidedly in poor taste, but after explaining the joke, a few days to calm down, and this (albeit bizarre) set of apologies, I’m kind of regretful that it cannot let go of the prank.

This did lead to a surprisingly revealing conversation about how various people in mspa-lit perceives others. WoC explained in as much a straightforward manner as I’ve ever seen him that he does not typically trust others, especially in situations that involve inviting people into a particular fold. Tera and Minish reaffirmed with each other their widely progressive stances, especially in regard to things such as WoC’s tendency to employ the word “retard” (admittedly a problem that might have to be addressed at some point, depending on Discord TOS and popular perception of the issue).

All of this has come together in a way that makes me slightly fearful: it seems difficult to find a way to reconcile their personalities, if indeed that is even possible. I spent some time talking with Tera after the fact and while we did come to a better appreciation of each other--at least I hope--I did not seem to make much progress in bridging understanding between it and WoC. It may be that I’m engaging in a largely futile effort, as it seems I simply don’t have the social skills to coordinate the proper interactions.

I’m worried about what stuff like this will do to the mod team. There is nothing like a schism as of yet, but there does seem to be a growing divide between people like Spiral and Tera, and those like WoC and Nat. Ultimately I don’t even have any say in what happens, as Makin is the only one who can enact effective reprimands for mods. Given his tendency to foment chaos and drama this could turn out badly, but in matters of his mod team I think that he’s more restrained. We will simply have to see.

Nothing more for today.

---

8^th of February 2019

Viz announced on Twitter today that it’s launching its own Discord channel, including a link to said server. Although we weren’t sure how to react at first, out of curiosity a number of joined to see what the place looked like and how they were functioning. It quickly became apparent that the place is kind of a mess.

At first it wasn’t so bad, although Makin was cautioning us against joining. Some casual chatting happened, although there was a noticeable influx of Homestuck fans right off the bat. This increased in intensity for about half an hour, and then we noticed that users from splinter servers and people banned from the HSD in the past were arriving, such as Sylandrophol and Smolmuffin.

As soon as this began to happen, the Viz server turned into a proverbial dumpster fire. It’s been a solid hour since I joined and the quality has been plummeting ever since. Trickster is “resisting the urge to heavily shitpost,” and Makin has threatened to ban anyone from the HSD who is caught shitposting or breaking Viz’s rules. We want to maintain a good relationship with Viz, and our users causing problems would certainly be detrimental.

Thankfully, it doesn’t seem like any of us ARE causing those problems. It’s understandably biased of me to think so, but it genuinely appears that identifiable regulars from the HSD have been very well behaved for the most part. On the other hand, the splinter/banned users and especially randoms no one recognizes have been turning the Viz server into a living hell. I honestly feel kind of sorry for the mods of that server now, considering how much shit they’re putting up with at the moment.

This has, however, been an interesting opportunity to study the behavior associated with large, uncontrolled fluxes of new users. Some interesting behaviors have manifested, including one person who seems to be requesting that the official Viz Media website be made available in a variety of countries, such as Mexico and South Korea. Others aren’t even pretending to be on topic, with one user literally talking about “vaping horse piss.” Most of it is just unfettered shit at this point, enough so that I’ve already lost interest.

Unfortunately, some casualties now exist: Canis, hb, and Tori all got banned from mspa-lit because they started spreading memes from the HSD like asking if people have read the shills list. Hb is rather upset about this, considering it an overreaction and without warning, but I’m not touching the ban with a ten foot pole. This is kind of an unprecedented situation and we don’t want to appear too lenient in case people start purposefully causing problems, but we unbanned them shortly after they stopped messing around.

Ultimately I think the Viz server will be lost in much of the chaos and excitement that is coming our way. The reread begins tomorrow, and by all indications it looks like it’s going to be very enjoyable. The Viz server opening up has been a weird and vaguely uncomfortable experience, but ultimately I don’t see it mattering too much; it will probably fade into obscurity in a couple of weeks or a month, if even that. I feel bad that negatively associated users from our own past are mucking about, but we have our own things to worry about.

Nothing more for today.

---

9^th of February 2019 - Beginning of the Great Reread

Around noon EST or so, Makin finally made the reread channel publicly viewable. The room was swiftly populated, and animated discussion began even before the reread proper commenced; most of the talk was, I assume, wondering when it would actually begin¹⁶³. Then at exactly 3 PM EST, Makin sent out and everyone ping announcing that the reread had officially begun.

The way the reread works is explained in that post, but for posterity: every day until 4/13, we will read a designated number of pages from the comic, taking into account the presence of flash pages and other factors that influence the amount of time it takes to read. The schedule has been set so that it’s unlikely anyone is left behind unless they simply drop the activity. After rereading the given section for the day, people are encouraged to talk with each other about it and describe things they noticed or liked in the current set.

Along with the reread channel on Discord, Makin put up a thread on Reddit for discussion there, accompanied by a host of questions meant to prompt readers to join in the conversation and share their thoughts.Writing this from so many hours later, I would say that it’s been a very successful start: over 100 people have posted in the thread and almost every post has something insightful to say about it. I think that this reread couldn’t have been better timed.

Some people are going above and beyond in their efforts to contribute: I noticed one /u/-Indubitably- posting a list of the music used in the current set of pages, describing the composer and where the music can be found. Some people, including Nights, are creating art to commemorate the occasion. The greatest number of additions are of course just text posts, but as I said before almost every single one has something interesting or funny to read.

Miraculously, it also seems that we have a sizeable amount of people who are just now reading the comic for the first time; I’m pleasantly surprised to discover that, so many years later, people are still discovering Homestuck and freshly reading it. This is arguably the best time for it, too; it may not come anywhere close to the feverish excitement and energy from when it came out initially, but this is indisputably a good time for the community. I hope that it will serve as a wonderful experience, both for newcomers and oldies alike.

An interesting piece of discussion from mspa-lit later in the day specifically: I wasn’t entirely sure before, but it seems that opinion on Cohen’s involvement with Hiveswap has irreversibly soured here. There was a more mixed opinion when he was still working on the property--I believe we were holding out on our judgment in hopes that he would be able to meet our expectations--but now that all is said and done, it seems there is absolutely no love for Cohen in our fold.

Part of that may be due to a gradually shifting userbase and behavior, but there are serious and sometimes scathing opinions of Cohen that wind their way into the conversation often enough that it feels worthy of note. Of the more common complaints is simply that he was not that great of a writer, certainly not enough to replace Hussie in the midst of a project that absolutely required the original author’s attention and effort. More acerbic comments suggest that Cohen inappropriately allowed his personal biases to negatively affect his work, especially in the design of characters and how they interacted with each other (details on this are complicated and more involved with specific lore than not, so I will not elaborate on this here¹⁶⁴ ).

All of this makes me wonder why we keep messages from Cohen pinned in the server. It feels like with the categorically unpleasant nature of our association with him, we would see fit to remove such traces of our interactions. After some thought the most positive spin I can put on it is that it provides a layer of transparency, but Toast also helpfully explained that it gives something of a sense of “legitimacy.” I think I know what he means, but it sounds a little silly to be honest.

In fairness to Cohen, it’s not as if Hiveswap’s problems were solely his fault. As is important to remember, 1011686 pointed out: “there was a post rj made back in 2016 on 4chan, that the hiveswap team had run into a lot of difficulties that werent their fault, more than anyone knew.” With every piece of information that comes out or is known to us, it seems that Hiveswap was really just doomed from the start. Sometimes I doubt that even Hussie’s continued presence would have saved it; laying all of the blame at Cohen’s feet is simply incorrect.

I would cover more but it seems that mspa-lit has turned to discussing slurs again. These conversations can be interesting, but they are also largely circular and increasingly I get tired of seeing the same talking points brought out over and over again. The phrase “man with half the facts debates man with none of the facts” seems particularly apt at this point; at every bent in the conversation someone has a limited knowledge of the topic that probably does more to mislead than inform, while everyone else doesn’t know enough to contribute effectively. It’s a tiresome cycle so I think I’ll refrain from getting involved.

Nothing more for today.

---

13^th of February 2019

When I looked in mspa-lit in the middle of the day, something highly unusual was waiting for me: I noticed that a game of Truth or Dare had been in progress for some time. There are a couple of features that I want to highlight specifically about this, because it provides some insight into how the various people in the community kind of exist around each other.

Tensei and Nights start it with actually interesting/funny dares, specifically with Tensei daring to delete a gif of creatures from the movie Krampus that Nights finds terrifying. Nights followed up with a nice exchange:

Both rather innocuous dares, but they seemed somehow appropriate for each of the persons involved. Then, even though they kind of tangentially discussed the idea of Truth or Dare, they left it at that: Tensei said, “i dare us all to stop playing this dumb game,” and made it overtly clear that his starting the occasion was nothing but a brief joke.

A second group saw this example and wanted to participate themselves. From what I can see: Andrew, Minish, Griever, Qweq, Reniclas, and maybe a couple others like Cookie were all attempting to figure out the rules of the game and play it in this haphazard online fashion. This later interaction felt entirely different from when Nights and Tensei did it though, for a few reasons.

First, Nights and Tensei both appreciated that engaging in a game of Truth or Dare online with each other was an inherently strange or even dumb idea; it was apparent that they each understood they were engaging on an ironic level because the activity would not really be appropriate in a genuine context. In contrast, the second group of people to do this were engaging in the game seriously, and it took on a very different tone. That lack of self-awareness by itself managed to radically alter the feeling of the channel.

Second, while Nights and Tensei disposed of the joke after only a few minutes or so, everyone else seemed to keep it going for over half an hour, or even longer. I don’t know exactly how long it persisted but there seemed to be some fixation on it even past its expiration date. This isn’t exactly an unusual behavior--we are well known to fixate on topics for hours at a time if it strikes our fancy--but I believe this factor is important for understanding what exactly separates the more savvy users in the channel from those who are less adept at participating socially. There is a clear distinction between those who tend to move on from subjects in due time, and those who will try to keep it alive long after it should have faded away.

Another thing to comment on is an evolution in the way Gnawms gets treated here. It’s been increasing in severity for the last several weeks, but even before it was a common enough occurrence to bant around with him and mock him for his interests. Though I never really understood this, it seemed as if there was some kind of stability in this relationship: Gnawms was free to post whatever he wanted within reason, and he would endure some particularly direct jokes.

This has taken a turn for the worse since at least the start of the year. Though mockery was in ready supply, he only very rarely used to get banned for it. Now it seems that he’s banned multiple times a week, and frustratingly I find myself the only one who’s willing to talk to him about it. I can’t remember how many times I’ve been asked, “What did I get banned for this time?” since February started.

I’m afraid that this is will only get worse. I’m not sure if there was a purposeful decision to get rid of Gnawms or if this is a more subconscious shift, but at this rate Gnawms will probably just decide to stay away. Perhaps that is even a goal with this behavior: getting someone to leave instead of banning them outright affords a level of plausible deniability that the outcome is what one wants to happen. However, it is a disingenuous and malign behavior. If this sort of thing is happening more commonly, then it will need to be spoken out against; it is a terrible precedent to set for treating users one is not fond of.

Nothing more for today.

---

16^th of February 2019

There was a relatively disturbing development today after a particular topic came up strictly by chance. Makin and Phantos were all talking about web domains: this is a topic that comes up with vague regularity, especially of interest to Makin because it can be used to maximize exposure to the subreddit and Discord server if utilized efficiently. The discussion usually revolves around how expensive certain types of websites are as compared to their effectiveness, such as com versus io domains.

Today the conversation took a somewhat dark turn as Phantos revealed information about websites he’s purchased and is holding onto. There was a brief window where links were posted that had information to do with dealings between him and folks from the Vast Error team, but it seems that only a couple people managed to catch on in time to click on them, Makin being one.

What he saw was apparently discussions between Phantos and people working on Vast Error that disturbed him enough to say “this is honestly ban worthy,” even calling it petty and gremlin-like. Phantos explained that he had come back to the HSD in order to talk with people from Vast Error about whatever was in the correspondence, but no one from VE had been around to speak with so he decided to stay. Now that the secret is (sort of) out in the open, he said: “I didn't come here for support, and I didn't advertise anything. / and I regret little. / I'll see u on my alt,” and he promptly left the server.

This prompted a long string of bewildered queries into what exactly happened. I had been paying attention almost the entire time, reread the backlog, and I’m STILL not aware of all the facts--though if I knew everything I’m sure there are details I would be obligated not to write down here. The overall point is that the ambiguous revelations are in such stark contrast to the generally sweet perception of Phantos that most of us are extremely confused.

All of this suggests some really morally grey underpinnings, and the fact that we don’t know everything has basically turned it into a mystery. However, Makin quickly asked for the conversation to come to a close. A few of us including myself were disgruntled with the lack of information, but there was a big push from people including LLF, Niklink, and anyone else who picked up on the tone to move on: they have appropriately pointed out that this is not really our business, and we should not dwell on the topic too much.

In keeping with that idea, I won’t discuss the particulars of the matter anymore here, even if I do find out what happened. The overall point of the matter is that Phantos is gone, and I think all of us who were present are reevaluating what we thought of him in the past. It’s been a strange day and none of us are quite enthusiastic about this development: a few are largely ignorant of the implications of his behavior and what they mean for Phantos as a person, instead just lamenting his disappearance once again. Those of us who were paying attention are more wary.

Nothing more for today.

---

17^th of February 2019 - LOFAM Album Release: Cosmic Caretakers

After an extended absence, LOFAM has finally released a new album: Cosmic Caretakers. It’s been in the works for nearly two years now, hittings some problems along the way it seems, but nonetheless exciting for it. A community stream is being held to celebrate its release as usual, the first in months. It seems to be a welcome sight: over 150 people are attending the stream, which is a very good reception for an album all things said and done.

After a brief discussion with Cait, Bambosh, and another member named power464646, it seems that this album took so long to release due to what are essentially administrative difficulties. The project, originally being named “Rubric of the Guardians,” suffered a false start, in part due to some intense pushback on the name. Other difficulties involve people dropping out of the project, leading to subsequent delays.

This latter problem may be attributed to a general decline in the fanmusic scene. There really are no other major groups besides LOFAM and CANMT; while the source material is now updating, CANMT has made no serious efforts at music in a while if memory serves (if memory is incorrect on this matter, I’m sure that it will be corrected in short order¹⁶⁵). Homestuck itself has been done for nearly three years, so it really shouldn’t be surprising that this is the state of things.

Strictly speaking, the steadily declining interest makes it even more remarkable that an album like this could be released at all. There are a plethora of individual artists making their own music scattered about the place--themselves an interesting sort--but in the modern era of the Homestuck fandom it is nothing short of incredible that a group of this size and talent exists, and that it is still working to make albums like Cosmic Caretakers.

The album itself is a true return to form for LOFAM: they have their organizational issues as does any large group like this, but the quality of their work is unquestionable. Every soundtrack and every piece of art to go with it has proven enjoyable for a hefty number of viewers. Though I’m no expert at either music or art, it is hard for me not to appreciate the sheer effort and talent that has gone into the album.

Seeing this stream happen in real time has reminded me of how much I enjoyed them. I’ve never really been an effective part of LOFAM or CANMT, but their presence is a wonderful thing for the community. It’s wonderful to see just how excited people can get for them; a significant part of the fandom’s lifeblood can be found in these fan projects, and to see that huge projects like this are still in the works goes a long way to tide us over. If we’re lucky then even more people become inspired to do similar projects themselves. The more the merrier, as they say.

Nothing more for today.

---

20^th of February 2019

For almost the entire day, mspa-lit has fallen prey to an old brand of shenanigans given new form. On April Fool’s Day last year, a bot was fed with dialogue taken from mspa-lit and set loose in its own channel, essentially forming uncanny copies of users that all endlessly churned out Markov chains. After that, I figured we had had enough of bot-generated dialogue, but today seems to have harbored its return.

Recently, OpenAI claimed to have created a conversation bot that was so good it was too dangerous to be released. Instead, they just made an opensource version available that has a significant (someone threw out the figure 20-fold) decrease in ability to assimilate dialogue and form complex sentences. Even this markedly reduced bot has proven to be rather intimidating, though.

Predictably, the opensource version ended up in mspa-lit. I’m not sure who was responsible for starting it--I believe user5 had been sending multiple generated samples for several hours--but eventually it subsumed the channel and became the object of attention for basically the entire day. The general result was surprise and even some alarm at just how accurate the bot could be. It did exhibit some obvious mistakes, but this was the version that was significantly downgraded; a few of us surmised that the full program could be virtually indistinguishable from a real person, prompting a discussion about the problems that such a thing presents.

At some point in the night, Griever left the server. We noticed this pretty quickly and it sparked some confusion, and a few such as Nostalgic were even a little upset. There seemed to have been no warning; Griever had been chatting amiably as always when he left. There was some of the usual questions: should we contact him and make sure he’s okay? Does he even want to be bothered? The ensuing discussion was of grave concern for those of us familiar with him.

Griever has been talking with some of the people from Homestuck Twitter. There isn’t much of a relationship between the HSD and Homestuck Twitter, but as has been put forth in this document a number of times now, what little interaction there is typically broadcasts negatively. It is not a far-fetched conclusion that Griever was influenced to leave during his discussions with people from Twitter (indeed, he mentioned that this was a factor in his choice, although not the sole reason for his departure).

When I asked him in DMs, Griever mentioned that he feels exhausted by the place, and that the population cycles too quickly for him to get really comfortable or familiar with anyone. This was admittedly a little hurtful to hear; though I agree the userbase has a moderate turnover rate, mspa-lit has typically been more stable than the rest of the server. He went on to say that he feels there’s too much negativity here, especially around Homestuck itself.

I didn’t ask him to come back unless he felt like it. There’s no point in making someone endure generally undesirable conditions for the few parts they happen to like. Griever mentioned that there are indeed people from the HSD he’s fond of, but ultimately he wants to try hanging out somewhere else. I don’t think any of us can reasonably begrudge him that, though we will certainly miss his presence.

Later in the night the topic turned towards a couple of things that have been cropping up more and more in recent months. The first and certainly more contentious of the evening was a revisit of slurs, especially when--if ever--it’s appropriate to use them. There were two solid camps in this discussion, the first saying that it was okay to use them in academic, clinical arguments, and the second insisted that it was not okay to use them in any context.

The main proponents for the first side were myself and Spiral mostly. Tera was highly resistant to this idea,and Oda was adamant that it was inappropriate, claiming he would cite articles on the topic to that effect (he eventually did this in DMs, although it factored little into the actual conversation in mspa-lit). Minish was originally of Oda’s persuasion, but after some argumentation he switched over to my and Spiral’s side. The mere fact that we changed someone’s mind in either direction is somewhat remarkable.

When it comes to topics like this, it’s far more common for everyone to dig in and not change their positions at all, unless a clear and unambiguous bevy of evidence is present. I felt kind of bad for Oda, as eventually it turned into a small dogpile. At the end of the discussion I felt obligated to remind everyone involved that, in the greater scheme of things, we’re pretty much on the same side: none of us feels like slurs should be administered with reckless abandon, especially not in ways that are denigrating (even WoC and Tensei agree with this, even though they use such words occasionally. That particular disagreement is about whether a word qualifies as a slur, which I’m beginning to doubt we will ever reach a consensus on). It is worthwhile to remember that at least most of us are reasonable people, and we are simply trying to reach a particular granularity with how we understand and define these things.

Thankfully this topic gave way eventually, though ironically to something that had the potential for much greater upset. At that point though in the early hours of the morning, it was discussed at great length with I believe no japes or jokes whatsoever. The topic of what dysphoria is and what it means for someone to have it is usually met with intense debate or even mockery, but this time the only people involved were those genuinely interested in learning about it.

Though I’m hardly an expert on the matter, I and a few other people versed in the subject were able to provide some quality information to the other members present, such as Nights. There was a lot of confusion surrounding the topic, but with our combined expertise and experience we were able to clear up misconceptions and misunderstandings. In all, it was actually an incredibly productive hour.

To me, mspa-lit is at its best when everyone present is swapping knowledge and helping each other explore the meaning of a given topic. There is nothing to be celebrated more than the earnest exchange of information with each other, be it culture or academic knowledge or anything really. Certainly, there are few things I prize so much as these moments of depth in our community.

Nothing more for today.

---

21^st of February 2019

There was a small but substantial change to the organization of channels. Last night, Makin asked about the previous time we moved #altgen down in the channel list. A cursory glance at entries from around that time frame suggests that I didn’t describe the incident, so just to be sure I will do so now. Back either before I became a mod or right around that time in January 2017, #altgen was near the bottom of the channel list.

The motive behind this was to instill a buffer between #altgen and #general, which is the first channel people see when they join the server. Makin was afraid that the reputation of the HSD would suffer, so he thought it was prudent to keep it hidden from view at least a little bit (an even more worthy concern back then than it is now). Over the course of the rest of the year, individuals and groups from the channel gnashed their teeth and querulously submitted complaints. When the Patreon was formed, Makin put a tier at $100 per month that claimed he would move #altgen back up in the channel list.

Eventually for whatever reason--probably due both to public outcry and the Patreon reaching the aforementioned goal--Makin did end up moving #altgen to near the top of the list. This quelled the lamentations of its members. Last night though, he asked about this incident, suggesting he wanted to move it back down. After doing what I could to confirm what happened last time, today he did just that: #altgen is now back at the very bottom of the main public channel list.

It’s worth pointing out that the last time this happened, channel groups did not exist yet. Now that they do, there is a slight difference: Makin created the category “Shitposts” and moved both #altgen and #botspam into it at the bottom. This latter move was probably inspired by the outbreak of an incredible amount of shitposting in #botspam once #altgen was moved (the average messages sent per day in #botspam is 200 or less. On this particular day, it was nearly 5,000).

While this was going on, Makin spontaneously created a new #hangout channel. This was not the archived channel brought back to life, but a completely unique one.With this in mind, his next actions were obvious: after a few minutes he deleted the new channel. Immediately after this he claimed he had made the channel “just so I could delete it again.” Some were amused, but those who have been asking for #hangout back were not pleased in the slighest.

This led to some serious talk in the mod channel to see if reinstatement of #hangout with the new channel organization might hurt or help the situation. To be clear, #hangout being archived has been an absolute boon for #general’s activity, and indeed the rest of the server if I’m being optimistic; under no realistic circumstances do I want it to come back. But with #altgen in the position it is now, I think it mitigates some of the confusion about what those three channels are for. Even now, people get confused easily about what each of them is for. With #altgen firmly placed in the “Shitpost” category, I feel like this removes the bias towards #hangout and #altgen that occurred when they were closer together, and that they could coexist without draining activity from #general like before.

This was largely ignored. A factor both for and against #hangout’s reinstatement is that it would appease perpetual whiners like AnionCation, who seem to bring up #hangout’s archival at every single opportunity. I feel like it would be a petty thing to give back (and I am shamelessly curious about how the new channel arrangement would affect the statistics), ultimately harmless. Others like WoC were fiercely opposed to any course of action that conceded ground to such individuals.

Another argument in favor of bringing it back is as a way to prevent congestion in #general (most servers have two general discussion channels so that multiple conversations can happen without crowding). As it is, though, we tabled the discussion after a short while. None of us are exactly eager to bring the channel back, at least not right now. In the future it may become a more likely prospect, but for now it remains very unlikely.

Nothing more for today.

---

23^rd of February 2019

Yesterday there was an interesting discussion about whether the various channels of the server are drawing enough activity. Specifically, #writing is what sparked this conversation. A number of users were saddened by the fact that the channel is fairly underused, which reminded me about why I had started to keep statistics on the server in the first place.

When #writing was created, Makin asked for someone to keep track of its daily usage to see if it was doing okay numbers wise. I had already decided to start keeping more extensive statistics before #writing was created, but the point is I now have a considerable amount of information at my disposal concerning the server’s activity.

All of this was put to use in today’s discussion: not only did I lay out how #writing is performing, but I managed to provide some brief analysis of the rest of the server. I already wrote at length about 2018 and the server’s past in the Related Materials, but now that a month and then some has passed in the new year I felt it was a ripe opportunity to give people an idea of the server population and activity.

Something I specifically pointed out to everyone (perhaps in too great of detail) is that I’m curious to see what happens to #altgen in its new position. My suspicion is that it will gradually slow down; #altgen leeches off of activity in #general, and the decrease in their proximity means that a downturn simply can’t be avoided. At this point it’s not a 100% certain thing, but the only question in my mind is to what extent it will decrease in activity.

A problem we’ve been running into with increasing amounts of dissatisfaction is liveblogging, specifically with poor standards. Minish spurred today’s iteration of the topic by stating that he had reached a particular episode in whatever show he was watching. Initially that was the only thing he said, which prompted us to ask why he would bother mentioning it if he wasn’t going to explain.

Tensei and I were admittedly a little aggressive, but we prompted Minish to offer more details. This launched a considerable discussion about what standards we really should have for liveblogging. I remember some older debates we’ve had on this particular issue, and I made sure to announce the logical conclusion of those conversations: “liveblogging should always be accompanied with thoughts on the matter and reasoning for those thoughts; otherwise, don’t bring it up at all.” Somehow this was not a sufficient explanation for a few people present.

Gitaxian and LLF both fought with Tensei over this definition for a while while I watched. I was not particularly interested in getting involved, having been through this topic a number of times already. I must admit that an old habit of LLF’s has been coming out again recently: he tends to nitpick extremely trivial points of discussion, such as pursuing semantics. We’ve gotten better at calling him out on this behavior, but I can tell it annoys him whenever we do. Gitaxian is less bad about this, but he seems to possess some really atypical opinions on a wide variety of subjects.

Their cyclical arguments proved to be meaningless, anyway. Minish had accepted what Tensei and I told him in good faith, and he had long-since provided details on what he felt and why about his show. This was more than enough to mollify me, and so the rehashing of liveblogging question was more of an annoyance than anything. Sometimes I am extremely weary of how often we retread certain topics here, although I think it always bothers me more when it’s just two groups disagreeing with each other as some sort of knee jerk impulse.

The reread seems to have slowed down a little since it started, but it is still going strong all things considered. The commentary extension has been praised by many; even the little additions that Makin and us helpers have supplied are proving palatable to people. A significant part of the extension, which has been discussed a few times now, is Makin pointing out when pages of Homestuck used to have contributions from Bill Bolin.

As a quick reminder, Bill Bolin was a member of the music team who, in a manner of speaking, threw a tantrum after disagreement with Hussie, producing a long-winded rant that has spawned a number of standing community memes (I cannot remember the number of times “PROFESSIONALISM” has been said in chat, but it is almost certainly too many). After this legendary encounter, Hussie completely scrubbed the webcomic of all traces of Bolin’s work, except for one or two musical motifs in places; the songs that were removed have been replaced with other works.

This proved to be upsetting to fans of the comic that were around for the original music. Perhaps not surprisingly, there is a dichotomy between old fans and those who only ever heard the new pieces, in terms of who prefers which. Generally speaking, those who were around before are fiercely defensive of the Bolin music, but those who came after are ambivalent on the matter or even prefer the new songs.

Makin predictably tried to turn this into a matter of taste, putting some fine hypocrisy on display. In his words, “people saying bolin being lost wasn't awful for the comic are just sour grapesing hard / or just nostalgiaing.” I have no doubt that he genuinely prefers the old music, but after listening to it myself it doesn’t sound as great as he makes it out to be; I would not hesitate to say he’s suffering from nostalgia as well.

That having been said, I’m sure it was different if one was actually around for it. Regardless of which version I or anyone else prefers, I think that the commentary extension making it possible to find and listen to the original music is a wonderful thing. It also leads one to question what might have been different about the comic if Bolin hadn’t completely lost his shit all over everything. We will never know at this point.

Nothing more for today.

---

26^th of February 2019

There were some discussions last night about the reaching impact of the reread: Toast and Makin both claim that they’ve seen various communities outside of the subreddit discussing the event. Toast claimed that he “saw some discussion of it on 4chan,” and Makin went on: “random discords, a lot of twitter users, some randos on tumblr / it's all positive / I'm glad we're carrying the fandom through these dark times.” Though there’s no real way to quantify how many people are involved, the fact that it’s been noted on so many different platforms is exciting.

I’ve also noted a pervasive increase in the amount of fan content that’s being made, as well as renewed interest in projects both complete and in progress. Nights’ art is a good example, with most of their posts easily receiving hundreds of retweets on Twitter and upvotes on the subreddit. Other artists such as Tipsy have commented that they want to get back into illustrations, which most of us agree is highly desirable; such people have variously contributed their own pieces in this relative frenzy.

On the HSD in particular we’ve been discussing and even playing Homestuck-centric games, like a couple of extensive mods for Minecraft. Just recently there was a post stickied on the subreddit about The Genesis Project, a Homestuck game which received a substantial update recently hoping to draw new players; like the Overseer Project, it is an ambitious and increasingly impressive rendering of the webcomic (though it is being developed at a very slow pace). Perhaps someday it will attract more significant attention.

I was watching #general and the other channels tonight and I saw an errant comment that struck me. It was kind of silly, but it referred to what we’re going through as “The Homestuck Renaissance.” There has been talk about such a thing before, especially when Hiveswap still seemed exciting. Yet, with all of the energy around now and all this content the community is coming up with, I must admit: it’s starting to actually feel like a renaissance.

Nothing more for today.

---

27^th of February 2019 - Third Anniversary of the HSD

Today marks the completion of the third year since the server was created. It’s hard to believe the place has been around this long; even harder to believe is just how different it is now from way back then. I think it’s safe to say that the server is completely unrecognizable. It’s honestly hard to recognize from even just one year ago, let alone three.

In all, it was a rather muted day given the occasion. Not a lot really happened, although a thread on the subreddit and an announcement were made. To celebrate, Makin gave away random Steam keys for people to claim. Mostly, as I’m doing here, there was a lot of reflection on how long we’ve been around and what we’ve been through, or accomplished. For me, it was another opportunity for me to think about what this place will look like in another year, or several years.

The community nowadays feels completely different, especially with #hangout gone and the channels variously moved around. It becomes increasingly hard to remember what things looked like in the past; I don’t even recall when the channel category system was put in place, although I’m sure it was last year. Discord’s developers being attentive and active means that it is almost always turbulent in one way or another.

At this point I’m sure it’s just me trying to make more work for myself, but another project I want to pursue is assembling a record of the changes that have been made to the server’s structure over the years. Considering the lengthy list of archived channels (now almost forty in number somehow, goodness gracious), an exhaustive changelog would almost certainly be impossible, or at the very least mind numbing. It would be easier to implement such a thing starting from the creation of the Shitpost category, but before that it would probably just be a yearly snapshot or log of what people remember. Whatever happens, it will have to be dealt with later.

I find it interesting to think that the current mod team has been almost the exact same for over a year now, since the Rapture last year. There has been scattered talk, from Makin himself and otherwise, about when the next Reckoning might happen. As with last time, it seems evident to anyone who cares that it’s not really necessary at the moment. The server has no overarching organizational problems and is generally free of actual problems. Then again, if and when the next Reckoning happens it will likely be from the inscrutable exhortation of Makin’s soul rather than any real problem.

All of this is just food for the pensive, though. Today has been pretty relaxed and everyone feels at least mildly positive. Really, while it hasn’t been insanely active to the degree I would find more entertaining, things have generally been without severe incident or harm. It has been a good time for us in the last year, and there is the promise of more things to happen in the one coming up. Though it is more gentle than before, I still feel optimistic about the future. I hope that’s true for everyone else as well.

Nothing more for today.

---

28^th of February 2019

As I mentioned in a recent entry, the reread seems to be going well. Activity has approached a certain level of consistency which is pleasantly more than I expected. More expected was the fact that it has fostered substantially increased interest in Homestuck in the server, and indeed in the entire fandom.

Discussions about the webcomic are more rampant than ever in the dedicated reread channel and mspa-lit. These conversations are rife with people observing things that they somehow missed in previous reads--no one has been exempt from this, with almost everyone I can think of expressing some minute detail that escaped them before. Bits of dialogue that were skimmed over or forgotten are resurfacing, and in-jokes long since abandoned are cropping up again.

New content has appeared on the subreddit in what can be described as a relative flood; the quality is of course questionable in many cases--one shitpost in particular drawing more ire than usual from Homestuck Twitter. We were actually somewhat amused when we found out about this. Gitaxian noted, “That one definitely deserves to be purged from reality but probably not for the reasons it's being called out,” to which Makin responded, “it's just bad / I know I downvoted it.”

As might be expected from controversy at this point, the negative attention actually draws more people to us, which completely defeats the intentions of whoever tried to make a big deal out of it in the first place. The quantity of posts and how much attention they’re getting just seems greater than before the reread started. Despite our sort-of-not-really feud with Homestuck Twitter, they seem to be enjoying the reread themselves, as well as a multitude of smaller groups with no real affiliation. As I mentioned in a previous entry, this is being deemed a renaissance of sorts. It is indisputably a time for excitement.

Though, it should be pointed out that there are still those around who remember the forums in great detail, and sometimes I’m sure this all must be paltry to them. Makin and Niklink exhibited a very particular interaction today that I feel is worthy of recording mentioning. Niklink beat Makin to making a reference to people from the forums¹⁶⁶, to which he responded:

By itself this is somewhat innocuous, but it invited some more details that I found rather interesting.

The latter statement is not quite true of course; Niklink immediately mentioned that there are a number of people from the forums who are still around: “then you look them up and they're working on acapella covers of things / shameful, really.” This by itself did not strike so much as what he said immediately after: “ don't remind me about the fucking forums / it's like how star wars fans would feel if they deleted the original theatrical release of episode 4,” a comparison that helped to underscore the scale of the impact that the forums’ disappearance had on the fandom.

With each interaction like this I witness, it makes it more clear to me just what I and others like myself have missed. I used to think that the difference between now and then could not be as great as people insist. Now I’m afraid all I can do is lament that I will most likely never see anything in this fandom quite like the forums, excepting a miracle of some sort.

Such things remind many of us of Viz’s part to play in everything. There was some hope in the beginning that their involvement would accompany some nice quality of life changes if nothing else; the transfer to the new website was an exciting development, but so much time later their promises to convert all of the flash pages over to HTML5 in order to preserve their functionality has gone unfulfilled.

Though not a promise on their part, there was similar hope that they might reestablish the MSPA forums; such a pivotal piece of the fandom was surely at the forefront of general requests to Viz when the transfer occurred. Yet, with each passing day it seems less and less likely that the forums will be restored. There is little room for positivity in this regard; so much potential has been wasted, and such a large piece of the fandom is likely gone forever.

In the end, all we can do is persist as we have been doing for literal years now. It’s strange to think that the comic has been done for nearly three years, and was started nearly a decade ago. I spin my wheels about this often, but it’s hard not to pontificate on the matter: how much more will the fandom change in the upcoming years? How long can we last, exactly? It gives me heart to think that people who chat regularly now have been around literally since before the comic began; the caveat, then, is it just means for them the clock has been ticking much longer than the rest of us.

The night continued on, and we eventually started describing other old internet places, such as a Flash game repository called Flashpoint (as well as a host of others, like Arcade Town). This conversational bent helped me come to the realization that: “everyone who frequents this place is like / a survivor of old to mid internet phenomena,” with significant portions of our time and nostalgia spent on websites that are either defunct or not even existent anymore.

I imagine that the nature of the webcomic we all read plays some part in that; I think it attracts a particular mindset, especially those that have used the internet habitually since they were young. It’s not really surprising to me that so many of us have this sort of strong, collective memory of old websites. It’s becoming increasingly hard to remember places from Web 1.0, but I’m sure that the early to mid 2000’s had a powerful formative effect on nearly every person here. It’s just one of the many common threads that one can find pervading the server.

Nothing more for today.

---

5^th of March 2019

The situation with AnionCation in #general has reached a head. A plurality of mods have become upset with how she conducts herself, to the point that the last time she began stirring controversy we threatened to fully ban her for it if she does it again. That was a sufficient amount of time ago such that we had forgotten about the promise, but today served as a stark reminder of why we delivered it.

The last time this happened, AC was given a temporary #general ban and actually left the server while it was in effect. We hoped there wouldn’t be anymore altercations after this; her complaints were beginning to clutter the channel whenever she was online, and there were transparent attempts on her part to attract the support of other users in the channel (so-called “beta orbiters”). It all became rather difficult to keep track of and care about.

Speaking realistically, I haven’t put as much thought into how #general is managed for the last so many months. Between Spiral, Shitler, Nat, and Deus, there are more than enough eyes on the channel to keep it in line for most of the day. Spiral in particular has taken her position in #general very seriously though, and whenever AC begins stirring the pot it leads to some remarkable tension.

In keeping with my lack of attentiveness though, I’ve mostly been keeping myself uninvolved with the sort of drama that threads through the place. Various users and mods have complained about AC’s behavior, and though I remained kind of distant from it I could tell for a while that it was going to need to be dealt with. Today presented a different avenue for this to occur, though.

Spiral has been afraid that consistently bringing up the issue has afforded her some kind of bias. It served as a pretty stark reminder of my first year as a mod here, grappling with the same kind of thoughts. I was always afraid that what I was doing could be construed as some kind of conflict of interest, and I did my utmost to assist all parties. Seeing someone else go through this struggle has been like looking into a mirror, in a fashion.

After a few more complaints, I realized today that the problem with AnionCation was peaking once more and asked Spiral or anyone else who had opinions on the matter to voice them. Toast and I largely abstained from the process, being somewhat ambivalent ourselves, but four or five mods in total expressed their thoughts on the matter (“KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL,” WoC submitted in his usual fashion). Ifnar, apparently having met up with AC for New Year’s, did not expressly disapprove but was certainly not happy with the proceedings.

Spiral, being the representative mod on this issue, struggled to make a decision. She wasn’t sure if she was making the right decision by pursuing some sort of punishment; having been in her steps, I reassured her that she’s on the team for a reason and that we trust her judgment. In a way, it was nice to witness: Spiral managed to overcome her anxiety and exercised her authority, undoubtedly a small step forward in professional development.

From there, it was agreed that a #general ban was in order, especially given the thorough warning from the last time complaints arose. We were content to leave it at this, until it was brought up that AC had been publicly offering to send nude pictures to various people. This radically changed the nature of the conversation, although at first it didn’t really affect the decision: the change happened when Makin came online and noticed. In keeping with past encounters of a NSFW nature, the genban was converted to a full server ban without delay.

In effect, the AC problem has been closed forever. I’m sure that if I looked closer there was room to handle all of this in a different way; this situation’s end arrived somewhat abruptly, and I feel like there’s a chance it’ll lead to more problems in the future. In the meantime though, I think all of us are just a little too tired and busy to want to put up with it further. When you’ve been helping keep the HSD in line for so long, you feel less and less inclined to deal with the minutiae these situations throw at you. Still, I hope that nothing terribly disruptive erupts from this in the future.

Nothing more for today.

---

6^th of March 2019

There was an interesting conversation around noon today that I thought was worth mentioning. Makin started by posting some pretty inventive bait: he posted sheet music and asked if any of us could sight read it. A number of people like Interrobang were lost, but a few of us such as myself, Wadapan, and Reti figured out that it was the beginning to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.” This is probably among the most creative ways we’ve been Rickrolled so far.

This predictably launched a discussion where people posted sheet music samples so that the rest of us could figure out what they were from. I ducked out of this before long, but a few of those presented were a little esoteric (Interrobang ended up posting “a jazz meme” where a Youtuber played a single common guitar sequence for 5 hours straight). Tensei posted a sample that turned out to be from Nyan Cat, which is what spurred the next topic of discussion.

After reacquainting ourselves with the actual video of Nyan Cat, we collectively realized that the meme will be eight years old in April. When you dissect the video, there really isn’t that much to talk about: it’s a catchy music loop overlayed on a short gif, and it plays in this fashion for over three and a half minutes. Yet despite this simplicity, Nyan Cat has been viewed hundreds of millions of times and is ubiquitously recognized as a feature of internet history.

This fostered an extensive discussion about the origin and existence of--by today’s standards--other old viral videos. Though it’s strictly only tangential to us, I felt there were many things that came up that are worth at least mentioning, so pardon if I spin my wheels for a while on this particular topic. Consider yourself warned: an unnecessarily long explanation follows that doesn’t strictly relate to the HSD in the here and now. Skip if you feel so inclined.

A significant example of older meme culture that comes to mind is the assorted MrWeebl content such as the primeval Badgers video (of which the original, to my astonishment, came out in 2003!) Slightly less ancient examples come in the form of Chocolate Rain and Charlie Bit My Finger (this having been seen nearly a billion times now), which are both around 12 years old at the time of writing.

Some of us found it rather strange to reflect on how the nature of internet humor has changed in the last two decades. Dap pointed out: “a lot of things were funny that aren't anymore / Like the original charlie the unicorn is weird to watch now,” and though a token few like Wadapan disagree with that particular notion, it generally holds true that they’re no longer enjoyable. Someone suggested that it was simply an effect of people growing older, although I suspect that the real explanation is somewhat more complex.

In order to figure out the truth, though, it requires one to answer two questions: the first is, would the same content released now perform as well as it did originally? and, would that reception be based more on the age of the viewer or was it because of how novel the content used to be? In the case of the latter question, I would argue that it’s dependent on both: something like Homestar Runner just wouldn’t be able to hold its own in the internet of today, regardless of who watches it.

Obviously I’m not an expert in these matters (I don’t even know of anyone who could reasonably claim themselves as such), but all of this 10 to 20 years old content is roughly traceable to stuff like YTMND, with low standards of production and exceedingly weird humor due to the relatively unworkable, new technology. At some point after 2010, though, there seemed to be a shift in broader internet culture.

I point to the Annoying Orange as one possible spot where this shift can be identified: the technology had improved enough to facilitate a new quality and brand of content, and to reach even the most impenetrable demographic. Simple brainworms like Nyan Cat were the product of a desire to create something fun and/or interesting with limited tools available. At some point though, we witnessed the rise of a sort of perverse material that I can only describe as clickbait. This is where the gradual gentrification of the internet began: it may not have started off as bad as it is now, but memes like the Annoying Orange laid the framework for where Youtube (and the broader internet) culture is in the modern day.

Looking back on all of this with the rest of mspa-lit has been an extremely weird experience: remembering things I hadn’t heard or thought of in several years was like recalling a hazy dream. It hardly made sense that we enjoyed it from our current perspectives, although Tensei correctly observed: “... its not that weird if youre in the middle of it / its basically like caveposting here.” His point is more than sensible: I wonder exactly how we’ll look back on everything we did in the HSD in ten years or so. Will it be with a sense of casual bewilderment or fond recollection? Perhaps both, if today’s conversation is any indication.

That having been said, this brief treatise has basically been outside the scope of the HSD, even if it extensively informs the baseline of our humor. When dealing with each other specifically, we tend to be a lot more self-referential than that; it’s only on rare occasions that we start extensively discussing viral videos in general. Naturally, we’re more inclined to talk about Homestuck memes and videos than more generally-associated internet culture.

As a small aside, something interesting we’ve noticed is that, no matter what Homestuck video we happen to link in chat, there is almost always a comment from Dingus on it. This has been proven with even the most obscure content: videos with only a handful of views share his presence, and it’s become just a little unnerving to notice. It’s impressive how far and deep the roots of this community can go; some members will very casually toss out how long they’ve been around, or we’ll stumble on some scrap of evidence thereof. It only serves to underscore the breadth and width of the fandom, at least back in its heyday.

Nothing more for today.

---

10^th of March 2019

We’ve come to a critical point in the Great Reread; we have hit almost the exact halfway point of Homestuck, both in terms of narrative and page count. The end of the fifth act is accompanied by a flash animation (two in fact) that is nearly 15 minutes long. Called “Cascade,” it is greater in quality and scope than any previous animations in the story, which is quite a feat given that most of them were already considered fantastic in their own right.

Makin has decided to put even more effort into this already prodigious event by hosting a brief community stream, to serve as a watching party for Cascade. Despite the short duration, there was a sizeable turnout of about 150 people at its height, and I’m reasonably assured that everyone had a wonderful time. For a solid hour before we began the flash animations, Makin set a number of old Homestuck fandom videos to play (as is tradition). Usually these are just the pre-show, so to speak, but this time I think people may have been paying more attention.

As far as this record is concerned, I’m conflicted as to how much of this to describe: the content in question is indisputably important as to the overall history of the fandom, as there are hundreds to possibly thousands of videos of content by fans alone that have contributed to our collective culture; however, by the same token these videos are naturally impermeable to anyone who is not strictly familiar with Homestuck, and thus I see little reason to describe them at length here.

Thankfully, I won’t really have to. Makin has been collecting content and information from the whole fandom, digging deep into places that might not have been touched in years. I believe he mentioned wanting to learn a new skill set, and has been pouring all of this information into an archive. From the few snapshots we’ve gotten so far, it looks like this could become one of the single biggest repositories for Homestuck knowledge in existence.

As a small reminder and aside, this document’s purpose has become broader in scope as time passes: principally I wanted and still want it to be accessible to people in general (at least to some extent), and of course the focus has mostly been one very specific, admittedly insular aspect of the fandom. Occasionally over the course of the last two years I have been inspired and occasionally forced to explain other facets of the fandom in tandem, but most of what I write is about our little group specifically, as a sort of microcosm of the Homestuck fandom--all of this is an effort to explain our workings to outsiders, people who may be completely unfamiliar with the nature of our community.

In contrast, what Makin’s putting together is intended more for people who are definitively fans: it is a collection and archive of raw sources for basically whatever fandom stuff he can find, such as fangames, cosplay tutorials, official art, and so on. While not only for Homestuck fans, it is certain that this information would be more useful for those who chance upon the comic some time in the future and (regrettably) at that point cannot get involved.

With luck, they will have access to or be able to find this resource Makin is putting together. If such is the case, then--while it will definitely not be the same as experiencing it in the moment--the spectre of the fandom can live on. Alongside our efforts is anyone else in the fandom who is collecting various pieces of information, such as the fellow on the subreddit who was collecting music. Between all of us I’m increasingly optimistic that the only substantial loss of the fandom will be the MSPA forums (as incredibly significant a loss though it may be).

This is also the latest development in what people have jokingly referred to as the “Makin redemption arc.” His reputation has been so thoroughly sullied for so long; many would argue that this is appropriate even to the current day, but the fandom at large has for one reason or another moved on from that history. I described this recently as well, but there are few people still active who could properly recite any of Makin’s past offenses; in the war of attrition, it seems that he was able to hold out the longest.

Regardless of long gone incidents, the effort Makin’s gone to recently has been striking. It hasn’t necessarily absolved him, but it explicitly showcases a side of him that counters less charitable perceptions. Outside of his dedication to the fandom, there was no real reason for him to organize the reread, or to maintain it as he does. There is just as little personal reason for him to assemble this archive. I’m sure one could still posit selfishness as his motive, that he’s doing it to ensure his status as an important figure of the fandom today. To that, all I can say is: he’s still doing the work that no one else is bothering to do.

Nothing more for today.

---

15^th of March 2019

Recently, LOFAM released a new album for the first time in a long while, and during that particular entry I commented that CANMT has been without their own music for a while. Coincidentally, CANMT was actually working on a new album and preparing it for release even as I was writing. Today, that album was released. It remains unnamed, but as usual a community stream was held to celebrate the occasion.

CANMT’s efforts have not gone to waste: as with the LOFAM album, the amount of talent and work that’s gone into the new album is completely evident. Everyone who watched--around 80 people or so--were significantly impressed by the quality. This is a little striking, considering the team’s origins as a literal joke.

Even better is that o, the author of Cool and New Web Comic, continues to use music from CANMT in his flashes. CANWC has truly returned to form over the last month; while updates are still less in frequency than they were before the intense hiatus, he has updated with enough regularity that excitement for the story is stirring again--especially in light of some recent developments that have people wondering what will happen next. It’s nice to see people engaged like this again.

My own excitement has been dampened somewhat by recent events, though. Nights contracted some sort of serious illness and was gone for about a week, but then he physically left the server on top of it. At first we weren’t sure if it was a side effect of his medication (which was making him overtly loopy) or if it was genuine, but further clarification, from him personally, indicates that it was intentional. He has accordingly become the latest in an increasing number of regulars who have suddenly left the server recently¹⁶⁷.

I’m always dismayed when people decide to leave, and with Nights in particular it’s really disheartening. This isn’t exactly new though: a chance glance at an entry from December of 2017 shows that this has happened before, and could probably happen again in the future. There’s no telling if Nights will be prompted to come back this time, but we seem to have run through cycles where he grows tired of the place and leaves for a while. It’s difficult in the meantime, but perhaps in the future we’ll see the entire cycle happen again.

Speaking broadly, it seems that mspa-lit has become a tad smaller. I was asked to do a comparison of the amount of conversation in mspa-lit, and after a brief analysis it seems that we’ve been talking about half as much as we did last year around this time. This trend does not hold for the server as a whole, which is about as active as it was last year, suggesting that mspa-lit in particular has been hit hard for some reason.

There are two perspectives to consider with this: a number of people are quick to blame Makin, whom I will agree is somewhat responsible. He has enacted policies that are clearly discriminatory towards newcomers, so his own position in this matter is impossible to ignore. I don’t think it’s the most important factor though: I think that it can be chalked up to there being less material for us to discuss.

I feel like there’s been less and less to write on as each day passes; I’ve already covered the basics and provided myriad examples of interaction in mspa-lit, and to a lesser extent the server as a whole. Thus, individual conversations aren’t very meaningful to record anymore. There are few if any fandom-wide events--the Great Reread being the only one that comes to mind. Andrew has described that he thinks the channel has entered into a period of quality over quantity, a sentiment that Makin highly agrees with.

To be clear, we still have a nice time talking with each other frequently, and I don’t want to enter another phase of doom and gloom. I am only trying to suggest that we are settling down somewhat. Something that bothers me immensely, though, is Makin’s flippant disregard for people who leave. His response the vast majority of the time is to say: “Who cares? Someone else will take their place.” This is said more often for places like #general than #mspa-lit, but it gives me pause whenever it comes up anyway. This sentiment will only be true up until it suddenly isn’t anymore.

Despite saying I didn’t want to enter another downcast episode, it seems I’ve done just that. I’m not going to waste energy or time exploring the possibilities of server death and signs that may lead to it; I’ve already accomplished that in a few entries from before. However, after a lot of thinking, I believe that this document has accomplished its purpose for now.

I will continue writing SPAT, but only for stuff that seems absolutely critical to record. In absence of any sort of official news (Hiveswap, another story coming out, etc) or absolutely major development in the community (another Reckoning or the Reread, for instance) I believe that it will be fine not to mention everything here. It makes me sad to say that, but I can’t and don’t really need to spin my wheels forever.

I’ve written enough about the community to give people a thorough idea of what’s happened here and what we were like. I will continue to write about major developments as they come, but generally speaking entries will probably be much more sparse than they have been up to this point. Rather than several entries a month, it will probably be closer to only one or two, if even that.

Perhaps in the future it will be worthwhile to simply provide discrete snapshots of the community, rather than have a continuous picture. Regardless, I’m tired and it will be good to give this document a rest. I will write in the current style until the end of the 10th anniversary, and then I might stop for a while. Part of me hopes fervently that it will only be a short break before I’m inspired to write again--to be honest, that’s what it all comes down to. If nothing else, I’ll just write whenever I feel like it.

Nothing more for today.

---

16^th of March 2019

We fell below 10,000 messages a day for the first time since August 20th, 2016. I’m very upset about this. Nothing else to be said on the matter¹⁶⁸.

---

17^th of March 2019

Trickster messaged me asking to be banned for a period no less than three months, citing that he feels like he’s chasing some sort of weird “conversational high” and that his interactions have been more forced than not. I didn’t want to appear dismissive of him but he becomes incoherent when he gets tired. In his ramblings he mentioned that he feels like everything that happens and all the people here are fake, calling it “delusion.” That hurt me more than I would like to admit and I snapped at him to go to bed.

Following up on this from the next day now: Trickster, as I had hoped, realized he was speaking nonsense and abandoned his pretenses of leaving. I’m not sure why I’m still so bothered by it--one might expect I’d gotten used to this sort of thing by now. No matter how I try to rationalize it, though, the feeling gets worse each time someone floats the idea of leaving.

It doesn’t help that the departures tend to happen in groups: Nights, Mines, and Trickster all left (threatened to leave in Trickster’s case) in the span of a week. The latter two have come back, so that’s something to be thankful for. Still, people leaving or the implication thereof, combined with the recent downturn of activity (even with the reread in full swing), means I’m not exactly feeling great.

Nothing more for today.

---

19^th of March 2019

I recently took stock of mspa-lit and decided to do a little investigating of who I thought could feasibly count as a regular. We’ve had this discussion in the past, but the general consensus each time has been that keeping track of that sort of thing is way too difficult, or even potentially offensive. Reasonably speaking, each definition one might come up with for who counts as a regular would be arbitrary, and thus ultimately meaningless. Still, my curiosity prevailed and I decided to stick with a definition, arbitrary or not.

The deciding factor for whether or not I would consider someone in the first place was a very simple litmus test: if I see someone in the chat, is their name familiar to me? If yes, then I put it on a list. After keeping track of the chat for a few days like this, I had over 50 names to work with (and since then, I’ve noticed nearly a dozen more that were similarly familiar but that I didn’t track).

After acquiring these names, the analysis was simple: the Discord search function allowed me to search for messages from people in a given channel for a set period of time, and I went per person per month in mspa-lit. I didn’t bother doing this for all of the server’s history of course, but just for January and February of this year. This led to some results that were genuinely interesting to me.

The distribution of messages across people in mspa-lit was generally more widespread than I expected. I thought I would see a localization of ten to fifteen people who have the bulk of messages, such as myself or Makin, and then everyone else would have only a few hundred. There were indeed the assortment of about 5 people with over 5,000 messages in the channel per month, but there were actually around thirty people each month with over 1,000 messages in the channel, and several with over 2,000-3,000.

This suggests a much bigger base of people than I realistically expected. There are a few heavy hitters like tmtm and Minish, but everyone else is not insubstantial in their contributions. This brief foray into the subject has been rather illuminating, although it’s still largely unfeasible (and completely unnecessary) to track this sort of thing. Turning user activity into a leaderboard is probably not a good idea.

To tie this into recent events, people leaving has stressed me out considerably but has also opened up some interesting dynamic shifts in the channel. The presence of various people has a pronounced effect on the tone and progression of a conversation: one of the most noticeable change in the last few weeks is that Gnawms being mspa-banned has reduced discussion about furries or furry-adjacent material to almost nothing¹⁶⁹ (a rather unambiguous connection, I’m afraid to say). In general though, there seems to be some serious differences in how topics play out based on who’s participating at a given time.

Tonight the discussion has been about making more fan content: Spiral--to my recollection--is not usually a heavy participant in mspa-lit, but she brought up the idea of a fanfic regarding the end of Homestuck. This would normally fall flat, but it seems just the right mix of people--Andrew, tmtm, Solarsail, hb, CyclopsCaveman to name a few--has made it so the concept was taken and ran with. It’s rare that this happens anymore, but there seemed to be real, substantial interest in the idea Spiral was putting forth. For a time, methods to accomplish this task were discussed at length. If different people had been present, it’s entirely likely that the same discussion would have died prematurely.

With the absence or departure of particular users, it seems that people who would ordinarily just lurk have been emboldened to speak up and express their ideas--it’s possible that there simply wasn’t enough room to fit everyone, so to speak. Cuil has been talking more often lately, and members who show up sporadically have been a little more consistent in their presence in the last few weeks.

This has been a puzzling trend that I don’t understand too well--it would be ill-advised for me to assume too much about how or why people are inspired to talk at certain times over others. I have been presenting this as related to the departure of certain regulars, but more likely it’s just that various circumstances in their personal lives keep them busy or away from the HSD at certain times. At this point I’m just exploring the possibility of atypical combinations of regulars, such as they may be considered.

To try and inject some order back into this entry, all of this reminds me of something that I’ve already commented on a few entries ago. Makin says infrequently about losing people: “There will always be someone to take the place of a person who leaves.” I’m paraphrasing--the way he actually says it is surpasses rudeness¹⁷⁰ --but recent events hint to me that this assessment is somewhat correct.

Yet, I would be hesitant to rely on it: I also said that this is only true up to a certain point, and I strongly maintain that idea (treating users as disposable is a sickening practice, and I won’t be convinced otherwise). I don’t know where the breaking point is, but I’m not eager to learn that particular information; the brand of logic in question is perilous in emergencies, and could easily ruin everything if applied wrongly. I have to believe that Makin understands this--he’s not stupid, despite his intermittent foolishness. If things truly become dire then I’m sure he has some sort of contingency in place. I could be wrong, but hopefully I won’t have to find out.

Nothing more for today.

---

29^th of March 2019

There have been stirrings on Homestuck Twitter: V is doing an impromptu AMA right now. Most of it seems to relate to that overall sphere of the fandom, which is to be expected--there seems to be something of a barrier between the subreddit and the HSD, and the Twitter crowd. However, she tossed some shade at us and the subreddit in the proceedings.

One question especially unnerved me, asking: “who is worse, Makin or Roach?” To V’s credit she provided a very diplomatic answer, saying Roach is “a good adult with a job” and not mentioning Makin at all. I’ve seen similar questions or random Twitter posts bashing Tensei, and this sort of mockery nearly makes me see red each time I encounter it. As many complaints as I do have about Makin and Tensei, seeing complete strangers insinuate awful, untrue shit about them makes my blood boil.

That specific sentiment aside, these proceedings just seem kind of a strange: there seems to be a casual disparagement towards the fandom (which may or not may not just be irony, it’s hard to tell) but I don’t know if I can be totally against it: even this ambiguous contempt is better than the absolute nothing we’ve been getting for the last couple years. Coupled with other things, all of the right signs are coming into play. It seems as if we might actually see something good or entertaining on the anniversary.

The volume of information that V posted was actually substantial; we were able to use it to confirm many things, not least of which that Hiveswap is still in development. Makin made a post on the subreddit covering all of the important information as of today. That pervasive air of excitement seems to be returning even if only a little bit. No one is sure what’s coming, but for the first time in a while real hope seems to be rearing its head.

Nothing more for today.

---

31^st of March 2019

The April Fool’s Day prank began early, about 4 PM EST. We jumped the gun, admittedly: we were relying on DeltaPsi to use her bot and rename everyone in the server to a Homestuck-appropriate handle. We expected this to go quickly, but it actually ended up taking about six hours. Makin thought on his feet, thankfully, and while that was happening in the background his first action was to start hiding channels in order of increasing activity until nothing but altgen was left.

The initial reaction was complete confusion, with some inevitably realizing this was April Fool’s Day come early. Finally, Makin moved freshly created channels (#incipisphere, #earth-c, #the-meteor, #alternia, #dreambubbles) to the fore and made them visible; the mods all adopted canon character handles from Homestuck, and were the only ones allowed to talk in these new channels at first. As more and more people were given their new names, we manually sorted them into the new channels using a custom role.

This annoyed people as one would expect, but a vast majority of those present seemed to be enjoying it. There was a spontaneous rise of different “factions” of people who were playing along, and interacting with us mods as canon characters. These factions wanted to do different things with or to the canon characters, such as playing at violence or peace. A few people took it too far and started DMing us mods, but it was largely inoffensive behavior all around.

There was comment from those less amused by all of this that it had grown old quickly. Tmtm and one other described it as “a ten minute joke that went on for too long,” a viewpoint I can completely understand. For our part, some of the more seasoned roleplayers such as Tera and Spiral (and Tipsy, who we had taken on as a volunteer for one character she was basically fated as) were able to fit completely in with little problem, exercising their expertise with great flourish. For others like myself, Makin, and Shitler, it was a tad more frustrating due to our lack of roleplay experience.

The hours went on, and we could feel the excitement dying down a little. Then Makin enacted his coup de grace: once most of the names were changed, at about 8:30 PM EST, he pinged everyone and allowed them unrestricted access to all of the RP channels except #incipisphere (which was tacitly reserved for canon character interactions). What has followed since is nothing short of complete chaos.

An unintended side effect of the channels being closed earlier was that the voicechats became a sort of refuge for those participating, and they immediately filled to the brim. I believe there’s a default 100 person limit for any voice chat on Discord, but the amount of people participating was so high that it spilled over from the general voice channel into all the others. I’m not sure, but at one point it looked like all four channels were completely full with people, which is something that has legitimately never happened before. Though the number dwindled some, it wasn’t by much: the voice channels have been chock full of users for basically the entire day without pause.

As the night went on, the loose interaction between the “canon characters” and the rest of the server began to take on a sort of question and answer format. The regular server members would ping a certain mod and ask a question befitting of the corresponding character. Again, the mods most use to roleplay were able to take to this with remarkable aplomb. I mostly found it vaguely agitating and uncomfortable (mostly due to how far some users were taking the experience), although it was fun to respond a few times if a nice joke presented itself.

In all, it seems that this year’s prank is already rather successful. I feel that by beginning so early we might have played our hand a bit too much; I’m especially fearful at the sort of crowd this will encourage, with all of the roleplay elements. I imagine there will be a shortlived but substantial call for a permanent #roleplay channel now, although Toast’s antics when such happened before probably preclude the possibility. This isn’t very serious, to be sure, it’s rather just a prediction on my part.

Overall I’m quite happy with the effect. I think Makin is too; he barely participated in the roleplay, but he’s no doubt enjoyed moving things around, making the day interesting and mysterious at the start. Speaking holistically I’m pleased with two things: that the usercount did not drop, even with the unmitigated horseshit we’ve been up to AND an @everyone ping; and that the interest we generated this year seems to have been much greater than it was for last year’s prank.

I’m not sure what happened but last year’s April Fool’s Day was quite milquetoast. This year’s prank has been incredibly entertaining, in spite of the few people who are deeply annoyed at the proceedings. It’s nice to conduct these things every once in a while and remember that we still have the power to give people a good time; April is usually a busy month for us between this event and the comic’s anniversary, and I’m happy to say it looks like that will be the case once again this year.

Nothing more for today.

---

1^st of April 2019

Seeing as we decided to begin April Fool’s Day early, we saw fit to end it early as well. People were more or less done with the roleplay prank, so it was as good a time as any. In all, the response has been way more positive than negative (I did note a few ‘thank god’s as Makin hid the RP channels and put the regular ones back up, but they were far and few between). The Q&A between the mods and the regular users seems to have continued all night, which was curious and a little disquieting to me. I think I underestimated just how fervent this fandom gets about roleplaying.

On that note, as I’m wont to do I saw fit to analyze how the mod team did (the complete information being available in the Related Materials). Tera was the indisputable Queen of Roleplay, accounting for over a quarter of total messages sent in character. Its adeptness at this is due to the fact that it actually used to roleplay in their spare time, as the very same character it chose for the prank. This experience no doubt made itself quite clear, in the supreme gusto with which Tera delved into the task.

Most of the other mods did well also: though not nearly so many messages were sent from us individually as Tera, we were all complimented on our performance by various users--WoC in particular was praised for his rendition, which was startlingly accurate to the point of disturbing us. We managed to get a laugh out of some people, and really that’s what we were going for: fun and games. I’m glad that it went as well as it did, even with the bot hiccup at the beginning.

That having been said, this all might have just been too stressful for Delta. Other reasons might be involved, but she has decided to leave the mod team. She wasn’t present hardly at all for the RP channels, I think due to a combination of being in a terrible mood from whatever is happening in her life right now and the renaming program taking longer than expected. Regardless of exactly why she’s leaving, we’re going to miss her greatly.

On the subreddit, there was no real prank to speak of. Makin did put up a thread claiming there would be a significant rule change: after today, all shitposts would be sequestered in their own subreddit: /r/althomestuck. Most people have immediately written this off as a joke, an obvious reaction given the day that the post was made.

Woe unto them, for it is not a prank. Makin has repeatedly affirmed that it’s serious, and that the subreddit would no longer be accepting shitposts. The comments are all fairly lackadaisical for now, but I’m skeptical of the reaction tomorrow when the rule goes into effect. I’m personally kind of happy about the development: the subreddit has chronically suffered from absolutely god awful shitposts that lack any sort of creativity or real thought.

This goes also for “sightings” of Homestuck content in real life that were really just various memenumbers seen randomly somewhere. It’s not fun to clean up that sort of content. It’s fun to stumble across a bona fide reference such as a character plastered on a posterboard somewhere, but people post anything that could even remotely count: a prime offender right now is a crosspost from another subreddit, a meme about a man eating 413 pieces of garlic bread. I really wish I was joking, but this is completely real. This is the level of content that we’re typically faced with on a day to day basis.

In short, I’m looking forward to the rule change. I think that the subreddit has been viewed unfavorably for some time on the outside because it’s filled with these low-effort garbage posts. Unfortunately, whether or not the change will stick is something else entirely: the shitpost culture is rather forceful, especially because there isn’t much new content for us to talk about. There is additional worry from people like hb, because the Pokemon subreddit initiated something similar and it’s been taken over by fanart and exhibits little else on most days. We might just be trading one demon for another, but we’ll just have to see what happens.

Nothing more for today.

---

2^nd of April 2019

As I feared, Makin’s rule change was met with intense resistance. The actual post in question sits at about a 50% score, which is pretty bad for a policy post like this. Complaints are rife, both calling Makin out for making such a change on April Fool’s Day of all times and lamenting the decision itself. The response has actually been kind of surprising for him: “mfw althomestuck backfiring hard / … / I would have thought they'd be fine moving,” which distinctly calls to mind the nu-altgen incident from the beginning of 2018.

To his great credit, Makin took the complaints in stride and decided to attenuate the rule change. He drafted a follow-up post apologizing for the untimely announcement, with some stipulations: shitposts would still not be allowed up until 4/16, allowing for about three days so people can get their reactions to whatever new content comes out of the way. He refused to elaborate as usual, but he is insistent that the things happening on the anniversary will be worthy of our absolute attention.

Makin also doesn’t want shitposts active for that period because it could undercut the work and effort that’s gone into whatever’s coming out. This is oddly specific wording that makes me want to believe him, but it’s all still pretty vague in the interim. Until the date actually arrives, we’re just going to have to be patient; a difficult task when such lofty claims are presented repeatedly.

Once 4/16 arrives, Makin will hold a vote on the subreddit in order to assess what the community feels is the best way to go forward. The options are thus: shitposts may be allowed unrestricted on the subreddit, only moderate/quality shitposts may be allowed, or no shitposts at all may be allowed, depending on how the community votes. /r/althomestuck is already being used to some small degree because of the temporary shift, but it’s mostly metaposts poking fun at Makin for the rule change so far. It will probably see some more use as the waiting period between now and 4/16 proceeds.

Subreddit drama aside, there’s been some contemplation on the HSD itself about the upcoming anniversary. Many of us are excited about the prospects of an epilogue finally manifesting; it’s something that the entire fandom has clamored for since the comic ended three years ago. Skyplayer brought up a more existential perspective on the matter: “what will we do when we can't ask for the epilogue anymore / what if there's nothing to look forward to anymore?” itself a different sort of daunting from the usual thoughts on this topic.

I can’t speak for the fandom as a whole obviously, but in mspa-lit it feels like we’ve thoroughly moved on from Homestuck as a serial experience. The reread has managed to bring back some of the old excitement that we felt reading the comic before, which is a testament to the reread’s success. We’re arguably some of the most jaded and cynical people around in the fandom, so the fact that we’re able to enjoy our time with it--even in the face of all our previous complaints--is quite nice.

However, there is an undertone of weariness to it; we’ve gone through this rigmarole before, some of us many times. As we get older, I think we’re collectively ready for something new. Makin has undoubtedly been priming us to be able to move on to other sources of entertainment, although at our heart I think most of us just want a new Hussie property. By dint of being in this group, most of us are huge fans of how he writes things and the way he can conduct a story when he’s fully engaged.

That’s sort of the overall point for us, is that by the end it didn’t feel like Hussie was engaged very much, if at all. We would really like to see a project from him that’s unique and different, something that he’s just as excited about as we are. Hussie’s best work is when he’s passionate and thoroughly ensconced in the personal mythology of his stories. Our criticisms often revolve around the idea that by the end of Homestuck, Hussie had lost his way and made it difficult to resolve plot threads in a meaningful or satisfying fashion.

The comic is an enormous thing, with a long-reaching shadow. I personally wonder if it’s just too big to get out from underneath. If an epilogue does appear, what might come after that? Hiveswap Act 2 is still confirmed as in development, but Cohen is gone. What will the project look like in the future? There’s a lot of unknowns at play here, although it’s nice to anticipate things for a change instead of being dimly hopeless about the future of the property.

Nothing more for today.

---

10^th of April 2019

Makin continues to make references to mysterious events that will happen on the anniversary, to the point that he practically can’t contain his excitement. This is all quite atypical for him, and lends increasing credence to the idea that it’s genuine. He went so far as to make another bet with WoC about it (nothing like snorting hot sauce this time). If nothing comes out, WoC wins. If real, substantial content comes out Makin wins. If something shitty like a picture of a horse or a single panel of Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, “no one wins.” The winner will receive a decent game, courtesy of the loser.

Even if WoC’s predilection wasn’t to lose the bets he makes, Makin isn’t the sort to make them in the first place, especially with money on the table. All of this, among the myriad other strange things he’s been doing and saying lately, is heavy food for thought. The consistency of his statements (“three big things are coming”) just adds to the effect. Most of us are refusing to give in to any real excitement on the matter, though.

We’ve collectively been burned enough times to know better, is the ultimate point. WoC’s bet was made out of sheer disgust for any optimism on the matter, furiously denying that anything will happen when the time comes. Most of us aren’t in the know about whatever might be coming and are thus a little more reserved, exhibiting the most cautious of optimism. Besides Makin, Toast claims to also know what’s going to happen, though he’s been no less cryptic.

There have also been some official figures like V and James Roach making various tweets to drive up excitement. Roach mentioned having read the epilogue and described it as “very good,” although this isn’t really convincing evidence--anyone who’s even slightly familiar with our history of taking his tweets as news understands it’s been a disaster. V, enigmatic though she may be, has established herself as someone very close to the heart of Homestuck’s creative process at this point; her posts are taken far more seriously, although they have had only a similar level of information as Roach’s tweets, if not less.

All of this is just to say that things do in fact seem to be moving. The attitude from those claiming to have special knowledge has been weirdly infectious, as much as the rest of us attempt to resist it. For the first time in a while, I’m looking forward to a Homestuck memedate with something suspiciously close to excitement. Even if nothing ends up happening, I have to admit that the stirrings of hype feel good.

Speaking to the possibility itself, today Sein mentioned that, after all of the hyping up that’s been done, he will leave if nothing actually happens. I didn’t see this and coincidentally floated the idea of doing that myself; he joked about establishing a pact, but in the back of my mind it feels a little more serious than that. Makin himself has made a variety of crazy predictions about the anniversary, not least of which is claiming that the server count will go through the roof (“15k is being pessimistic,” though as of writing we’re sitting at 14,250).

Part of my hesitation in getting my excitement up is that if something DOES happen I don’t want to have hyped it up too much for myself, something that I’m sure a number of others are also trying to avoid even if only on a subconscious level. The general mindset is that we certainly want something to happen, we desire that very much. Precedence just doesn’t speak well of the chance is all. If we’re wrong and something substantial does happen, then so much the better for it. Regardless of all this pontification, the truth will be revealed on Saturday. There’s nought left but to wait for the day to arrive.

Outside of this interminable wait, Andrew brought something to my attention today that I thought was extremely weird but interesting. Apparently back in early 2016, a user named Rumull created an extensive shipping chart of the prominent members of the HSD. It includes features of fictional romance that are explained in Homestuck proper, so for anyone not familiar with those systems it’ll largely be impenetrable.

The more interesting part of this, to me, is that the chart has remained completely unchanged since June of 2016. The names included belong to members who were present back then, most of whom no longer frequent the HSD (and a few who still do). There isn’t really much meaningful information to be gleaned from the chart, but I found it a fascinating glimpse of the community back even before I joined; a snapshot of a completely different era. It’s hard to believe this place has been around for literally over three years now.

I keep thinking nothing else will happen today, but through talk of Makin’s archive project I was tangentially alerted to a topic that I had completely forgotten about for a while now. Back in 2015, Michael Bowman paired with a number of other Homestuck musicians in real life and held the one and only Homestuck Concert in Austin, Texas. This event is legendary even just by dint of being the only time such a thing has happened in the Homestuck fandom, but there was additional discussion that revealed it as something of a tragedy.

Apparently, there was exactly one person who had the foresight to record the concert in its entirety. Unfortunately, this person mistakenly thought that no one cared about the concert; they proceeded to not only remove the video from Youtube, but also to delete it entirely from their harddrive. Because of this, there is basically no footage of the event in question. It has since become a sort of holy grail of fandom experiences; it is one of the many things that is permanently lost to us, made all the more saddening due to its uniqueness.

This all being said, I faintly remember someone, perhaps Makin, talking about this a long time ago: if memory serves, there is a bare scrap of the concert recorded somewhere with ¹⁷¹. Hopefully this sort of thing won’t even happen anymore, thanks to Makin’s efforts with the Skaian Library (which he just put out a thread for today).

It’s vaguely ironic that Makin is assembling such an extensive fandom archive after the fact; there have been a lot of difficulties with finding content that’s suffering from link rot or has been taken down entirely (something Spiral has been really adept at getting around in some cases). One wonders: if the archive had been started even half a decade ago, what materials would have been saved that we no longer have?

Nothing more for today.

---

12^th of April 2019

Things are beginning to get weird. The manic energy surrounding the anniversary has simmered enough that it’s beginning to catch even the more reserved fans. It’s currently 4 AM EST and V is continuing to post things on Twitter that beget excitement, confusion, or both. The most recent culprit and why I’m bothering to write at the moment is a tweet that simply says: “Today”. This immediately threw everyone present for a loop.

Act 7 was posted at midnight EST, so by “today” it’s not hard to make the logical deduction that whatever is coming out will be posted at midnight again (PST). Yet, there’s still so much room for doubt and confusion. Skyplayer mentioned that V is now posting about K-pop, and that there’s a massive event for the group BTS happening in approximately one hour at the time of writing. This could mean something serious is happening at that time, or it could be a joke, or we could just be grasping at straws.

This latter-most case seems the most likely to me, and most of us will be going to sleep regardless. No one wants to miss out on any developments though; it is both exhilarating and nightmarish to consider things happening soon. Indeed, the word most on our minds now is “soon.” The moment of truth is nigh, and there is only so much time left before the joke is consummated or the promising teases are fulfilled. The community is stirring; for the first time in a long while there is possibility in the air.

I said all of this, but some hours later after sleeping on it there’s been a pretty dissatisfying development. V overtly lampooned her tweets hyping up the anniversary by saying “did you think think I was talking about Homestuck??” or some such nonsense. Makin lamented this too, saying he worries it’ll ruin people’s excitement. Naturally, he then proceeded to post dozens of iterations of his usual fake-out garbage, where he posts: “HOLY SHIT GUYS” followed by a useless link or file that doesn’t actually reveal anything.

At this point I’m not sure if he realizes he’s actually destroying our excitement too, or if that’s part of his overall design. Realistically speaking he’s only doing it in mspa-lit though, so it’s just his usual brand of snarky horseshit designed to tease the people who interact with him most. I would be far more aggravated if he was doing it in #announcements or #news, but he at least knows not to go that far with his shenanigans.

Still, the problem is that the energy for today was severely undercut while I was asleep. I and a few others are completely checked out now, while we were basically on the verge of giving in to the fever pitch. If this all does indeed turn out to be an elaborate prank then I can think of a hefty number of people who will be very upset. A sarcastic quote I’ve been really fond of trotting out this last week is, “It’s good to show contempt for your audience.” If we get burned again in this horribly dragged out fashion, the hand that feeds us is inevitably going to be bitten.

I make it clear we don’t want to put up with any bullshit, but even with that in mind, such is our general excitement over the predicted content that we’re not quite sure what to do. We’ve been told by a few staff people on Twitter not to stay up for news, but that isn’t stopping most of us from at least waiting a bit. There are two imminent times that could serve as potential deadlines: midnight EST and midnight PST.

I’m usually awake at ridiculous hours of the morning so staying up for both of these marks is not a particularly impressive feat. Even if it weren’t for me though, there are a plethora of others--especially members from the west coast--who are also staying up. The tension is palpable; some of us aren’t even able to go to bed because of the anticipation. In my case there are also plenty of things that need to be prepared to make sure the Reread and the anniversary are both conducted smoothly tomorrow. Unless something happens to occur between now and tomorrow, there’s nothing more to be said.

Nothing more for today.

---

13^th of April 2019 - Ten Year Anniversary of Homestuck

I wanted to keep a record of things as they happened in real time, but I was so busy that it was functionally impossible to do so. I don’t want to start off by saying that everything has changed, because it hasn’t, but today was an extremely far cry from a disappointment. To be sure, this was indisputably the best 4/13 we’ve had since the end of Homestuck three years ago.

I woke up to find that Viz had accidentally leaked the existence of an epilogue early. The reveal was meant to take place later in the day, but they announced it at 10 AM EST instead (Tumblr post now deleted). This by itself was enough to send people into a frenzy, but several things coalesced to amplify the effect somewhat. Most important is that we started the community stream around 11 AM EST, playing random meme videos until we were slated to watch Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator at noon.

Makin pressed the whopper button due to a tip that the epilogue would almost certainly come out at 1 PM EST, saying we needed to start the stream early in order to get Dictator out of the way. Things began well enough, with over 300 people joining the stream almost immediately. As The Great Dictator progressed, we eventually amassed over 400 people. Then complaints started coming in that the stream wasn’t working. After a little bit of investigation, we determined that the problem was that there were literally too many people watching--it was causing the host to deny newcomers access.

The movie was more than halfway over so we held a poll and then decided to let it play out, instead focusing on getting reread information out. As planned, all of the relevant platforms were notified of the Great Reread’s final day (as one might expect, I’ve written some information about the reread’s statistics on that post. Look at the bottom of the original post for more info), and then we commenced with that portion of the community stream. The result of two months of effort were consummated; even though a lot of it was overshadowed by the intense atmosphere of the anniversary, it was still a pleasant time for everyone involved. Many people hadn’t seen the relevant material since its original release, making it more exciting than I might have expected for a lot of them. In all, it would be hard to call the reread anything less than a success.

After finishing with the reread, for reasons I’ll explain later we struggled to set up the next movie, an edited version of Con Air. Right at 1 PM EST, we were interrupted by the appearance of the epilogue. Viz announced it on Twitter, very specifically using the word “them,” and we abandoned our efforts to rescue Con Air while we encouraged everyone to go read whatever was there. We had debated streaming the epilogue when it arrived, depending on the form it took, but we quickly determined that wasn’t even possible.

To explain, the epilogue is something that’s been hinted at us literally since the comic ended. We’ve been teased numerous times with various officials giving vague information about it, claiming that Hussie has had it finished for a while--various tidbits like that. We didn’t really know what to expect, other than more of the same. Homestuck isn’t exactly a traditional webcomic, but it still has all the features one would expect: images and text are ubiquitous.

What we have now immediately presented a departure from that. Entitled “The Homestuck Epilogues,” they have no images so far. In fact, it’s presented as a fanfic of Homestuck, a complete parody of one might find on a website like Archive of Our Own. There’s a comprehensive list of tags describing what one will find therein, a character list, the whole shebang. This immediately struck people weirdly, and a lot of us were apprehensive from the get go.

After even just a half hour though, public opinion shifted rapidly. From what I could identify, most people were initially confused or even upset: we received three pages that were text only, written as a conventional fictional story as opposed to a comic. The content therein was tonally and thematically different from Homestuck as well; this is overtly meant to be a darker, more aged story than Homestuck was.

This makes sense to most of us, I would say, and with each passing minute more of us are okay with this change. More of the same would probably never have been able to meet our expectations, but the new format is rather novel as far as Homestuck is concerned. Further, it’s been a long time since the story’s end. Most of us are in different circumstances from three years ago, and increasingly we’ve been dealing with the prospect of growing up and dealing with how confusing or daunting life can be. Homestuck’s Epilogues appear to be going in that direction too, which may be just what’s needed to sate us.

I should avoid going into too much detail; the important part for the purpose of this record is that the consensus is way more positive than it is negative. The writing seems of very good quality, and the Epilogues are going to be presented in a serial format. We have no knowledge of any planned release schedule, but it’s “TO BE CONTINUED.” Ifnar, originally a voice of skepticism and apathy, said: “I genuinely am excited to know where Homestuck is going for the first time in half a decade.” If that’s not a ringing endorsement I don’t know what is.

Makin, working off of unknowable sources once more, claims that the next update will be on the 20th. Disregarding the fact that we have no idea how he knows this, the very fact that we can say “potential update” once more elicits a strange and intense thrill. The last three years have been dull, a time of stagnation; if this goes as we hope, then people will become invested and we may begin growing in earnest as a community again.

We maintain no illusions that things will return to the peak of 2012 Homestuck fandom, but that’s probably for the best. The people still present for the Epilogues development are all older and generally wiser; I imagine it’s for the best that we avoid going back to delirium, as fun as it may have been. Optimally this will be a controlled, sustainable growth.

Most of us are simply hopeful for greater fandom engagement, and a return to the ways of producing large quantities of great fan content (which is still kind of there despite the incredible gap in content: a recent, wonderful example is a compilation animation made by Shadok, which we found so entertaining that we played it twice during the stream). A promising sign is the sheer number of newcomers--we netted nearly 300 new people today, which is roughly on par with the ARG at the beginning of the year. Nights and Putnam came back to discuss the developments, I was pleased to see. Unfortunately the former decided to leave shortly due to not caring too much about what’s happening, but Putnam has been engaging extensively since they came back. To no one’s surprise, it makes me happy to see friendly faces return.

Looking back over it, this entry is going to be a little hard to read. It’s so difficult to keep all of the events of today in order; this has truly been an incredible fandom experience. The fact that I can say that is itself remarkable, given the fact that we stand here literally ten years after the thing we’re celebrating first began. It’s so exciting that it’s actually exhausting. We haven’t had this much to look forward to in a long while.

Speaking of which, there are still developments to come that aren’t the Epilogues, apparently. Makin swears up and down that we’re receiving additional news: “... there's more stuff beyond the epilogue to come, though I guess they decided to save this day for Homestuck exclusively. It's not the end, trust me. This should be an interesting month.” An obvious guess to what else is to come would be Hiveswap Act 2, or another Friendsim probably. Beyond that none of us have any real idea. The potential is limitless.

Returning to the community stream, I mentioned briefly that we started experiencing difficulties. It’s the first time that I’ve had the chance to detail what exactly was going on--I’ve been forced to piece together the proceedings of historical events from various sources, so it’s satisfying to be able to provide an accurate and mostly unabridged account of something for once. Once we were done with the Epilogues, we tried to pick up Con Air again and immediately ran into serious problems.

Makin usually has these events on lockdown, utterly and completely. All of this happened to occur at exactly the worst time possible for him, though, so he relied on me for help today. This went fine at first; I’m used to posting reread threads by now and setting up the stream wasn’t difficult. The problems started with The Great Dictator breaking from how many people were involved (highly reminiscent of Newgrounds breaking during the release of Cascade in 2011, although not nearly the same scale of course). This exact issue plagued us with Con Air, and no one was able to watch it at first.

Makin and I quickly set about trying to find a workaround to keep the stream working. At every turn, there was some technical difficulty that seemed to ruin our progress. I’ll avoid going into explicit details (mostly to avoid any chance of liability but also because they’re kind of boring), but essentially we went through three different platforms and methods to try and get the movie going. Finally, Makin was able to jury rig an account I had created and stream the movie himself, which essentially saved the night.

From there we had few other issues; the rest of the stream proceeded amiably, with us watching a movie that was literally made by Insane Clown Posse called Big Money Hustlas, which we’ve seen a few times now. I’m not sure whether to recommend this movie or not; it exists in a strange quantum realm between “so bad it’s good” and “so bad that it’s just fucking terrible.” The only reason we watched it the first time is because ICP features as an element of Homestuck lore (if this sounds perplexing to you, imagine how we feel about that). The fact that we’ve watched it more than once suggests it’s closer to the former I guess.

Finally, as is tradition when we have big community streams, we closed out the night with a “film” based on Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff made by an independent film association called Monifate. I may have written about this already in a previous year, but I sincerely can’t remember at this point. Monifate is based out of Spain, and the members made an ungodly, startlingly faithful rendition of “Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff: The Moive” that’s available to watch on Youtube in two parts.

Watching this movie after a large community stream is, as I said, a tradition. It’s even seen as something of a rite of passage to stay past the end of the stream and watch the movie in its entirety. “Rite of passage” is absolutely the appropriate phrase to use here, because actively watching the movie is nothing short of an endurance run, or an exercise in brain damage. The reward for passing this trial is more brain damage. It’s exhausting in every sense of the word, with all of the non sequitur conventions that one should reasonably expect from an actual SBAHJ comic. It’s fucking shit.

Yet, this is the internet culture wagon that we’ve hitched ourselves to. For whatever reason, we have given in to the unmitigated, unapologetic shittiness and are riding it for all it’s worth. You’d think ten years would be enough for us to decide to do something else with our lives, but here we are still. SBAHJ is just an easy target really--it’s arguable that everything we do even on a regular basis is kind of crazy. At this point I don’t blame anyone who thinks we’re collectively sick in the head for doing all of the things we do.

At this moment, I wouldn’t have things any other way. Nothing more for today.

---

15^th of April 2019

When a community stream ends, usually we put on a video of something grating and make it loop endlessly in order to convince people to leave. This time we did something a little different: immediately after the anniversary stream closed out with SBAHJ: The Moive, instead of tacking on whatever annoying shit we could think of, instead we put on a live channel for Homestuck music on Youtube: luminantAegis has had an unofficial music feed going for quite some time, so we tapped into that for the evening.

It was an extremely low-effort affair on our part, but it was somehow very enjoyable. After the stream ended, there were still about 90 people lurking in the Cytube page. Most of those people, I’m sure, simply weren’t looking at the page anymore. By contrast there were a solid 15-20 of us who were still there, listening to the music and chatting casually about how the day had gone and what was on our minds. The atmosphere was wonderfully relaxed; together it all conferred a sense of peace and satisfaction that I haven’t felt in a very long time.

I just checked again, and at some point lumi’s stream had been removed. There are still about 20 people there, all inactive. It makes me a little sad to see that it hasn’t continued. I would suggest that we keep lumi’s stream up for people to hang out in the Cytube when we’re not using it, but Makin would probably despise that idea. I can already hear him calling it a splinter in my mind. Truthfully, it’s probably for the best that the stream was put to rest. Maybe in the future something like it can arise once more.

Now that we’ve had a few days to come down from the unmitigated high of 4/13, I’ve greatly anticipated how the statistics would look. I am beyond pleased to say that I was not disappointed: 4/13/2019 is officially the most active day the Discord server has ever had, with over 75,000 messages sent in 24 hours, and beating out the second most active day by about 15,000. I predicted there would be significant drop-off in activity afterwards, and while that has definitely occurred it was actually less pronounced than I expected: 4/14 saw over 50,000 messages and today there was 40,000.

Seeing that the momentum has carried on this well makes me curious about various things. I already often lament the fact that I didn’t participate in the fandom at large until late 2016; there are a lot of events I could have recorded personally that I simply wasn’t around for. These statistics I write down on a daily basis are another matter, one that’s hard to speculate on. I’m more curious than ever what the activity of this place would have been like if we had been around for proper update culture. It’s not a perfect gauge now, given how much time we’ve had to naturally accumulate more people, but perhaps we will now gain some sort of answer to that question.

I mentioned in the previous entry that Makin claims the next update will come out on the 20th of this month. If this is true (and we have no real reason to doubt him at this point), then circumstances will conspire to offer significant insight in how update culture worked, statistically speaking. This isn’t even to speak of the two other “big things” that Makin swears are coming, but we haven’t been informed of yet. If and when such news is released, I’m sure it will bolster our activity greatly as well.

Speaking more selfishly, seeing how this has all turned out has already been immensely satisfying: it makes me happy beyond words to see the fandom’s activity restored to the level we had a couple years ago, if not more. I don’t know whether this will persist or not--I certainly hope so--but those answers will come with time, as always. Even without that though, seeing this wellspring of energy and excitement over the last three days has left me thoroughly contented.

The Epilogues releasing was accompanied with a small recoloring of the Homestuck symbol that has become a sort of de facto mark of this year’s event: ordinarily a green house, for the Epilogues it is instead a mix of black and white. After seeing someone else do it first, I was inspired to make a similar change to my own avatar, and from there it kind of snowballed. Now, several people on the modteam and a hefty dose of regulars have similarly modified their avatars, in an effort to show solidarity and appreciation for the event in its entirety.

Funnily enough, even this led to a little bit of fun. Toast called up the distinction of “white on left, black on right,” in reference to the setup of the background color for the new images. He claims that some of us have the colors backwards, which has spurned some small rivalry between how we should alter the images. If we’re being completely anal retentive, then the way he describes it is indeed correct: referencing the image I supplied above, the background on the left half should be white and on the right it should be black, with the foreground object being the reverse. Realistically speaking though, those of us with it in the wrong order simply laughed and told him to piss off.

Another pleasant development seems to be increased communication with officials working on the Epilogues. As has proven to be the case in the recent past, V is the one predominantly in contact with the fandom at large: she’s been answering questions submitted by people, with varying levels of ironic disparagement and sincerity. Though a number of us express dislike for the more negatively tinged responses, it is an unequivocal improvement from the vast nothing we’re used to.

I had a little more to say on the matter, which I’ll repeat here:

… while their official communication (like putting out web announcements and conveying this stuff in a "Professional Manner") leaves a bit to be desired, the fact that they're doing these AMAs and responding to people so thoroughly is an extremely good development.

It’s still all being done in a somewhat ad hoc manner, but aside from those gripes I have no complaints about the direction things are heading in.

One of these questions was to the effect of asking about the numerous quality issues with homestuck.com, including numerous flash animations that are laggy or some (including one of the most important ones narratively and qualitatively) not working at all. V responded to this by saying we--referring to the subreddit or whoever would be interested--should compile a thorough list of all of these problems and send it to her, whereupon she’ll send it to someone who can actually work on fixing them.

If this actually goes through, then it will be among the greatest community wins we’ve experienced practically since Homestuck came out. It has been nothing short of nightmarish trying to convey issues with the website to official figures, and to get them fixed. The forums going down is a direct example of this, where despite the problem being obvious and fans lamenting it very openly, nothing was done. If homestuck.com can be improved substantially for newcomers and old readers alike, it won’t exactly rectify the enormous fuck-up that was MSPAF’s demise, but it will certainly be a good start.

Nothing more for today.

---

16^th of April 2019

Not much to note in today’s happenings, except for the goings-on of a couple community members. While the place is abuzz after the anniversary, it’s relatively quiet right now. I’ve taken the time to step back and get an eye out for how people are feeling and behaving, which I haven’t been able to do with much effectiveness lately. There are two people I want to describe in some detail today.

First would be user5, who appears to be undergoing some sort of uncertainty in his life. He’s been variously shrugging off the idea that he has things to figure out, and then issuing statements to the effect that he feels he needs to take a break, or leave outright. This flip-flopping has been kind of alarming, especially paired with some rants he’s given both in public and private; after speaking with him about it and thinking a little about his statements, it’s clear to me that he feels some sort of pressure to maintain his current personality.

To clarify, user5 has thus far presented himself in a way that everyone has various expectations on how he’ll respond to things, or how he participates. This was more or less a joke or a charade on his part--he’s not nearly as crazy or wild as he portrays himself to be. Now that some time has passed, it seems that he feels the weight of his suggested personality crushing him. He wants to take some time away or leave completely, because he doesn’t want to keep up the pretense of being this figure that we’re familiar with.

I tried to stress to him that this is completely unnecessary; I’m sure that, while people might need to adjust a bit, no one would care that much if he took a breather and assumed a more casual approach to discussion. He was amenable to this at least a little bit, but I have no idea whether he’ll take the advice to heart. Whatever it is he decides to do, I hope that he’ll recognize he’s always welcome, no matter how he chooses to present himself. Keeping up a masquerade like this would be exhausting for anyone under normal circumstances, and I don’t think we have as many expectations for him as he suspects.

The other person I want to talk about is Tipsy, whom I was inspired by as she was conducting a stream. Members of the chat will variously stream themselves playing video games or some such, and today Tipsy was doing a live art-stream. She is well-known for comics she used to draw and write concerning Homestuck back when it was in full swing--her art has become fairly stylized, and is easily recognizable for those of us familiar with her.

As things go, she decided to draw a few things live for us, including more detailed work than I’ve seen her put out before. She took direct recommendations from people watching her, and a few in the HSD such as Putnam. It was actually a pretty therapeutic process watching her make art, and while I didn’t actually talk in her stream I’m happy that I got to watch most of it unfold in real time.

In the grand scheme of things, her stream today was not that important. Yet, I feel like it was an excellent contribution to an otherwise slow day. There are few things on this server that bring me such joy as watching people make content to share with each other. The art was silly and fun, but it was something tangible to show to others. I think that’s a powerful thing for people to engage in, and I wish I knew of a way to get them to do it more often. On the other hand, perhaps it’s for the best that I don’t; such works are at their best when they come from the heart, with little external prompting.

Nothing more for today.

---

20^th of April 2019 - Full Epilogue Release

As Makin predicted a week ago, the rest of the Epilogues released today at 1 PM EST. It’s now 4:40 PM EST, and I’ve been reading nonstop since the story was released. I don’t think I’m even halfway done yet, and neither are most people. The enormity of this development is something that I feel none of us truly understand or appreciate yet, but I can already see that this is going to significantly alter things for at least a while, both for us and the fandom at large.

The response across the board so far is mostly confusion and bewilderment: the content of the full Epilogues has been bizarre to the extreme, and none of us quite know what to think yet. So far, the most common sentiment, as condensed by users such as Velikiy and Rina, seems to be: “what the fuck?” More in depth analysis of what we’re experiencing is simply not possible yet.

At the risk of making today seem uneventful, I probably won’t write much more until I’m done. The Epilogues are simply too large, and too engrossing to ignore. The work is commanding our focus, and besides: there’ll be plenty of time for a more faithful recounting of the fandom’s reaction later.

Even just from a general perspective, as I mentioned earlier I can already see the fandom’s horizon expanding. We’re still not going to return to the absolutely manic state of the fandom’s peak, back in 2012 and 2013. However, the dialogue that we initiate with each other has almost certainly been changed. There’s new food for thought on the table, and we’ve been starving for so long¹⁷². This new content will keep us entertained for some time, I can tell.

Nothing more for today.

---

21^st of April 2019

The Epilogues’ effect has already reached far and wide through the fandom. The reception to it has been extremely different depending on which section of the fandom you’re in, even more so than I could have predicted. Most of us in the HSD are sitting quite pretty with what we got, but others have not been so pleased.

The subreddit is the nearest example that I can use for comparison. While the Discord community has been definitively more on the positive side than negative, the subreddit seems split down the middle in terms of reception. There are a plethora of posts on this already, sundry analyses that claim the Epilogues are shit or a masterpiece. It has been fairly polarizing there, although I’m pleased to say that (with a few extremely annoying exceptions) most of the posts seem pretty well-written.

Negative reception is not by itself bad--it just needs some constructive criticism or to actually be thought-provoking. There is definitely a bevy of posts that are effectively worthless, but if I’m being honest with myself most of the posts are actually valuable in their own right. This is something that we were all secretly hoping to see: it’s more frustrating than I can express when the reaction for a given work is shitty garbage, instead of displaying any sort of insight or reflection on the part of the reader.

4chan appears to be avoiding that dialogical pit trap as well, miraculously. The website’s users seem to be confused as to what to think, with no clear impression as to whether the majority think it’s bad or good. Bewilderment seems to be the rule of the day there; I can’t say I’m not amused to see them collectively unsure what to think or say. My only lament is that the total volume of posts on the topic seem to be kind of low; I wasn’t around for /hsg/, but it’s a certainty that their particular branch of the fandom is greatly diminished in the modern day.

Far more negative than I could have predicted are the Twitter and Tumblr spheres of the fandom. Back when Act 6 and Act 7 were still fresh, the people who tended to inhabit those websites were far more positive than the subreddit or HSD were (although these latter sections of the fandom were more fledgling back then). Today sees the opposite of the old status quo, where we’re ambivalent-bordering-on-happy with what we’ve received, and Homestuck Tumblr/Twitter are not. To be sure, they are nothing short of incensed.

The nature of their complaints is kind of strange to us, but it seems to center on the treatment of the characters within the story. The end of Homestuck was ambiguously positive from a narrative standpoint, but the Epilogues have been nothing short of exhausting, emotionally draining reads. This is not a happy ending, really; Homestuck Twitter and Tumblr are far more invested in the characters than in the progression of the overall narrative, so this development is something of an affront to them.

Although I can appreciate their desire to see these characters get a happy ending, some of the complaints just aren’t very salient either. Even V has commented on this, in a Twitter post: “Reddit's Redemption Arc / no matter what goes on on that website i can't say you guys don't read.” I’m still not completely alright with the passive aggressive remarks, but with some of the messages she’s been getting I don’t even think I can blame her.

Overtly negative/unhelpful responses aside, the fandom’s reaction has been incredible. I didn’t think it would be possible to galvanize the fanbase to this degree; people have been crawling out of the woodwork to talk about it, in some cases having been away for literal years. BKEW, prominent theorist and practically a community celebrity for years, has started posting again. He seems happy with how things are going, and it’s nice to see him active again.

It’s going to be some time before the exact details of all these responses can be explored with any significant granularity. The Epilogues are still fresh--too fresh, really. We haven’t had time to process it and begin discussing in earnest; we’re still in the honeymoon phase, as they say. I’m sure that opinions will balance out at least somewhat in the upcoming weeks; at the very least, I’m sure our perception will become more neutral as we start to notice small details that we missed the first time, or questions that weren’t answered.

The comic is well and truly over now, according to Hussie as relayed by V, but our masturbatory philosophizing has only just begun. I’m fascinated (and in some cases disturbed) by the overall fandom’s response to them, but one thing rings true above all else: we finally have something more to talk about now. I’ve said this a few times in recent entries, but it’s true now more than ever: it’s an exciting time to be part of the fandom.

Nothing more for today.

---

22^nd of April 2019

The more negative responses to the Epilogues appear to have reached something of a pitch. V and several other people who exhibit even mild attachment to Homestuck’s production are receiving some extremely upsetting messages from the more fanatical section of the fanbase: in some cases, these messages involve clear threats of suicide. I’m not sure that anyone expected this severe a reaction, although after some talk with a few people close to these matters, I can see why it’s happened.

Tipsy and a few others have vaguely described this issue to me (an effort on their part to conceal the identity of anyone involved, so as to respect their privacy). I mentioned in the last entry that the subreddit and the HSD are more imminently concerned with the narrative of Homestuck rather than its characters--although it wouldn’t be fair to say we don’t like them too. However, there are other portions of the fandom who are fiercely attached to the characters, to an astonishing extent as we’re seeing now.

This particular facet of the fandom has deserved a write-up for quite some time, but expositing on them at this point in time is perhaps convenient. Specifically, there’s a subculture that largely exists on the internet which demonstrates the practice of “kinning.” This refers to when someone identifies so strongly with a fictional character (or other, real life people, or animals, or even inanimate objects) that they take steps to modify their behavior or perception to more closely match what they like. Essentially, they attempt to become the thing or person they idolize.

Despite looking extensively, I’m finding basically nothing that explores this phenomenon with any real depth. Google shows me nothing but page after page of Tumblr blogs with people engaging in the practice, which does absolutely nothing to help me understand its origins and the “politics” of kinning, so to speak. Instead, I’ll set out some observations that could very well be inaccurate or false, but are more or less in keeping with what I and other members of the HSD have encountered.

The practice of kinning is most likely very old on the internet, although the Tumblr crowd seems to have popularized it. At the least, users on that website display the most recognizable form of the behavior quite prominently. It is not a popularly received practice outside of communities that engage in it: when I asked for details about the origin of kinning, Toast responded bluntly: “mental illness.” Spiral answered more diplomatically: “its not any particular fandom / its sort of existed for a long ass time / like, early internet / but then when kinning happened / it boomed.” Despite my attempts to probe further, no information was forthcoming.

The point of this explanation is to help frame what is happening now, with the Epilogues. The Homestuck fandom is not without its fair share of people who engage in kinning, especially because a number of the characters are highly relatable and strongly written. The diverse range of personalities means that there’s typically something for everyone. Alongside the LGBT representation, it was inevitable that a number of fans would start to kin particular characters.

Unfortunately, a side-effect of this practice is that, whatever happens to a given character in the story has a particularly strong effect on people who kin that character. There is an overwhelming desire to see the person they identify with receive good treatment or a happy ending. When a sad or frustrating development occurs, the person kinning the character in turn feels that sadness or frustration, either through the strength of their sympathetic identification or because they feel like “their character” deserves better^{173 174}.

This is what’s going on with some of the particularly nasty or negative comments towards V, and other writers on the project. As described earlier, the Epilogues are not a happy ending. They are arduous and filled with harrowing, borderline edgy developments. This is all well and good for people who crave narrative progress, but for the kinners this has proven to be a pretty upsetting turn of events.

To be sure, even though I don’t really support or even fully understand the practice of kinning, it’s not hard to see that the new content has had a serious impact on their mood. It’s regrettable that they feel so strongly affected by what’s happening. However, being driven near to suicide over the matter approaches insanity. It is not an appropriate or even sane response to want to end one’s life over developments in a fictional story, and it is utter madness to hold the writers accountable for the irrational whims of the fans.

To be sure, this is the most extreme behavior to come out of the Epilogues’ release. At least, it is the most extreme so far. The rest of us are largely content with discussing the proceedings, and we are genuinely worried how the actions or statements of the kinning crowd may affect the writers. This is not something that the latter deserve to deal with in the slightest, although we have little power to stop it from happening due to how insular that side of the fandom tends to be.

I don’t wish to project a miserable picture on the matter, not entirely. These responses have deeply unsettled some of us, but by and large they seem to be contained to only a few individuals. More widespread is criticism about how the story treats trans identity, or LGBT folk in general. V has posted on Twitter multiple times on both of these topics, defending the Epilogues and how it deals with these themes. It seems to be an unfortunate part of the fandom’s history: at least one group perpetually agitates the people who make our content due to grievances with how its written.

That having been said, dwelling on the purely negative is somewhat disingenuous. There are plenty of people who are quite pleased with how things are going, or who have been inspired by it. I’ve seen several pieces of art come out in less than 24 hours depicting various scenes from the Epilogue (this is spurred in part by the fact that it’s purely textual, whereas Homestuck in general used a more visual medium). Even WoC has contributed art of multiple scenes that he claims won’t leave his mind; I can only imagine all of the people who are sketching and drawing scenes from the story right now. I wouldn’t be surprised if a collective effort arises to illustrate the entire story.

Outside of conventional fan projects like this, it seems that more esoteric or bizarre ideas are forming as well. One of my favorite examples of this comes from user Puff, who described an effort by themselves and a few others to essentially transcribe Homestuck into Shakespearean English, culminating in an MSPFA page hilariously called “Home Did Stick.” It’s not terribly far into the comic yet, but it’s a delightfully strange thing.

I’ve greatly missed seeing projects like this being released; they make you stop for a second and wonder if what you’re seeing is actually real. Homestuck has a remarkable capacity to inspire people, and while many conventional works have come out of the fandom, my favorite things to look at are usually the ones that force you to question reality, and how on earth anyone could have conceived it to begin with.

Home Did Stick isn’t quite on this level, to be fair; it’s a fairly simple concept that in retrospect I’m surprised didn’t already exist, but I’m nonetheless overjoyed that people are working on things like it once again. There’s likely going to be a period of turmoil as the fandom reshapes itself around the subject matter we’ve been given. At this point, though, I think I can allow myself to be optimistic; it looks like it’s going to be very interesting around here for at least a short while.

Nothing more for today.

---

25^th of April 2019

Today Acamaeda, one of the authors of a well-known fan adventure, came in to talk. Specifically, they work with another person named Joy on a “continuation” of Homestuck called Act Omega. Continuations are a special category of fan adventures that specifically try to address the points of the comic that they don’t like, or that they think could have been done better.

Acamaeda has talked with us occasionally in the past, but has been largely absent for a while. Today, they came in and shared a meme about Worm, but then the discussion inevitably turned to the Epilogues. Acamaeda offered their opinion of the story in four words: “Read Act Omega instead.” This summary report rankled deeply with us for a few reasons.

Acamaeda expressed that they started Act Omega as a way to provide catharsis to fans who wanted a happy, conclusive ending with Homestuck, rather than the more ambiguous conclusion we had for a while. It seemed they were bringing their fanventure up as a form of promotion for people who were further upset by the Epilogues (of which there are surely many, but I will exposit more on this later).

Makin--true to form--was particularly incisive in this matter, offering the harsh but accurate criticism that Act Omega hasn’t actually made any substantial progress since it began. He clarified: “I literally have no real problems with [Act Omega’s] structural issues / the real problem … is that it only exists in your head / and it's not getting made at all.” Acamaeda’s response to this was that even if their work is never completed, they would still take it over the Epilogues.

While this statement initially confused us, ultimately it only served to embitter us further. At this point, any further clarification on Acamaeda’s position was useless. I noticed the tone of the conversation switch from casual bemusement to outright disapproval: it felt monstrously inappropriate for them to advertise their work in this way. It distinctly called to mind the sort of person who seeks every available opportunity to hock their wares¹⁷⁵.

The very origin of their work becomes disconcerting under scrutiny; it seems innocuous enough to want to write an ending that people like better than what they actually received. However, this has revealed a startling mentality surrounding Homestuck, pervasive in certain sections of its fandom: there are people who are claiming to be “substantially hurt” by the way it’s written, who use that emotional distress as leverage against the writers.

Acamaeda directly mentioned this group of people in the course of the conversation: “I know a LOT of people who were really upset by the epilogues / Who really care about the plot and the characters of Homestuck and wanted closure but never truly got it.” This by itself is fine; it would be the height of hypocrisy not to point out that the subreddit and the members of the HSD were also put off by Act 7. However, as mentioned in a previous entry, there are individuals sending messages to the authors of the Epilogue, saying they want to physically harm themselves over the writing.

Acamaeda mentioning people’s hurt feelings prompted some brief outcry. I’m not sure if it was genuine lack of knowledge on their part or if they were playing up their indignance, but Tensei, Makin, and WoC all denied that this was happening. To inject some nuance into the situation, a number of people becoming upset is happening; that having been said, in this scenario I think that it is morally correct to rebut those people, because it is silly behavior at best and dangerously irresponsible at worst.

The point I’m trying to drive home with all of this is that the group in question should not be catered to in any way, shape, or form. I was originally waffling in my opinion of whether the behavior was justified, although I’ve since firmly disapproved of their arguments. Tipsy is another person struggling with what to think of this development; she is still juggling the emotions of people with the importance of free speech and art. She is just as put off by the dramatic responses as I am though, so I suspect her perception will settle somewhere similar to mine.

This all aside, I feel as if today’s incident with Acamaeda has helped me to understand something: there seems to be a fundamental inability of people in mspa-lit to accommodate artists who care too much about their work. I first noticed this trend with Austin and Vast Error; it should be pointed out that in that scenario, we were being far more respectful and calm in delivering our criticisms, trying to genuinely offer advice on the direction of the comic. Austin couldn’t or didn’t want to tolerate it though, and left the server after a little bit of this.

With Acamaeda, I regret to say that we were far less polite. The criticism was no less deserved, I just tend to get frustrated when the chat can’t convey its opinions with any real decorum. Eventually Acamaeda saw fit to abscond from the conversation, which was an understandable decision given the miserable state in which we were delivering our advice. Nothing of real value was actually accomplished; we ended up driving off another content creator¹⁷⁶, although it’s difficult to surmise exactly who is most responsible for this ineffective communication.

Overall I consider today a failure: “who is more to blame” being a pointlessly divisive question, a more salient one might be, “why were we unable to convince this person to effectively improve their work?” Makin and others seem to have a rather quicksilver grasp of content creation: I’ve seen them claim that people should make more worthwhile fan projects or art, which is completely true; however, in spite of the fact that their criticisms are usually pretty cogent, their actual attempts to reinforce this behavior have been nothing short of dreadful so far¹⁷⁷ .

Instances such as Vast Error where the author is simply impervious to criticism are one thing, but Acamaeda might have been more amenable to suggestion if they had been approached carefully. A more fruitful and constructive goal with all this would be to try and inspire as many people as possible to work harder and faster, and to spur their creative impulses further. Makin is able to do this in a place like CANMT or LOFAM where he’s able to directly exert pressure on people within¹⁷⁸ . Conversely, for those outside of his purview, he needs to find a better strategy for interfacing with content creators. Dispensing advice is literally worthless if one is unable to convince others to take it.¹⁷⁹

Nothing more for today.

---

2^nd of May 2019

There have been some strange developments in the Twitter section of the fandom today, being the result of a variety of factors culminating together into a particularly dramatic time. More observant individuals have been describing some details about it for the last day or two, but the drama has escalated so much that the rest of us are beginning to take note now. This particular bit of drama relates to the overall identity of V.

V, first appeared (to my knowledge) as an author for the Friendsims. Ever since her simple grapheme attracted attention, an astonishing and sometimes uncomfortable amount of effort has been expended in figuring out who exactly they are. This is not to say that people have been trying to discover V’s real life identity, but rather who they are with regard to the Homestuck fandom. For the more paranoid among us, there was automatically an impulse to say that she was actually someone else in disguise.

Specifically, a lot of people openly theorize that V is in fact IPGD, an older official for Homestuck that’s closely involved with Hussie’s work. This link remains unverified, although plenty of people such as Bambosh or Toast paint it as a foregone conclusion at this point. The reality is that we simply don’t know if they’re the same person; at this moment, as far as official purposes are concerned, V and IPGD are not the same individual.

IPGD did comment recently though, in the wake of the Twitter drama that has been plaguing that section of the fandom. IPGD actually used to associate with the fandom rather extensively, and created all sorts of work--some of which have become rather controversial in the time that’s passed. One such piece of content is a fanfic that dealt heavily with themes of abuse from her own childhood.

As an aside: V has become increasingly prominent in her involvement with the fandom and is highly associated with the Epilogues, if not a pseudonymous author. The Homestuck Epilogues have been so controversial since release that various fandom members, irate with how it was written, are doing everything in their power to mudsling those responsible for them.

V has not escaped from this treatment; she, alongside other officials involved in Homestuck at this point, are suffering greatly at the hands of unhappy fans. To relate this back to before, people are still heavily under the impression that both V and IPGD are the same person. Thus, they peered back through the history of both personalities in order to dig up dirt on one or both of them. Thus, the fanfic I mentioned was discovered, such that V and IPGD have both come under fire for its existence.

V has not commented on the issue, and IPGD released a lengthy post on the topic describing why exactly she wrote it. IPGD is being accused of supporting taboo fetishistic content like incest, though she describes in her post that she is explicitly condemning such things. Yet, the rage machine rattles on, and while the Discord and Subreddit are more or less contented, the Twitter and Tumblr spheres appear to be wracked with infighting right now.

I recognize that this summary so far has been kind of confusing. The important part of all this is: Homestuck Twitter appears to be imploding right now, because there are fans who are displeased with the Epilogues. Said fans are trying to discredit officials by dredging up the past, which has inflamed the situation substantially. Normally we would take note of such things and talk about them, but it’s been so problematic that we are collectively ignoring it. We have enough baggage on our own; we don’t want to invite the problems of other people, especially not problems of this variety.

Nothing more for today.

---

5^thof May 2019

It’s been a while since I’ve done this, but I wanted to take the time to describe a couple of people who I thought have been participating enough to merit comment. These individuals share an interesting quality, which is that they appreciate rational literature in much the same manner Makin does¹⁸⁰. Though they’re less overt/forceful about it, they can still both be found on Alexander Wales’ Discord server, being fans of Worth the Candle and his other works. These individuals are The Wadapan and Daniel111111222222.

Daniel is something of a reserved figure: he seems far more interested in maintaining an objective approach to any given topic. There was a discussion tonight that transformed from a more aloof or distanced nature about crying into something that was explicitly revealing about instances in each person’s life. He selected a choice quote from WoC, responding sarcastically: “i dislike how this went from discussing crying to discussing how people cry so many times like you dont even know guys.” This was also slightly evocative of Makin’s tendency to shut down conversations that get too mushy.

Daniel’s contributions to the chat are somewhat uncommon, but he has overtly mentioned that, “i enjoy having a similar taste in literature as makin does / he links some random shit like conference call and i'll almost certainly like it too.” Indeed, most of his more substantial comments seem to center around such topics, especially when Worth the Candle or Worm pops up in discussion.

Looking at his post history, it’s actually surprisingly hard to gauge exactly what Daniel’s personality is like. He participates frequently enough that I imagine most people recognize him from the last few months--but offers little insight into any idiosyncrasies he might have. There is one exception to this: interestingly, he seems to post “fat husky” in #fathusky at least once a day. This habit is surprisingly consistent, going back literally to when the channel was created. I can’t point to anyone else in our¹⁸¹ coterie who does this.

Of the two, Wadapan seems to be a more carefree individual. Both of them have participated to a similar degree so far, but Wadapan seems to have involved themselves more openly in the politics of the place, or associated with people to a greater degree. A cursory glance shows that they share a number of ancillary servers with me and others, such as the Oceanfalls Discord Server.

Wadapan’s contributions show a dynamic range of behavior, from utterly silly to more serious. Their most animated discussion with us recently was about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which of course offers a lot to talk about given that Avengers: Endgame came out a couple weeks ago. They offered great insights into the construction and interpretation of a lot of these movies, something that they often do with literature as well.

Wadapan seems a little more willing to share their excitement and feelings in general with people. I distinctly recall them being one of the few voices of active anticipation shortly before the Epilogues were released. After some consideration, it seems that they have a pretty wide range of interests, or at least a broad taste in media. Thusly, they’re well suited for interacting with people here.

Both of these individuals have a pretty refined palate in comparison to the average newcomer. I find myself wishing they would participate more often; while I try my best to value all sorts of personalities and perspectives, it’s indisputably refreshing to have people who are capable of more serious, in-depth reflection on any given topic. There are some additional personalities that I feel like describing, but I’ll leave that for another day.

Nothing more for today.

---

6^th of May 2019

Yesterday, Makin announced that the Discord had reached 15,000 users and the subreddit had 40,000 subscribers. This has technically been true for a few days now, but it’s still an exciting milestone. It’s nice to take a step back and realize that the server has literally grown twice as big as when I first joined. The fact that the community continues to grow even this late into its history is of some fascination to me.

After mulling over the matter some, I think that a clear trend is emerging in user activity. The simple point of the matter--which I’ve reiterated a number of times now--is that ultimately user activity is based on the presence of official content. I used to worry that apathy had grown to the point that no one would care when new content was released, and there would be no discussion.

The Skaianet website at the beginning of this year, 4/13, and the Epilogues releasing have thoroughly proven me wrong in this matter: the fact that it was the 10th anniversary may have led to some sort of amplification effect, but it was literally the most active day this server has ever seen with 75,000 messages in one day. When there is nothing new to discuss that activity falls away, but when there is something fresh for us to talk about pandemonium ensues.

All of this contributes to a model wherein activity spikes severely during periods of new content. It does seem as if the average baseline of discussion is slowly declining, but this is balanced out by those periods of extreme activity. This latter effect can be explained by the server’s overall population: when there’s something for them to consume, I’m sure the average number of people who use the server also increases dramatically, and then the less dedicated fall away when they grow bored.

It seems reasonable to suggest that most of the users physically on the server are not actually using it on a day to day basis; indeed, I suspect they’re not even lurking. While the population of the server continues to grow, a vast majority of incoming users don’t contribute more than a few messages, if any at all. This drives down the actual rate of user activity (taken as a function of daily messages divided by server population). Thus, taking a leaf from a vaguely comparable phenomenon in torrenting, I will refer to this category of users as leeches.

Realistically there isn’t much that can be done about leeches besides removing them entirely; we’ve variously floated the idea of purging or pruning inactive users from the server, which at the time of writing would kick roughly 4,500 users from the HSD. Makin categorically opposes this idea, and I’m not fond of it either. Future estimates of server activity will have to rely on analyses that factor for leeches, which I haven’t been doing up to this point; there’s nothing else to be done about them for now.

That clinical diatribe aside, I’m actually quite comfortable with where the server sits for now. We have clearly seen that, when a suitable occasion arises, we will engage with great fervor. That is one of the ultimate things I was worried about: average daily activity aside, it is arguably more important that we are still invested enough as a community to discuss new content when it appears. The rest lies solely with the content producers.

That having been said, the future is looking murky again now that the Epilogues are done. Homestuck Twitter is still a complete shitfest, to the point that I think we’ve stopped discussing it (I can think of few, if any, situations where the drama has been so bad that even we didn’t keep tabs on it). To top it off, the next book with commentary was delayed a second time to October this year.

This news was met with the appropriate vexation: one delay is already concerning, but two delays for the same book is enough to sound some alarms. There was some discussion about why this could be happening: we suspect it doesn’t have to do with the editing process, as the upcoming sections don’t really have anything in them that would set them apart from the other books media-wise; we also considered the possibility that the books aren’t making enough money and they want to cancel the line, which would be devastating; the only other thing that makes sense is that Hussie himself is responsible for the delay.

Theoretically, these books are the only thing that Hussie himself must work on personally. The commentary should invariably be penned by his hand, although it’s difficult to tell exactly how much time that takes. Speaking on an official basis, there’s nothing else that Hussie is known to be working on right now, which makes these delays disconcerting.

Makin of course has re-asserted that one, possibly two more things are coming. He claims that “only one of them might be cancelled,” which is the sort of ambiguously bizarre shit that I’ve come to expect from him with such discussions. Regardless, it’s not inconceivable that Hussie is too busy working on one or more of these secret projects. If such a thing actually exists, then What Pumpkin might be busy trying to prep them for a release on the next meme date, June 12th. This would be a far more reasonable and happy outcome than “the books are being cancelled due to lack of interest.” Only time will tell what the reality will be.

I mentioned in the last entry that there are a few users I want to speak of. Rather than describe them individually, there’s a collected phenomenon that I felt is worth describing. Namely, it seems that erstwhile shitposters and altgen users are migrating from their original channels to mspa-lit, which is actually a pretty historied phenomenon for this server. The following users and more besides all fit into this category as of today: Velikiy, Rina, and 1neStar (currently known as Spider).

These users have attracted attention to themselves on occasion in mspa-lit through a weird combination of appropriate and then unacceptable behavior. It’s difficult to even begin describing the way they participate, because I can tell that they’re trying to fit in with the channel even though they sometimes don’t do it very well. There’s a level of shitpost in their messages that is just enough to bear comment sometimes, but in general they seem to control themselves well.

Makin and others will occasionally snipe these individuals when their shitposting starts to shine through just a little too much, but they’re pretty decent at receding and participating in a more normal fashion whenever they’re called out. Of them I don’t know as much as I would like, especially with regard to Velikiy or Spider, but Rina has been participating heavily for a number of weeks now such that I’ve noticed a couple of specific details¹⁸².

Rina has a very bubbly personality, somewhat Tipsy-like in disposition if I should say so. One amusing detail I witnessed is that her profile picture must be a static image that rotates through the entire color spectrum. This last point I’ve seen her finagle about for some time, trying to find just the right image to apply the effect to before she wears it. Before long she tries to find another such image, cycling through a few of them in a month, approximately. This isn’t really important, except as a small character detail that I enjoy.

This category of people has been interesting to witness coming around. I would compare them to Shitler: an unremittent shitposter in the past, he has since become a respected and admired figure in our community. It’s not exactly a common process for one to go through, but my point with this is that it’s not unheard of by any means. I am fully willing and eager to see or help people grow and start to participate in more meaningful ways; it is never a smooth transition, but it is always worthwhile to try and encourage people to become better at socializing with each other and to think more critically about how they behave. To this end, I hope this group of people all stick around and continue improving.

Nothing more for today.

---

9^th of May 2019

Homestuck Twitter and all of its various participants have been acting strangely. Normally this behavior is confined only to the fans, but the officials have been acting somewhat cagey. This has been slowly ramping up for the last week or so, with people making extremely vague hints as to something coming soon. Even the twitter account with the actual name “Homestuck” has been acting strangely, although before I explain I should describe in brief the history of that twitter account.

The account in question, @homestuck, has been around since December in 2009. Hussie had created his account on Twitter a year before that, but it’s widely known that @homestuck was not owned by him; a fan whose identity remains unknown to us had the foresight to scoop the account up. This fan offered to give the account to Hussie immediately, but he initially declined for whatever reason. Thus, the fan retained control on the account for many years.

While it was in their control, the @homestuck twitter was used for parodical purposes or to notify fans when an update had occurred. The account did not stray from this purpose until partway through 2018, when it seems that Hussie or WP official asked for it in earnest. There was no official mention of this; we only determined it after the @homestuck account started to post material that was openly advertising upcoming events, such as the release of the Friendsims.

To bring this back around to the current day, @homestuck has firmly been ensconced in the milieu of Homestuck Twitter, to the point that it’s looked at as an official font of news. To this effect, the account posted a rather cryptic message today that simply read: “hmmmmthursday.” Other accounts, such as those from WP officials, tend to post things like this to obliquely announce upcoming events.

Unfortunately, these posts are also used in a joking or trivial manner, such that none of us can rely on them too much as a litmus test for upcoming events. Makin was not impressed with the current PR, stating: “people are going to riot / if this is just aysha shilling her interview¹⁸³ / instead of act 2.” While most of us were content to join in on the grumbling, for once it proved completely undeserving: before the end of the day, an update was uploaded to Kickstarter that said Act 2 is still in active development.

The actual content of the news update cannot be seen unless one is a backer for Hiveswap, but naturally the text was disseminated by fans at the blistering speed of information (a copy of which may be found here in the Related Materials). In brief, it promises that work is still being done to produce Act 2, although mention is made that they’re trying a different development method to try and speed up the process (as a result of experience from difficulties with Act 1).

Additionally, there was a link to a survey for backers that allowed them to submit a question or questions to Hiveswap devs. This link was also shared by backers, which no doubt means that the responses have been positively flooded by all manner of fans. I’m sure there is no shortage of responses that could be considered snarky: indeed, Tipsy submitted a response that simply said, “Who is working on the game????” a question that no doubt many people share.

Despite some well-deserved cynicism and snide undertones, the news is very welcome. Most of us had given up Hiveswap for dead, especially since it’s become known that Cohen and WP are on hugely negative terms with each other. The game is now being written by Aysha, and no one is really sure of the direction of the story anymore, or of the entire game really. Still, the announcement has lifted our spirits somewhat; we have yet another thing to look forward to now.

Nothing more for today.

---

10^th of May 2019

There is an incredibly bizarre livestream of Hiveswap: Act 1 on Steam today. It’s being hosted by Aysha as the writer of Act 2 and James Roach, as well as featuring a couple other people. I was alerted to this by Skyplayer and Makin, who notified everyone in mspa-lit when the stream started. As of writing it’s ongoing, and there have been some difficulties throughout, as well as some peculiarities I wanted to address.

After watching the stream for some time, I’m still having a hard time describing it fully. It has been characterized by an endless assortment of weird, maybe-sort-of jokes. It would be self-indulgent to not suggest the possibility that their commentary is better received by a different audience than myself or other people from the HSD. However, speaking for us personally, the way that this stream is going does not inspire a lot of confidence in the direction that the game is going in.

Homestuck incorporated a lot of attention to tiny, sometimes insane details in such a way that connecting them all felt satisfying and consistent--this is a hefty portion of the reason why we like it, speaking as people from mspa-lit. However, the jokes and casual conversation of this stream so far suggest something of a disregard for that sort of thing. Not to appear like what Tensei would call a “fucking turbonerd,” but there have been a number of relatively basic or even fundamental details that the hosts are getting wrong¹⁸⁴ .

At this point it’s just not clear at all whether this is a bit or if the misunderstandings are genuine. Makin also shares the concern that it could be real, and I think we’ve subconsciously started prepping ourselves to receive a terrible game. This isn’t really a good attitude to have about it though; time has taught us that being overtly negative about something--especially when it hasn’t even come out--is a one way ticket to having people bitch at you endlessly.

To be sure, we’ll still voice our thoughts if the subject comes up organically, but aside from that we’re just going to wait and see what happens. The larger question for me today is the exact reason why What Pumpkin decided to host this stream today. I can’t tell if it was just something they were doing for fun, or if it was intended as some kind of perverse form of commercialization. In the absence of any more detailed reasons to dislike it, I believe I’ll just leave off on that remark.

Nothing more for today.

---

11^th of May 2019

Very little of note happened today, which for some reason I felt might be worthy of note for once. Rather than approaching this from a more pessimistic angle as I have in the past, I feel that a clinical approach is possible this time around; after thinking about it for a while I believe I’ve noticed a trend or two which may differ from how activity has worked in the past. Regardless, these observations will now follow.

I’ve had a general expectation that the weekend is a more active time for the server than the middle of the week. Contrary to this, keeping track of the actual numbers over the last several months has made it increasingly clear that the reverse is true. For some reason, activity actually tends to go down on the weekend and then rise again throughout the week.

I believe this is due to the fact that people tend to have their own plans for the weekend that keeps them away from the computer, whereas during the week most people are engaged with school or are in an environment where they have ready access to the internet. In the latter case, they are simply more prone to talking here. In following with this, it’s far easier to coordinate with others on the HSD to play games or watch a movie on the weekend. If no such plans exist, however, then people will surely be found elsewhere.

Such was the case today where we all watched Baby Driver. There was a high number of casual participants, with about 15 at the highest--this is owed to the fact that we set up the stream well in advance and advertised it appropriately. Yet, when we had finished, there was almost no discussion afterwards. People simply disappeared, so I assume they had their own plans as well. Then again, I suppose that’s only to be expected.

Nothing more for today.

---

14^th of May 2019

Yesterday, Griever briefly came up in conversation and I wondered aloud whether he was doing alright since his departure. Sky mentioned that he’s been hanging around on various Discord servers or other groups, and doing pretty well. I was genuinely glad to hear this; I’ve considered Griever a friend for some time, and when he left I was worried how things would go for him.

Then, ironically, Griever joined the server again today at about 3:30 AM. There was a cruel twist, however: he was not here to mingle and say hi. Instead, he instantaneously posted a rather lengthy diatribe about the server and Makin in particular. It’s clear that he had written this out and had to have put some thought into it: he pasted it immediately, and then without another word he left again.

The message itself was almost shockingly acrid. In it, Griever described Makin as an exclusively terrible person and administrator, beseeching people to seek other places to go if they’re not happy in the HSD. He also verbally recognized that he was being petty in posting such a thing, but did not care. Knowing him for a while, I had no idea that he was capable of something like this. It practically oozed spite; I’m more disappointed than I can say that Griever decided to do this.

Naturally we discussed it in mspa-lit for the remainder of the night. A large portion of us were genuinely upset, including Spiral and CyclopsCaveman. They were as taken aback as I was, not completely sure how or why Griever had suddenly resorted to such a puerile action. It would be one thing if we distantly heard that he had started to shittalk us, but to come back specifically for the purpose was another thing entirely. In the midst of all this though, Archie began meddling in the conversation and injecting the opinion that Griever’s assessment was completely on point, which did much to anger the rest of us.

We grew increasingly incensed with Archie’s manner of explanation, and no matter how many times we tried to explain why we took issue with it, he didn’t give it up. I wanted to maintain some element of cordiality to the conversation, but feelings were running a little too high on each side of the argument. I was almost too upset to even want to mediate things, although we managed to stay just below the level of sheer verbal blows to each other.

Finally, Makin came online at some point and reviewed everything that had happened. HIs comment was a fair summary of a lot of confused, angry messages across the night: in short, he described that Griever hasn’t been a part of this server for a long time. While his comments on Makin and the HSD may have been accurate at the time he left, they aren’t exactly relevant anymore.

I personally wanted to point out that--while there is still a ways to go--Makin has absolutely improved over the last year or two. I’ve made it my task to oppose him whenever I think it’s right to do so, and I believe it says something that such has been increasingly unnecessary as time goes by. Not much more comment is needed than that. As a last word, I stand by my statement that the way this began and unfolded was immensely disappointing. I don’t know what Griever is thinking but I hope that this isn’t the kind of person he was all along.

Nothing more for today.

---

18^th of May 2019

Eurovision took place this week. For Americans or anyone else who may be unaware, Eurovision is a song contest taking place in and involving countries from, unsurprisingly, Europe¹⁸⁵ . To summarize it briefly, the contest has been in place since 1956 and was conceived as a way to bring Europeans closer together after the chaos of World War II. In recent years, some countries outside of Europe such as Australia have also been permitted to enter.

As far as we’re concerned, the Eurovision semi-finals were held on Tuesday and Thursday (the 14th and 16th, respectively). In previous years, Makin opened up a temporary channel for users to liveblog their reactions. One not familiar might wonder why so much interest is held around a simple musical contest.

To this there’s two answers: the most understandable or common is that the winner of the contest earns fame and glory for the country they represent, and potentially a huge boost to their career in general. As an example, ABBA is arguably the group to enjoy the greatest success and recognition thanks to Eurovision, after they gave Sweden its first victory in 1974.

The second and more personally relevant answer is that some (or most) of the performances are absolutely ridiculous. Makin has opened up the #eurovision channel for discussion and liveblogging, and while there are a number of songs that we genuinely criticize or praise for their quality, there are also a few that are completely bewildering and/or excellent meme material. Indeed, a widely recognized meme is Sergey Stepanov, also known as the Epic Sax Guy, who played for Moldova in 2010. Other famously bizarre performances include Verka for Ukraine in 2007, and this year Iceland has a particularly amusing song¹⁸⁶ .

That aside, Eurovision is a wonderful occasion for friendly rivalries. As an American, I have no real cultural ties to any of the countries that are represented in the contest, yet I found myself actively rooting for certain countries over others for some reason¹⁸⁷ . I had a particular fondness for any potential underdogs, as there are multiple countries who have never won Eurovision before.

As things go, the finals were held today, which are simply another performance of the same song each country did in the semi-finals. The real meat was in the voting that took place at the end. North Macedonia gained a pretty sizeable lead with the official judges, but with the peoples’ vote it came down between Sweden and the Netherlands. Tensei was seemingly unmoved the entire time, putting on an air of complete certainty that his country would swipe the victory.

Somehow Tensei was proven correct, and the Dutch won for the first time since 1975. Makin’s instantaneous response was: “FUCK NETHERLANDS / AND FUCK TENSEI.” Though he hadn’t actually been 100% certain that they would win, he was not shy of the cultural victory. There was some more cajoling, and many memes were shared; Tensei brought up that the contest may be held in Amsterdam next year, in which case he could go. Myself and a couple others jokingly floated the idea of meeting up for Eurovision next year if such is the case, although I think Tensei wasn’t very amused by the prospect.

As these things go, eventually the channel settled down as people went back to whatever channel they frequented most. Makin slated #eurovision to be archived tomorrow, to be revived again next year for another bout of this incredible nonsense. It was nice to experience something new and share it with people here, some of whom I already know and others I’ve never talked to in this server. It’ll be a real treat to see it again next year with them.

Nothing more for today.

---

23^rd of May 2019

In much the same fashion as the Great Homestuck Reread, Makin took up a fan suggestion and initiated another, similar thing today: Problem Sleuth is getting its own reread. Due to its shorter length and sillier premise/tone, this isn’t expected to take as much time or garner nearly as much attention. However, Problem Sleuth is generally regarded as a quality work all its own and it will be a pleasant experience for anyone joining.

Makin posted the first thread for this reread, but has tasked me with posting the remainder. I assisted enough with the Homestuck reread that I already know what to do, and I’m pretty happy to have a way to help out. He’s promised to demod me if I make even a single mistake, so I’m sure he’ll just make fun of me when that inevitably happens. I’ve told him before that he needs to start delegating more tasks to his mods so they can gain some experience and pick up the slack, should he ever be truly indisposed¹⁸⁸ . I’m lucky that I know even this much to be frank.

Regardless, this reread isn’t quite as exciting as the previous one, but it’s still a nice community event. Makin organized it specifically so that it’ll end on the next meme day for Homestuck: the 12th of June. I suspect that he believes (or knows, as he claims) the next big announcement is coming then. Despite the overwhelming event of the Epilogues--now over a month behind us already!--I still find myself reluctant to believe in the possibility of more content. It’ll be wonderful if it happens, but better to sit tight and wait for legitimate confirmation.

Nothing more for today.

---

1^st of June 2019

We’ve had a new user around lately who has been engaging pretty consistently, to the point that I’m already comfortable considering them a regular. This fellow, Misha, is easily the most engaged and well-spoken newcomer we’ve had in a long time. He revealed in some cursory discussions that he’s interested in a wide range of topics, especially history and philosophy. Among other things, he’s able to at least reasonably participate in conversations about them.

Just in the last few nights alone, we’ve talked about everything with him from figures of the classical age in the Mediterranean to the ethics of eating meat and how it might relate to climate change. It’s been a delight having new opinions to work with and discuss--even with less eloquent people it’s usually a breath of fresh air, but in this case it’s fostered some very interesting conversations.

Of note, there was an incident with Misha some weeks ago before he had ever come to mspa-lit. He was talking in #general about video games with people, when Nat came in. Nat sometimes bans people too readily, and Misha wanted it addressed because it did seem rather unfair. After bringing it up in modchat, it was deemed “questionable but fair” and I delivered the bad news. He surely interpreted this as powertripping and left the server, at which point I thought we would never see him again. Following this, I was rather surprised when he came back and started participating in mspa-lit.

The decision the mod team reached wasn’t inappropriate, either; if I were to offer any sort of criticism of Misha’s character it would be that he can take a rather flippant stance when it’s ill-advised. It should be pointed out that I don’t know if this is actually the case with him; I’ve only seen it happen once, and it was pretty vague. I’m sure he doesn’t quite agree with that assessment.

This one thing aside, I do hope that Misha remains. He’s the latest in the line of people like Daniel and Wadapan, who actually know how to engage and carry themselves properly. I can only hope that we’ll receive more in the future; it greatly enriches the community when you have more people who are willing to participate and know how to do it well. As long as we see people like this trickle in, I’ll know that we’re doing something right¹⁸⁹.

Nothing more for today.

---

5^th of June 2019

In the wake of the Epilogues releasing, I’ve noticed something of a paradigm shift in the participation across the bigger channels in the server. The smaller ones being more or less the same as usual, I’d like to begin by briefly summarizing how activity has historically looked when looking at each channel. I’ve grouped each into two categories: “major” channels, which would always see over 1,000 messages a day; and “minor” channels, which received less than such.

The major channels have always been #general, #altgen, and #mspa-lit, with every single other channel being relegated to minor status. Some of the latter would often get close to or even surpass 1,000 messages on special occasions, but it was by no means a consistent thing. In particular, I’ve always seen #gaming as being on the cusp between being a minor and major channel, owing to a small but very active set of users--it is arguable whether WoC’s position as pseudo helps or hurts this, although I would venture to guess that he is a more positive influence.

After the Epilogues, I started to see a change in the numbers across each channel. #general, #altgen, and #mspa-lit are still the champions, averaging to about 4,000 messages a day each this year so far. Without getting into too much detail, this is a little bit less on average than 2018, but it is not terribly striking. Instead, it feels like those extra messages have been redistributed: #homestuck is now seeing over 1,000 messages a day.

In the case of #homestuck this is absolutely not a surprise. The Epilogues, while not nearly the force for conversation that they were when freshly released, have given ample new perspective to fans who are eager to relate events in the last segment of the story back to what we had already, or vice versa. The channel on average sees triple or quadruple the number of messages it used to before, and if this keeps up into next year I will happily be recategorizing it as a major channel.

A different and far weirder case has also arisen: #oc-shrine has been something of a mystery these last several days. Its activity was not bolstered by the release of the Epilogues in the slightest--if anything, it took something of a dip for about a month. Two weeks ago, however, for no discernible reason the post count positively skyrocketed. Where before it would see about 100-200 messages on average, it suddenly had over 3,300.

I was flabbergasted to see this spike, but despite combing through the channel for an answer I could not find anything out of the ordinary. What’s more, while lower than that, this continued for a period of about 10 days. The only explanation I can come up with is that the presence of a new user was generating discourse or content. Indeed, after some thought I am forced to conclude that it was some sort of strife: I recall a user from the channel griping to me in DMs about another who was causing some problem.

I assume that virtuNat got to this problem user, because the channel has been declining back to its normal rate of usage in the last few days. However, to return to the origin of the conversation, it feels like #oc-shrine and most of the other minor channels have been seeing a somewhat increased average message count this year overall. The total server message count is lower than normal, but the minor channels are seeing more usage. I’m not sure how to explain this effect, but I suspect that the pseudos are glad for something more to do.

To segue into a different but vaguely related topic, I’ve noticed a shift in how I’m feeling about writing. Griever coming back and spewing his unbelievable vitriol seriously upset me, to the point that it made me stop talking as much for a few weeks. To add to this, I feel as if the slowing of the server has been contributing to the effect. It’s not quite my usual brand of gloom and doom, but it’s pronounced nonetheless.

Rather than being upset at the slowdown, I believe I’m just having a harder time finding novel things to describe. There’s only so many ways to say “we had some funny exchanges today,” or to enumerate what we discussed in particular. The Epilogues releasing is an event that has fundamentally changed things: we have obtained closure, meaning that we are satisfied, but also necessarily making it harder for us to find things to talk about regarding Homestuck.

A lot of our discussions were founded in part by a bitterness that there was so much left unresolved, and what had been addressed narratively was done so in a very negligent or shoddy fashion. The Epilogues have remanded that to a large extent, and now we have few if any remaining demands. We still enjoy the story and appreciate it greatly, but there’s only so many ways to filet a fish, so to speak.

A different way of phrasing this, in summary, might be that the server has matured somewhat. I can’t remember if I’ve spoken about this in a recent entry or not, but I feel like our rate of change has diminished. The speed with which we gain new regulars (note: regulars, as distinct from users in general) has slowed significantly, and by extension the rate at which our culture and the needs of the server change has slowed exponentially. We are no longer in a time of burgeoning growth and all of its accompanied drama; we have entered something of a halcyon period instead¹⁹⁰ .

Without delineating who believes exactly what, suffice it to say that most think this is preferable. I largely agree with this, although there is a not-insignificant piece of me that sides with the other belief: it’s nice when a lot is happening, and quickly. Still, it wasn’t fun to be on the receiving end of drama. Often enough it got out of hand such that it wasn’t fun to watch it happen to others, either. While I’m slightly ambivalent, this is probably for the best in the end¹⁹¹.

Nothing more for today.

---

6^th of June 2019 - The Gnomening

Note: this entry was written in real time, please excuse any conflicting remarks as new developments arose.

Makin has been loosely threatening to have another reckoning for a while now. In fact, I believe he started threatening it just a month after the Rapture at the beginning of last year. Finally last night, he said it was happening for real and to prepare ourselves. Most of us became somewhat nervous, and initially there was some talk of staying up in case it happened immediately--I know Toast and Nat specifically tried to do this at first. I decided rest was more important and that if I was demodded while asleep, then so be it.

As things went, I woke up this morning and nothing had happened, so I made the right choice. I assume the others also did so, although throughout the day I noticed that all of the mods were present on the sidebar--a somewhat rare occurrence. We spent the day as normal, talking about all manner of things. We didn’t bring up the possibility of the Reckoning, but I’m sure it was in the back of all our minds. Eventually around 3:30 PM EST, it finally began.

Makin started by posting numerous images of garden gnomes in #announcements. I should explain for any who are unaware: there’s a meme similar in spirit to a Rickroll where you’ll be linked to a video of a 3D animated gnome dancing around. The overall idea is the same, where you trick someone into clicking that video instead of whatever they were looking for. It’s a very basic prank, but its absurdity has been pretty funny since it started coming in vogue late last year.

Returning to today, I was fortunate enough to be present the entire time, so I have the leisure to make notes as thoroughly as I can. Makin posted images of gnomes with some regularity until about 3:45, at which point he demodded every pseudo¹⁹². At this point, there was no doubt left as to what was happening. At 4 PM he then demodded all of the full mods too. In announcements, he requested that everyone begin the process of nominating new #general pseudos and janitors, with preference towards people who haven’t had the position before.

People indelibly went to nominate qweq as the janitor again, but Makin seemed reluctant. He likes to mix in new blood to prevent people from getting too chummy¹⁹³ or lazy, so he specifically wanted a new person for the position, at least at first. To this effect, people began to gravitate around Reti as the new general pseudo, which Makin accepted. With this done, the first pseudo of the new era was chosen.

Ifnar was reinstated as the #serious pseudo, amidst a landslide of people voting for him. The way he carries himself and his ceaseless presence made him a shoe-in for the position, and Makin relented for it. $trider (who now brands himself as godfiend) took the time to mention that he might like to be the #music pseudo. Makin responded: “strider no offense there is no fucking way you'll ever be a mod without paying / I can guarantee that / even after your redemption arc you'd still be a horrible mod.” The rest of the chat cajoled him greatly, although I believe $trider took it in good enough stride for the occasion.

The first true upset of the evening was with the Homestuck category, which Toast was in charge of. He was the pseudo for #homestuck, #hiveswap, and #althomestuck. Some voted for him, but there was a lot of interest in a popularly-deemed Homestuck expert called Photino. Though Photino denied the position, he was elected anyway due to having more posts than Toast (the original claim that Toast had no messages in #homestuck was proven false, but he still had less than Photino across all three channels. More importantly, Makin had already sent the announcement through so that, in his words, it was too late). Toast accepted his loss, though I’m worried it will bother him greatly.

The next question was what to do about #art-cosplay. Most people again went with the person who was already in charge of it, in this case Spiral. Though a full-mod, Spiral checked in on #art-cosplay often enough that the channel was kept in good working order. There were no alternatives and she’s honestly a very capable member of the team, so Makin promoted her back as the first full mod of the new era.

A far more contentious position, #oc-shrine was next. Nat has of course had her occasional run-ins with users, but there’s basically no one else who wants to do the job. When asked to come up with suggestions, everyone in chat started nominating WoC to “punish him.” Makin gave up in short order and just re-elected Nat to stem the tide, moving on to #writing. This too was handled quickly, as #writing literally doesn’t need a pseudo do to its slowness.

CyclopsCaveman, who has instead been going by Polyphemus for many months now, was a popular pick for #music pseudo. Olki has been less active over time, so the choice was natural for both people in general and Makin. #gaming was locked for WoC, although there was some talk that Tipsy or RAAR could take his place (Tipsy historically has not wanted the position at all, or any position, and RAAR did not secure enough votes).

The media channels were a bit of a toss-up. Ngame was active enough in #western-media, but his presence wasn’t that solid, and many other names such as Misha and LLF were posited. It came down to messaging history: both Ngame and another suggestion, Zilten, have less than 5,000 messages total since the new year. LLF had more with about 16,000, but Misha has come in as a true powerhouse with about 25,000 messages in just the two months since he joined. At first Makin decided to keep Ngame as the pseudo for western-media, but Tipsy eventually came online and said that in fact she would like to be the western-pseudo. Accordingly, Ngame was deposed, Tipsy was established as the western-media pseudo, and Misha became the pseudo for eastern-media.

Nat was unceremoniously made the #science-math and #coding-tech pseudo again. The people brought it to Makin’s attention that he had skipped #altgen by mistake, and there were various suggestions ranging from Dingus and Deus again, an oldie named Valkyrie, and a bunch of altgenners nominating themselves such as MaxiCreep, Mr. Skullium, Spongyboi, and a variety of others. Eventually, Makin said “fuck it” and made me “one of” the #altgen pseudos. This just gives me license to conduct more sacrifices and mess with the base, so I can’t complain. Valkyrie was then instituted as the janitor, but after Ifnar recommended Deus back for altgen pseudo, Makin went against him and turned Valkyrie into another pseudo. Deus is the janitor now instead.

Anervaria received their position back as voicechat janitor literally just for showing up, which no one can argue with. She’s handled it perfectly well so far, and due to having a higher post count than Dingus she was later promoted to a pseudo. With this out of the way, we returned to the topic of general. Makin decided Wadapan as another pseudo so that he would “get out more,” to which Wada responded: “lmao fuck now I have to unmute gen.” Qweq was reinstated as a janitor, which was deserving in my opinion.

As for full mods, Sea Hitler was immediately reinstated. Mines was also a popular vote to become full mod, which it seemed was to his surprise. Dingus was also a rather popular suggestion, and after some time of this Makin decided to give him “one chance.” He then asked: “what is the best MGS game?” Dingus was on mobile the entire time and unable to properly answer, which counted as a fuck up. The altgenners present gave him a tearful farewell as he went back to work.

Tensei was reinstated as full mod with little affair. Makin asked for further suggestions: Toast was a very popular one, because of his long history and rapport with people. Makin asked for pros and cons as to why he should be promoted to full mod. Tensei initially was in support, but Andrew called Toast an “oldie,” which caused Tensei to change his mind. Sea Hitler wrote a lengthy message in support of Toast, describing how he’s been an active user for ages and posts actively enough outside of mspa-lit.

Due to this and in mockery of someone pinging him, Makin agreed and decided to make Toast a full-mod. “But,” he said, “HOW LONG WILL IT LAST?” Toast’s reign has been kind of a joke in the past, such that the length of it is always in question¹⁹⁴. Finally, Makin reinstated Dingus and I as full mods because we’re “pitiful.” That concluded the more pressing positions, and though Makin opened the floor for any last-minute suggestions, no one had anything compelling enough for consideration.

Such is how The Gnomening of 2019 proceeded. It was a much less chaotic affair than 2018’s Rapture, although even that paled in comparison to what Toast and others describe the original Reckoning as. There was no shuffling or reorganizing of channels this time around, only a simple dialogue between Makin and people here. I have a feeling he wanted to shake up things just a bit more in regards to who exactly was on the team, but things are in fact pretty different.

As for those mods we lost today, we no longer have Nights (who of course left the server ages ago anyway), Wheals, Ngame, Olki, and Tera. While the first four are variously inactive anymore, I feel like Tera’s removal is more unfortunate--it was good at its job and attentive, and I’m sure it’s going to be dismayed by this when it sees what happened. I’ll have to check in and make sure Tera is doing okay when it comes around.

The lineup now is significantly different. To summarize, the changes are: Dingus, Mines, and Toast (full mods); Reti and Wadapan (general); Valkyrie (altgen); Polyphemus (music); Tipsy (western-media); Misha (eastern-media); Anervaria (voicechat pseudo), and Deus (altgen janitor). It’s going to be an interesting few months getting used to the way the sidebar looks, I already miss some of the old mods. I hope that the next year or however long will be all the more engaging for these changes.

Nothing more for today.

---

10^th of June 2019

Altgen sacrifices have been dwindling in both frequency and intensity as the months have gone by. I no longer remember when the first sacrifice occurred, or what might have spurred it beyond random action. I’ve already largely retired the event, after holding it on a weekly basis for those first few months. After some thinking though, it didn’t feel right to let it wink out of existence without any pomp or celebration.

Thus, I stormed altgen a few days ago and made it clear to all present that we would be having The Ultimate Sacrifice in order to truly give the occasion the sendoff it deserves. It was originally slated for this past Sunday evening the 9th, but was delayed so that more people could participate when the time came. Given how tonight’s affair went, this proved to be an excellent decision.

I had stressed to those present last night that I wanted it to be an absolute raging mess when we finally got around to it today. Specifically, I urged them to get started and build some excitement for themselves around 6:30, and then the sacrifice proper would commence at 7. I arrived home to see they had already started losing their minds at about 5:45, and it only grew from there until the appointed time came.

There are a few altgen traditions that I feel bear description after tonight given that they probably won’t appear again often, if ever. Long ago I made mention of how they have an assortment of memes concerning the one-off character from Barnyard called “Biggie Cheese,” especially in conjunction with spamming the phrase “THE PHYSICAL RETURN OF CHRIST.” There is another practice stemming from this same movie, wherein they’ll begin to scream “WILD” and “MIKE” in rapid succession, rendering the chat completely unusable.

Both of these, while inane, are pretty simple to understand as simple references. The thing that has increasingly bewildered me is instead something that--too my understanding--Sea Hitler started. He will announce to the chat: “let’s go on a bread expedition,” or some such. This immediately triggers the chat to begin spamming the word “BREAD” for a time. As far as I’m aware, there is no more complexity to it than this--there is no deeper “why,” the habit simply sprung into existence like that.

However, once they’ve done this for a while, they’ll start adding words. Whenever I’ve witnessed these bread expeditions, they invariably add the name of various users. On the occasion of tonight’s sacrifice, they added the names of mods, altgen regulars, or very historied members of the chat, such as Andrew. To reiterate, that’s literally all there is to it: screaming “X BREAD.” After enough of one prefix they’ll move on to another, and continue in this way for an hour or more.

To aid with the sacrifice, Sea Hitler spearheaded the expedition as usual, although he had a very specific plan for how it would progress. I was initially going to sacrifice people based on whoever could create the best original content. While this is indeed what happened, it wasn’t quite in the way I expected; a bizarre interplay began soon after the bread expedition started.

An altgen user named Walter seemed to be one of the only people present not participating in the expedition. After some observation, I noticed that they were actually putting out simple variations of the same image: an empty stage from some E3 conference this year, with the word “SEX” overlaid onto the stage. The sole variation was a number, starting at 1 and increasing with each iteration of the image Walter released.

Sea Hitler noticed this as well, and then managed to get everyone participating in the sacrifice--a healthy 20-30 people or so--into the #altgen voice channel. I was also asked to join, and was greeted with more absurdity: Sea Hitler had effectively organized everyone present such that they were a disturbingly efficient shitposting machine. He was directing people to spam different variations of “X BREAD,” and timing the change with the release of each of Walter’s images.

The stated goal was to get to 69 different forms of BREAD, as marked by Walter’s images. For any who might harbor doubt, I promise that this is a real thing that actually happened and was perpetrated by real people. Every time Walter released an image with another number on it, Shitler immediately directed everyone present to start spamming the next variation on BREAD, and would even plan some three or four varieties in advance so they could respond as quickly as possible.

This actually shacked up marvelously with the time limit I had set--they neared the 69th variation at almost precisely 7 PM, at which point I ended the sacrifice. I was sufficiently impressed with their organizational skills; for Walter being original and inspiring the bizarre coordination, I made him the sacrifice. The event was so amusing to me that I actually relented and awarded the position to two additional people: Shitler for leading the charge, and one of the altgen community’s choosing (of which they decided on a regular called hauntedPainter). To each of them I gave the usual role, and then as an additional reward in this final sacrifice, I gave each of them a month of Discord Nitro.

Those who were present also managed to have a really good time, so much so that they decided to commemorate the event somehow. At one point, there was a form of BREAD that made them laugh more than the rest of them had: an errant typo or joke from one of them led to “BRUHD” being somewhere in the mix, so it was suggested that everyone present could simply post “[BRUHD],” such that they could search for it on Discord and find the context easily.

Taking a step back and looking at it more objectively, this is all clearly insane. Yet, I was honestly a little touched at their collective appreciation for having a good time and how readily they engaged with each other. If they were to apply that mania and social strength to other things, they could achieve wonders. It’s almost too bad that most of their efforts are used for evil instead.

As it is, the bread expedition was more than fun already. Even if not for that, it was enormously successful: after checking the message count for today, altgen had literally 18,000 messages because of the sacrifice, which is more than the entire server has on average these days. To be sure, I don’t think that altgen has ever had that many messages in one day, certainly not within the last year.

Though the sacrifices are done for good, Shitler has promised that the expeditions will continue on occasion. I’m sure that other such traditions will inevitably be created and then fall into obscurity as time goes by. Altgen has changed considerably since I joined, being more of a shotgun of shitposts back then. It now resembles something more refined, or focus--more purposeful in exactly how it shitposts. I suspect that’ll change even more as time goes by.

Nothing more for today.

---

22^nd of June 2019

Things have been idling by as normal for the last week or so. On the surface things have been mostly quiet, except for a couple of stirrings. Of note, there have been a large number of times where we would bring up a show or movie that some of us haven’t seen, and have put it on a list. LOST is such an example, being one of the few shows that Makin considers shill-worthy, yet a hefty number of us have not seen. This alongside some old classics such as Avatar: The Last Airbender are of particular interest to us right now. Misha is already running anime night on Sundays, so if we slot something into Saturdays then we could very well have regular entertainment for a while.

Similarly, Spiral has taken it upon herself to rejuvenate writing contests in an attempt to make the affiliated channel more active. She’s receiving some help from Red and Andrew, as they’ll be figuring out what prizes will go to the winners. The last writing contests, if memory serves, eventually stopped due to a lack of participation. It’ll take a deft hand to actually motivate people to get involved; I’m sure that if anyone is to make it happen, it’ll be Spiral.

On a less pleasant note, underneath all of these gentle happenings there’s been a more disquieting event unfolding. Keeping record of the server’s statistical information on a daily basis has afforded me some insight on patterns of behavior here, including the average rate that we lose or gain users. We’ve noticed some mildly weird activity lately, but this really came to a head last night when I was taking count.

Roughly speaking we don’t gain or lose more than five people per day. Sometimes there are gentle increases, but it’s uncommon to see gains or losses of more than ten people except on special occasions, like meme dates or holidays. It was to my great surprise, then, when I noticed that we had gained not ten, not twenty, but fifty users in one day. Checking the userlog for the last day confirmed my fears: similar to a few months ago, we’ve been encroached upon by some kind of bot network without even realizing it.

Thankfully, spotting these build-ups is the most important step in preventing some kind of major attack. It’s not clear what they even want--we noticed a few porn bots spamming various channels like #hs-art-cosplay and #western-media, but it was a lone account out of the dozens that are simply staying quiet. The possibility of them being DM bots was brought up, and given the circumstances that makes the most sense. Thinking of the bots harassing users in private messages and us never finding out about it is actually quite upsetting.

That having been said, now that we’ve noticed them showing up, we’ll be far more attentive at picking them off for the next month or two. This is far from the first time that we’ve been assailed in such a manner, and though it’s tedious we’ve become quite efficient at removing the threat. I can only hope that whoever’s responsible for this nonsense will lose their motivation and go harass some other hapless server.

Nothing more for today.

---

25^th of June 2019

For the last few days, the regulars in mspa-lit and gaming each have been concerned about the disappearance of a Youtube personality named Etika. Etika has a history of mental instability, although a vast swath of his fanbase wrote off his recent hints of suicide as memes or some nonsense. As it is, Etika’s body was confirmed found today, and everyone who cared about him or his content expressed their sadness today in chat.

Normally these sorts of things would pass without much comment, but Tensei found the chat’s responses weird and uncomfortable. He claimed that it was as if everyone in chat were bereaving a close family member instead of a random person online. This naturally prompted a significant response from the people who had cared about Etika. I didn’t know about him before this event myself so I freely admit the news didn’t impact me at all, but this isn’t the first time that Tensei has taken the chance to be supremely callous.

The conversation that followed was weird and uncomfortable, for everyone involved. I’m not sure how much of it was Tensei playing it up for jokes versus being serious; everyone else, even those who didn’t particularly care about Etika, were irate with his thorough insensibility over the event. Even I was kind of put off by it, honestly.

Some weeks ago we all had a conversation that revealed a decent rule of thumb for participating online. Tensei, being fond of jokes, was submitting an outrageous take on whatever it was that we were discussing, which similarly caused people to spurn him. When asked whether he was being serious or not, he said something to the effect of whether or not it was reasonable to actually have the opinion he was expressing. Most everyone present said “no,” and that was effectively his answer.

To clear this muddy paraphrase: he was suggesting that in a given conversation, you shouldn’t just assume someone is speaking earnestly if what they’re saying is ridiculous. It leads to a lot of unnecessarily hurt feelings to assume someone is being serious when they’re speaking tongue in cheek. I find this to be a good faith approach to any discussion, and have tried to keep it in mind when talking with people since then.

However, the problem with today’s discussion is that neither of the choices mean well. He might have been serious, in which case he was being critically uncompassionate. Conversely he might have been joking about people caring too much, which most people present agreed was inappropriate for the occasion.

After thinking about it some, I don’t really want to paint what Tensei did as wrong or right¹⁹⁵. I think it’s an important display of the difference in priorities and ideals that our group has. This same issue has come up before, in the sense that someone has been dismissive or joked about something that everyone else thought was inappropriate. This is hardly a new thing, so it was weird to me that the conversation got as unruly as it did today.

After thinking about that for a bit, I think it’s for two reasons: primarily, death is a more polarizing topic than most that come up in here. I can state with near certainty that there is no other issue which causes us to take such firm stances. Additionally, Tensei being a mod complicates things. People in positions of authority come under much greater fire for things that would probably be dismissed casually from a normal user. This is appropriate as a way to try and keep those in control in check, but I don’t think it’s really effective for people who don’t take these things seriously. I’m not sure why I bothered to think about this as long as I did. The conversation stuck out to me as a good example of one we’ve had before, I suppose--the topic of whether or not it’s appropriate to joke about certain things. Certain of us ascribe to the idea that everything is able to be mocked to some degree, and others have a more sacred view of various issues. Still others don’t believe jokes are appropriate in any real-world case, although I can’t think of an example of this last group. I guess all of this is just another cross-section of the way our community works.

More important to the server as a whole, the bot raid of the last few days seems to finally be slowing down. On the night of the second day or so, Makin asked me to submit a report to the Discord Abuse Center about it. We’ve witnessed no response thus far, but we’ve been preparing in case they speak up and want more information. Mines has taken up the inglorious task of logging every single bot we’ve banned.

To date, we’ve banned literally over a thousand bots, and identified a number of strange patterns among them. The one I noticed was a variety of the accounts having names or avatars depicting cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. It’s not clear if these bots are all from the same group or if we’re somehow being assailed by swarmed by multiple groups at once. If it’s the latter, then there are at least two or three distinct “types” of bots getting through, and it’s been pissing all of us off.

Makin removed all links to our server from Disboard. This means it’s harder for people to find us, but it seems to have worked in the sense that the rate of bots joining has plummeted today. I hesitate to say that, because we thought we had the problem licked a couple days ago and then it came back with a vengeance. With luck though, perhaps it’s finally over.

Nothing more for today.

---

26^th of June 2019

Something extremely unusual has happened, one that we’re not quite sure how to handle. Makin’s Patreon page, as I’ve described at one point, has a tier at $720 where someone receives all of the usual perks and becomes a temporary full mod. Realistically we never once expected anyone to actually pony up that kind of cash. Today, we were proven wrong by the one individual that I suppose we should have expected it from: User5.

User5 paid for this tier in full around 2 AM EST. The immediate response for most was amusement, but amongst the mod team it was surprise and even a little fear. User5’s reputation lends itself to the imagination, as to how he would behave with unfettered permissions. Fortunately the reward tier does come with the stipulation of “no destructive powers,” but we had never actually planned for this scenario; we had no idea what the extent of his perms would be.

Makin gave him the custom mod role “KILL-MODERATOR,” and he received access to the mod chats. Yet, User5 claimed that he didn’t even care about the mod permissions. Instead, he was purely interested in getting Makin to join a Discord server to which he invited various other people including myself. I declined the invitation, so I have no idea how many people took him up on the offer.

We have literally no idea what will happen as a result of this, but there are already some side effects of the expenditure: principally, the SS13 server (SS413) will be going back up. The cost of an SS13 server is much more expensive than for other games, so Makin has made it clear it will only remain up for the duration that the Patreon can afford it. The server is to be resuscitated in a few days after he and Putnam get the code working.

Another side effect is that Dickle’s exile has been lifted. He was unbanned, reinvited, and immediately rejoined the server. He is extremely grateful for the opportunity of course, although I don’t think User5 is even aware of Dickle’s existence. This was an absolutely strange way to get him back, but not unwelcome by any means¹⁹⁶.

Nothing more for today.

---

3^rd of July 2019

SS413 went up yesterday and has been as successful as we hoped, if not more. The population at its greatest has been over 20, which exceeded what we had last time. I think it helps that the community in general is larger than it was before, both on the Discord and the subreddit. Because of this and better advertising perhaps, we’re getting a nice cabal of people in.

As might be expected there’s a hefty number of newcomers who have no idea what’s going on, but we have our robust individuals as well. Carlarc, Trickster, Tensei, Misha, Dap, and Putnam are all already adept at this game, and the latter two are the only ones who are afraid to absolutely thrash ass if the opportunity arises. Carlarc in particular is so strong with this game that he’s already been banned from any leadership roles such as captain, because he finds ways to make it an absolutely torturous experience for new players.

As it is, it’s wonderful to see the game come back. A few of the skills I picked up last time are still there, and it feels like it’s been easier to learn what to do and how this time around. It’s still rough dealing with experienced people, but Dap and Putnam are completely willing to share their expertise with anyone who asks (assuming it’s not an asinine question).

Putnam in particular deserves some significant praise for working to get the server up. I don’t know for sure but Makin has implied that he’s paying Putnam to get things working (not to mention being the primary admin this time around), and she has already dumped several hours into this project to make it happen. Makin has been no slouch either of course; between the two of them, it was only a matter of time before the server was functional.

That having been said, the server likely won’t be up for more than a month. Paying $720 is absolutely ridiculous, even just once. Twice would be a miracle, to the point that it would almost feel unethical using it. The Minecraft server is completely down at this point, and I’ve offered to bring the money I was using for that over for the SS13 server, assuming people keep using it. We’ll have to see how long its popularity endures.

Nothing more for today.

---

4^th of July 2019

American Independence Day being one of my favorite holidays, I was actually kind of unhappy today for personal reasons. The HSD proved to be a very good distraction for a couple of reasons. As is firm tradition at this point, WoC was given reign over his own channel (#usa-usa-usa) and a number of individuals--including most mods--changed their names to famous American figures such as past presidents.

Last year I feel that the channel received more attention than it did this time around. I feel as if there’s a significant lack of patriotism this year, which might be due to some of the political influences we’re witnessing in the states. It’s hard to dredge up much motivation for celebrating the country when most of the people involved don’t support its leaders. As WoC is fond of pointing out though, there’s a difference between governance and culture. It was good to express some joy for America despite all that’s happening.

More effective than this, though was that I ended up playing SS13 with people from the HSD for a vast majority of the day. This was quite effective at raising my spirits, and I came away with a heightened appreciation for everyone here. The game is a very good distraction from real life problems, with its own collection of increasingly bizarre problems. Its difficulty adds to this in some regard, as well; it’s satisfying to acquire a new skill and be able to figure out problems that arise.

There have been no shortage of humorous incidents in the game this time around, which I was looking forward to enormously. Indeed, I feel I’m even more prone to them this time around for whatever reason. The complexity of the interface and the sheer number of things you can do lends itself to this: while trying to conduct an appendectomy on Barry, I accidentally shoved two entire bedsheets up his ass. After the surgery was over I wordlessly retrieved them and we never acknowledged this in-game again.

Unfortunately, the game is not without its conflicts too. I mentioned that Carlarc has been banned from leadership positions because he’s prone to making the game hell for newcomers, and Misha has similarly been yelled at today for being too skilled, or “robust.” There was some confusion where it was implied Misha had been breaking in to the captain’s office every game to steal high quality equipment, which led to an altercation where someone got thrown in jail and the real captain was injured somehow.

Misha rebuffed by saying that he had only done it every once in a while as circumstances saw fit, which is fine for a game like SS13. Putnam is afraid of the server becoming unfriendly towards new players or people in general, and she doesn’t want these sorts of shenanigans to become commonplace. Misha grew aggravated and said that if the game was going to be reduced to an unfun pile of strict rules, he would no longer be playing.

We’re already at a shortage of actually good players, and losing one is not something I care for. I was extremely tired at this point and didn’t want to step in to defuse the situation, but Misha continues to prove himself reasonable: he said that threatening to quit was just a momentary vent, and that realistically he wasn’t going to stop. This sort of behavior is almost too gracious compared with some of what I’ve had to deal with over the last couple of years--it’s a huge relief when I don’t have to coddle people at all.

Nothing more for today.

---

5^th of July 2019

I forgot to comment on an issue yesterday: after a litany of problems, Makin finally pushed the whopper button and decided today that altgen bans no longer exist. Instead, if one gets banned from altgen, they are deemed unable to properly interact with anyone on the server. Depending on the nature of the offense, an altgen ban will instead be a temp ban from every channel or a complete full ban.

Makin had been mulling this over already near the end of June, and probably a few times before then even. I’m not sure what exactly spurred him to finally enact the idea, although it was probably the hundredth instance of talking about old altgen regulars who had been banned for various repulsive behaviors.

This decision coinciding with Independence Day was not lost on him (even going so far as to lampshade it in announcements: “ironic that this would happen on the international day of FREEDOM...........”). After the information went out though, I don’t think any of us paid it another thought--for myself, I almost immediately forgot about the decision in about five seconds. Today though, we may have already witnessed some of its effects.

As a small aside, I’m pleased to say that the server’s statistics continue to elude me even after nearly a year of tracking them on a daily basis. Why is this a good thing, one asks? Simply speaking, things are more interesting when you haven’t quite figured them out yet¹⁹⁷. I’ve remarked a number of times about how certain trends suggest this or that, but at this point I doubt that any of my predictions have truly been accurate.

Following this, I haven’t really nailed down any sort of pattern for the activity of the main channels (or the smaller ones, for that matter). I thought that the three biggest channels were seeing diminished activity and spreading it out to others, but that proved to be a short-lived phenomenon. Instead, the numbers show that #general has become gradually more active for the last few weeks, surpassing 12,000 messages today.

Conversely, #altgen has been gradually decreasing in activity, falling below 1,000 messages today for the first time since the 24th of May 2017. This has been going on for a week now--too short for any sort of predictable trend, but too long to be random either. Returning to the original topic, one thing can be suggested: the new altgen ban policy will probably widen that gap even further.

Participating in altgen is now the equivalent of putting all of your eggs in one basket with a ton of holes in it. Normally a user must acquire three bans in separate channels in order to get banned from the server for minor offenses, but now it can be done with one only. This is a severe deterrent from hanging out in that particular channel, naturally; all of the would-be shitters are now hanging out in #general, the closest alternative to their typical environment that’s regularly active.

Reti and Wadapan indicated that the increase in activity today was also partially due to some insane levels of voice activity, so it’s inappropriate to paint this in a simple light. Realistically there was a confluence of factors at play. All of this, though, is to say that there are still surprises and things to be gleaned about how the server and its people work. However, I guess I should admit that there’s only so many ways to say these things before it becomes monotonous.

Nothing more for today.

---

6^th of July 2019

Today has been a little rough. First to comment on is that Kople was banned following an altercation involving Nat. As has been explained a number of times in the past, Nat is the subject of many complaints. There are numerous occasions where I have been approached by someone who is unhappy with how Nat conducts herself in the channels she moderates. I have been variously moved by these complaints: sometimes Nat genuinely deserves to be chastised for being too harsh with people, and other times it’s just an overreaction on the part of the user.

This occasion definitely falls under the latter category, if not worse. Kople has actually been something of a problem user for a long time, probably about as long as I’ve been around. He is something of a chronic troublemaker (including an extensive history of getting in people’s faces including mods, and even harassing other users on occasion). It has been tiresome dealing with him, but this incident proved to be the brick that broke the camel’s back.

After cross-referencing what happened between Valkyrie (the person Kople complained to first), Nat, and Kople himself, it was swiftly determined that Kople was manipulating his story to make Nat look far worse than she actually was. Some parts of his explanation were outright fabrications. This is the sort of thing that we are loathe to put up with, so we decided to drop the axe. It’s been a long time coming unfortunately, but Kople was banned for lying to mods to get one of us in trouble, on top of all of his previous issues.

Similarly but separately, Archiewhite was also banned. His offense was ostensibly lesser but was kind of bad in aggregate: he’s been spoiling WTC even though Tipsy and others are actively reading it and liveblogging it in chat. Normally this wouldn’t really be a problem, but Tipsy is almost clinically unable to stop herself from clicking on spoilers, so the consensus is that we can’t even hide our discussion when she’s around.

Instead, when new people are discussing WTC and especially Tipsy is around, we speak only in oblique references. Thankfully she’s almost caught up so this will no longer be a problem, but until that moment this has actually been a rather persistent issue. Kind of like Archie, tmtm was actually channel-banned for about three days because she was repeatedly teasing WTC spoilers in conjunction with crappy jokes. Makin didn’t cotton to this shit at all and canned her, after which it seems she’s finally learned her lesson.

Losing two historied regulars in one day is kind of intense, but both of these people were somewhat problematic. Archiewhite in particular was vociferously anti-Makin, to the point of near-fanaticism. Obviously I’m fine with speaking up against his more inane bullshit, but I don’t use misleading rhetoric or resort to ad hominem. Archie’s brand of opposition was pretty distasteful, and as much as it pains me to admit it, it’s probably for the best that he’s gone. Maybe he’ll come back given that what he did to get banned wasn’t all that bad, but we’ll see what happens.

For something completely different, I’ve been spending the last few weeks on a project to revamp this document and make it more accessible. I’m pleased to say that drewlinky.com is now up and running, and it’s designed in a much more palatable way than the Google document I’ve been using for over a year (although you know this already, since this particular instance of the page is in fact on the website. Hope you like the site!). The style specifically emulates the Discord interface (using dark mode so as to be easier on the eyes), and the Sydlexia portion has been rendered suitably as well. It was a lot of work, but hopefully this will further ensure the longevity of all of this information.

Nothing more for today.

---

25^th of July 2019

We’ve had a rather disturbing development that I feel must be touched upon. Close to the beginning of this document I described an individual named Twonks, who was banned after some unsavory behavior that I have trouble recalling at this point in time. There was a lot of emotional tantrums/manipulation going on, and it was determined that she should never be let back into the HSD. I found this a rather permanent and unfortunate sentence, but such is what it was.

As the last couple of years went by I would occasionally talk with Twonks about various things, not thinking much about the initial outburst that led to her removal from the community. Some of the things she said struck me as odd, but I didn’t talk to her often enough to put much thought into it. Then, today things changed with the release of a document curated by Red and Anervaria.

Said document contains incontrovertible evidence to the conclusion that Twonks has engaged sexually with people much younger than herself, especially in more private places like the Microscope server that I have described elsewhere in this document. This has been labeled as pedophilia due to a more or less consistent trend of this behavior even after Twonks became a legal adult. There has been a scramble to disassociate with her, and most who are even remotely involved have taken steps to disavow themselves of her presence.

After serious consideration I have elected not to link to the document in question, due to a lack of modern relevance to the HSD and especially what some could argue is overt hostility towards its subject. If my word is worth anything in this matter though, let it be said that the document was well-researched and certainly convincing. No one has posited any reasons or evidence to disbelieve its contents, and so we set about trying to figure out what, if anything, must be done about it.

The document describes various people who are sympathetic to Twonks. It may be more accurate/graceful to describe these people as merely misguided, and thus defensive. Among people for whom the document is taken as granted, this behavior is viewed as aberrant. The HSD staff is less imminently concerned about it except to ensure that our userbase is safe: we have a lot of minors and generally impressionable people, so even on mere threat of something like this we take it extremely seriously. Pedophiles are not to be trifled with, and we’re quick to remove them with extreme prejudice.

All of it is extremely upsetting. While I obviously agree it’s prudent to remove individuals who continue to excuse the actions of a child predator, turning the ordeal into a mockery is beyond my acceptance. I was messaged by TSmae, who apparently was unable to excise Twonks from her life after this information came out (edit as of 8/21/2020: TSmae wishes to make it known that she was operating under significant duress, including threats against her including suicide; given time and thought, she understands that her actions were inappropriate and she has put considerable effort into distancing herself from Twonks). For the rest in the mod team this was enough to warrant a ban (especially Makin, who was understandably--but uncharacteristically--angry about the excuse-making). However, it became something of a hot potato in dealing with TS, and I was specifically upset at taking the proceedings and turning it into a circus.

The rest of the details for this situation are basically unimportant. I don’t want to linger on it or overexplain; to be sure, I kind of want to put this drama behind us as fast as possible. It is important to record as a sort of follow-up to a member of the community from long ago, but it does not justify more comment than this. The situation has been thoroughly handled and with luck it will be the last we have to suffer of anything like this.

To change the topic, we had something interesting occur when a user named Alset came on to the server with a temporary new account. Alset, as a refresher, was the subject of a strange incident in #altgen when they were temporarily server banned and managed to incite a small riot around freeing them. The “free Alset” campaign was successful (whether through their action or by simply waiting out the timer, I don’t remember), and Alset was permitted back as a smallish figure of importance to the channel. All this time later, people remember the incident with fondness.

For some reason, in the mod team this incident made it so that Alset’s name causes us to think they were permanently banned, and that they’re trying to skirt it by coming back with an alt. We always have to remind ourselves what exactly happened, which has become something of a nuisance. However, this particular time was marked by a peculiarity: Alset’s new account was not able to speak in the server at all.

For anyone reading through this document, I don’t think I need to elaborate again on the bot attacks we’ve been suffering lately. Makin did change the server’s security settings so that users require a role or to verify their account by phone in order to talk or DM users sharing the server. We were under the impression that our color role system would make it possible for new users to gain a color and thus be allowed to talk with little issue.

After conferring with Alset on the matter for a little, we determined that this is not the case. No one without a verified account can click on the color roles in #welcome, and thus are unable to speak until they verify their Discord account by phone. This is obviously a problem because it depresses user retention, especially new ones who might have made an account specifically to join the HSD. I posited in the mod chat that we need to find an alternative system immediately.

WoC and I brought up a system that we’ve seen in place on other servers: we’ve both seen setups where the #welcome channel is the only one that people can talk in or see, and they must submit a bot command (such as “!agree”) which shows their acceptance of the rules or whatever terms the server has. The bot thus registers this command and gives them a simple user role that opens up the rest of the server to them. This all seemed like an efficient and effective way to get rid of the bot menace while still getting new people to be able to talk.

However, we realized that this wouldn’t solve the fundamental problem, being that bots would be allowed to talk and DM other users upon joining. Further, Makin shot the idea down: he suggests that the extra level of protection from requiring a phone is valuable. I fear that this might be preventing some newcomers from being able to participate, as we have some users (including Valkyrie apparently) who don’t even possess a phone. However, it’s hard to gauge exactly how widespread this might be. For now, a better system eludes us.

Nothing more for today.

---

29^th of July 2019

It’s 2:36 AM and for the last half hour or so we’ve been putting Moonjail through a conversational meatgrinder. For no real reason I brought up Game Grumps a while ago, which led to us all discussing Let’s Play channels in general, such as Super Best Friends Play, Oneyplays, Yogscast, and others. The reason I mention Moonjail in particular is because they professed some pretty unconventional views and turned themselves into a punching bag.

It started with the topic I mentioned, being Let’s Play channels. Most people present inherently understand the entertainment value of these: they are often called “friendship simulators,” where the attraction is just in listening to a few people talk with each other whilst playing a game. It’s also common for those like Makin or Tensei to mock people for enjoying them, but we variously ignore such remarks.

Moonjail didn’t seem to understand this idea though. They asked for clarification on why people like Let’s Play channels, insisting that there must be a larger reason why people enjoy such content. To their credit, they quickly backed off when they realized that there WAS no larger reason than the dynamic between the people on the show: “... if that's as deep as the reason for liking it goes, i guess i just don't like it, which is fine.” It’s refreshing to witness someone who’s able to process new information without too much issue, and it certainly proved a useful skill throughout the rest of the night.

The next topic to come up was about socialization, starting with the notion of sharing videos with other people, and wherein the idea of group chats came up. Moonjail again said something we all found rather weird, stating unequivocally: “>groupchat / these don't actually exist / i'm like 90% sure.” This was the beginning of the end, as everyone immediately snapped to attention. The shift was so abrupt that I think it was mildly shocking to everyone present--suddenly everyone was clowning on Moonjail without mercy, and this continued for quite some time.

This behavior actually became a little too extreme, speaking personally. Though I’m guilty of participating in it myself, now that it’s over and done with I think it’s safe to say that we were too abrasive. WoC in particular, with his usual flare, was trenchant on the matter: “none of your friends value you / i hate to break it to you,” which I found too acerbic. I called him out on this, although little else could be done about it realistically.

The conversation proceeded in this manner (albeit a little more mildly from most involved) for about 20 minutes, at which point Moonjail mentioned that they were genuinely upset at the idea that their social skills were so lacking. They seemed to be confused, which is only to be expected given the circumstances. I tried to spin the conversation into a positive thing: surely it was for the best that they understood these things now, as opposed to still being in the dark? I don’t know the extent to which this helped, but they did seem to return to their typical tone as the night went on.

I hope that Moonjail will take positive inspiration from all of this, as disconcerting as it might have been. Now, though, I can’t help but think of the rest of the HSD’s users: how many more of them are in a situation like this, where there’s a fairly common convention that they understand nothing about? In the age of the internet, it’s still surprisingly easy to separate yourself from the wider truth of a topic in favor of your own personal experience. It seems that there are plenty of difficulties left to untangle as per associating with others through this medium. Then again, I suppose this is just one specific incarnation of an issue that can happen in any part of society, not just the internet. Truly, growing up is hard. It’s hard and no one understands.

Nothing more for today.

---

30^th of July 2019

In the middle of the day, we received some interesting news from a Steam post: it seems that What Pumpkin has paired with another indie publisher named Fellow Traveler, splitting responsibilities of Hiveswap’s development. What Pumpkin will continue to develop the game proper, while Fellow Traveler will take on the more social aspects such as releasing newsposts.

We’re not exactly sure what to think of this development. As described in the post, Fellow Traveler has released some content that is actually liked by people, such as Orwell and Hacknet. That having been said, Fellow Traveler isn’t very well known to basically anyone; almost no one could remember the name until Hacknet was brought up.

We’re also wary of being tied to other parties, which is only understandable given history. Users Tomato-Sensei commented: “this is giving me bad vibes,” which Ephemerald followed up with: “the odder gentlemen.” Trust for other people handling any aspect of the property basically doesn’t exist, and I would go so far as to say that the lack of outburst is due more to apathy than anything else.

To this point, Misha was rather vocal: “nobody wants your trashfire of a game that took a decade to not be done for a niche community that is actively dwindling.” While his stance is far more aggressive, it still holds some truth for the rest of us. To many, this all seems to be too little, and certainly way too late. Our hesitance is not for lack of wanting new content though, we just can’t bring ourselves to be optimistic about it. After so much time of this nonsense, it’d actually be foolish to suspect Hiveswap Act 2 or whatever else will come out with no problems.

The announcement was associated with something that did manage to pique our interest: Fellow Traveler made its own Discord server and included the link in the newspost. It seems to be little more than a collection of channels dedicated to various games Fellow Traveler has published or made. There is a #homestuck channel there, which--due to their announcement--has been rapidly populated and is experiencing an absurd boom. Of note, there are already a variety of figures that have been banned from the HSD for a number of reasons. We’re not sure if we should warn the server's mods about such people, but it would probably be viewed as targeted so we’ll probably stay hands-off in this regard.

Another interesting note is that all Homestuck-related Steam products, namely Hiveswap Act 1 and the Friendsims, are now organized into a category on Steam called the “Homestuck Universe.” Looking at any of the properties like Hiveswap Act 1 or the Friendsims shows that it’s an official designation now. There are some conflicting things to take away from this: such information might have been exciting some time ago, but now attempts to create a “universe” where all of a publisher’s works take place is considered overdone; conversely, we’re stupid and the possibility of a wide array of new content is tantalizing to us.

Whatever actually ends up happening, today’s newspost brings a refreshing kernel of hope. It’s not often that we get news of any sort, and if this is to be believed then we’ll be receiving it more often as time goes by. After looking at the subreddit, there are some people who are bringing up some excellent points about Fellow Traveler’s quality as a group, suggesting that good things are waiting for us. I don’t think most of us necessarily trust them just yet, but as I’ve remarked often in the past, these developments are better than nothing.

Nothing more for today.

---

31^st of July 2019

I’m actually writing this entry way after the fact, but I was just informed about an event called SAHcon, or “Stuck At Home con.” This was an “online convention” run by a mix of people from Homestuck Twitter. This took place on June 22nd, and involved community members hosting panels online by streaming them for others to watch and comment on.

To be honest, I’m astonished that this all happened and I didn’t even hear about it once. I dimly remember Skyplayer saying she was hosting a panel at the time, but it was never overtly explained what or why. In fact, I remember joining that particular stream but wasn’t sure what it was about. Despite this, basically the entire HSD was rather quiet on the proceedings--Makin didn’t announce it or anything¹⁹⁸. Anervaria mentions that they brought it up in #general a few times, but only to make fun of it apparently.

Looking at the event list, I’m not sure how I feel about it. The more I read, the less surprised I am that I didn’t know about it--these things all seem interesting enough, but they’re kind of disconnected from the HSD and its community for one reason or another. The only one that I would have loved to witness is Shadok’s Animation Panel, because his works are all a treat and he seems fun.

Conversely, there’s a panel literally called “Jax Does Homestuck: Gays and Girls” of which the description reads: “Jackie from Jax Does Homestuck discusses how everyone in Homestuck is gay and how absolutely fantastic all the girls are.” While I’m sure the actual content of the panel was interesting in its own right, this description would probably not have attracted a lot of people from here.

In short, learning about this so long after the fact is really weird. It feels like this should have been a bigger deal, even here, but I just wasn’t aware of it in the slightest. Interestingly, I was told by a friend that a few people on Twitter were angry that SAHcon hadn’t been mentioned in this document. This was rather bemusing; I’ve made it clear in three or four separate locations that if people think I’m missing information I should write about, they should contact me. Maybe I should try and spread that message a bit more.

There’s also some pronounced tension between various people who were involved with SAHcon and us, so I guess that doesn’t help in this particular instance.. It’s really cool that such an ambitious event was planned and held, but it’s unfortunate that there’s a rift in the fandom like this; I wonder what it might have been like if the brunt of the entire HSD had participated, instead of only a handful of people from here. If they have it again next year, maybe interest will grow.

Nothing more for today.

---

6^th of August 2019

On Twitter today, the hosts of Perfectly Generic Podcast announced that they were going conduct a wide-scale survey of the Homestuck fandom to get a better idea of its demographics. This is an exciting prospect--I’ve considered the idea of conducting a census of sorts a number of times, but always doubted that it would gain the traction it needs to be truly representative of the fandom as a whole.

That does lead into a problem with the current survey, which is that users on Reddit and the HSD are concerned about any sort of bias that might come with how it’s being distributed. As it’s being developed by Perfectly Generic Podcast, there was fear it could be aimed more towards the sensibilities of the Twitter crowd than the fandom as a whole.

Thankfully, after taking the survey myself and questioning others on it, this doesn’t appear to have really been the case. There might be some bias in who actually responds to the survey--which is mostly unable to be helped--but the questions themselves are all pretty well standardized. The main problem we’ve had with it on the subreddit and Discord server is that they missed a bunch of community events: the Great Reread wasn’t mentioned at all as something people might have participated in, as an example. They didn’t even include SAHcon on the list, which we found kind of strange to not include¹⁹⁹.

Though I can’t recall other surveys like this from the past, what sets this one apart is that it’s obtained some sort of validity through endorsement by WP officials like Aysha. It was posted on the subreddit which prompted some concern about how invasive the questions might be, to which Makin provided a bevy of tweets from officials saying that more sensitive information would be used only on an internal basis. It’s unclear how much this might have reassured people who were participating.

The hosts of the podcast have stated that they’ll release some of the results publicly, which is good. I was concerned that the information would be completely proprietary; this survey is curious in that it’s probably got the widest reach out of any survey in the modern fandom environment. Each community may conduct its own surveys, but this is the first one I can recall that’s going across every branch of the fandom (excluding /hsg/, which doesn’t properly exist anymore). For the HSD’s purposes, Makin announced the survey when it became available. I’m sure that more people than just myself are curious to see what the results are.

Nothing more for today.

---

13^th of August 2019

We’ve been waiting for an official announcement about new Homestuck content for some weeks now, due to come out today. To be sure, we got a post, but we wouldn’t necessarily call it an announcement. The post, nothing more than a gif, has prompted some interesting responses on both sides of the fandom. The Twitter side of it seems excited enough (though there’s a lot of confusion about what it’s about right now) while the subreddit and Discord are somewhat miffed.

My personal response and the sentiment I saw the most was along the lines of, “What the fuck is this?” Typically when one receives an announcement you expect to see some actual information about it, and content like this is usually associated with a release date, some details about what it actually is, etc. With this, however, we received basically nothing. It was less of an announcement, and more of a teaser for an announcement. Naturally we’re not very excited about this.

To be clear, it is a good thing that we’ve received a promise of upcoming content (or at least, that’s what we think this is). However, What Pumpkin historically has been terribly mismanaged both internally and with regard to public outreach. This seems to be a continuation of that problem, because the way in which this “announcement” was administered is completely terrible. As a rule of thumb, you should always underpromise to people and then overdeliver in order to satisfy them as much as possible.

What happened today was overpromising and underdelivering, and we’re tired of seeing this pattern play out so many times with What Pumpkin over the years. It would have been far more effective if they hadn’t said anything and just dropped the gif, perhaps with a mysterious quote from the comic or a mere hint of what’s to come. It frustrates us that there are so many simple, easy things that WP could be doing to excite its userbase more and to draw attention to itself, and they consistently mess this up. We’re not sure exactly why this happens, but it’s agonizing to watch them shoot themselves in the foot. They need a better public relations person or they’re going to continue squandering their social capital as time goes by.

The conversation was addled somewhat by a development which is very unusual: Makin has closed mspa-lit with the following message: “okay it's time / to close this channel for the summer / as an experiment / you will thank me when the eternal september comes.” True to this, the channel has stayed closed since (with a brief few minutes that he opened it to talk about a TV show he was watching).

This has been met with less of a response than I would have expected, but one that is no less complex: no one has been screaming or particularly excited by the development, but there is no less of a range of tolerance or acceptance for what’s going on. Some users like Kreuz or Tyr are more disgruntled than others, to the point that it may cause trouble for them. I’m personally worried that this will cause certain users from both #general and #mspa-lit to outright leave--Tera has outright said it might do this, for example.

On the other hand, certain users such as Jade and $trider have been extremely receptive and positive about the development. There’s been a lot of activity in #general since we’ve all been forced to share a space, and I’m hoping that it will continue. Two potential explanations present themselves: it could be that this is just temporary weirdness through people interacting who don’t normally do so, or it could be a sign that we need to start consolidating channels due to reduced activity on a holistic level. We’ll see what happens over the course of this “experiment.”

Nothing more for today.

---

14^th of August 2019

The results of the Perfectly Generic Podcast survey were released today. The full information available is actually quite revealing, and though we were expecting some of these results, it’s still fascinating to see the demographic structure of the fandom at large. With nearly 5,300 responses, it was way more successful than most of predicted it might be. It’s not going to be a perfect representation of the actual community, but it’s likely that we won’t see another survey with this degree of outreach for a while, if ever.

Some of the results in brief: the survey confirmed for us that there is a large degree of minority users, insofar as sexuality and gender are concerned. Racially speaking, white people are by far the largest number present, followed by Asians. Minors make up roughly a third of the respondents, and there’s actually a not insignificant number of people over the age of 30 (including a handful who are above the age of 40). Interestingly, respondents who claimed they were white also suggested that representation in media is not as important to them, while minors (especially transgender individuals) feel that representation is extremely important to them.

I fully recommend that people go and read the results of the survey themselves, it’s an illuminating study and I’m extremely glad that the effort was taken to conduct it. Even more impressive than the reach of the survey itself is its composition, which is to all appearances completely professional. I’m not sure if they did in fact have a professional, or even just someone with a lot of experience, but I wouldn’t be surprised if such was the case. I’m really hoping that this will be turned into a regular affair, possibly annually, so that we can get a moving snapshot of how the fandom looks over time.

For our benefit, at the very end of the survey it gave special thanks to people who distributed the survey to their communities. On the list are Aysha, optimisticDuelist, and to our surprise Makin. We weren’t even expecting any recognition for his part in distributing the survey, but the fact that they included him is quite nice in my opinion. Ever since I became involved in the Discord server, I’ve been worried about the rift in the Homestuck fandom between the major websites, but things like this give me some faint hope that more open exchanges and interaction might occur in the future.

On a different note, I mentioned that Kreuz and Tyr were being somewhat rambunctious about mspa-lit being temporarily merged with general. This continued into the morning, and while I slept those two and a number of others--no less than five, some of whom left as a result--were gen-banned for causing a disturbance, like shitposting or just being an all around dickhead.

Kreuz in particular gives me some pause. Interacting with him has been a distinctly weird experience in the past, if not outright unpleasant. I don’t wish to trash him necessarily, but it seems that he never stops complaining about things that often turn out to be trivial. Anervaria described the situation well: “Kreuz is a dissatisfied user following the change but it's just that he is always dissatisfied about everything.” With this in mind, when he becomes particularly upset his behavior can become somewhat toxic.

With this all in mind, there is a question of what to do with him that no one quites know how to answer yet. The easiest answer is just to ban him, but is this appropriate? Some mods commented that we’ve done so for less, which is objectively true. I’m not sure why I’m so reticent to pursue this option, given that information. Wadapan did come forth to say he gave Kreuz an ultimatum: “I gave him a day / he has one day to change his ways / to blossom into a new user.” For his sake I hope that Kreuz takes this up, but we’ll see. It’s been almost three years since I joined the server and he’s been like this literally since I arrived, so I’m not exactly optimistic. Nonetheless, time will tell what happens.

Nothing more for today.

---

26^th of August 2019

A lot of things have happened in just the last few days. On the 13^th, I mentioned that we received a teaser for upcoming Homestuck content, with details coming later in the month. On the 22nd the announcement proper was made: Pesterquest is up on Steam and will be released on the 4^th of September. It is a direct followup to the Hiveswap Friendsim, but this upcoming title will involve characters from Homestuck proper.

For this reason alone I would expect it to enjoy more success than the Friendsims did, but there are cogent points that suggest it may not work out: Makin is already pessimistic because they removed the Homestuck label from the game’s name for seemingly no reason, which will make it harder for fans to discover on their own. We have no way of knowing whether Fellow Traveler’s outreach will be enough to counter this, but past experience gives us little faith in word of mouth to make games popular.

We earnestly hope that we’re wrong and Pesterquest enjoys great success, but we’re also worried that if the game doesn’t do well, it’ll discourage What Pumpkin and all people associated with these projects from making more original content. In the post-Epilogues environment, original content is sorely lacking and we’re deathly afraid that any project not performing well could disturb the momentum the authors have built up.

This aside, Pesterquest is slated to come out on September 4^th, which is pleasantly close. It’s hard to properly gauge how excited people are for it, but on all of the main platforms at least it seems that most are at least mildly looking forward to the new content. The project’s director and lead writer is credited as Aysha Farah, and as with Friendsim there’s a wide variety of people who are writing individual episodes.

One of the people writing episodes is Griever, who was contracted for the job. Though it was initially painful to see him in this position, I took an opportunity to reach out to him and try to bury the hatchet. It’s still a bit awkward and others will feel more strongly about it, but there’s no use in staying angry about it forever; I genuinely hope that the new game is well-received, and I made it clear that I have no real ill will towards him. For those in the HSD reading this who were themselves upset, I hope that they can also find it in them to put the altercation behind all of us. At the very least, a modicum of tolerance would be preferable to hostility.

The next thing of importance: on the 24^th, Hussie ended up releasing an essay through Pgenpodcast with regard to the future of Homestuck’s narrative, and how it might be handled. The full text is rather illuminating, though dense. The long and short of it is that he did in fact intend for the Epilogues to serve as a sort of bridge material from old Homestuck to whatever comes next. More importantly, though, is that he says he wants the fandom to be more or less in charge of determining where the story goes next.

This by itself is rather cryptic, but the general consensus is that he’s removed himself from the position of determining what’s canon as opposed to fanon. Thus, all interpretations of Homestuck’s content are to some extent valid. The official content that might get released is being largely handled by other people (especially Aysha Farah it seems), but it seems he’s encouraging the fandom to have a more active hand in how the media is shaped creatively.

I’ll return to that particular idea in a moment, but as an aside: yesterday was Hussie’s birthday, and for it he organized a mini-ARG. At some point in 2010, there was a picture of him standing in front of a cave holding a Toblerone chocolate bar. I’m not sure how this garnered the attention that it did, but in 2018 there was a followup image of him sitting in front of the same cave, now with a small pile of Toblerone. To celebrate, this year he left a crate of individually signed Toblerone bars for fans to find.

Naturally, in less than an hour people discovered the location (Point Lobos in San Francisco) and went to claim their prize. The first fan to make it was a Twitter user named Milk Conspiracy Theorist. They took four bars and there was some talk about distributing them further across the bay area of California, but I’m not sure what came of this. The rest of the toblerone, at the time of writing, is assuredly gone by now.

This was a very fun and lighthearted fandom engagement, and everyone I could find was enjoying the simple mirth of the occasion. It was nice to have something fairly uncomplicated and silly to do, and it feels like Hussie has been emerging just a little bit for the first time in quite a while. However, we all soon learned that this revelry was not to last.

Unbeknownst to me before now, there’s been a steady increase in desire among various sections of the fandom considering the main protagonist of Homestuck to actually be trans, citing a number of formative discussions and issues that are touched upon throughout the comic that hint at the kind of things that trans people experience or go through. This iteration of the protagonist is generally referred to as June Egbert (alternatively Joan, but unless general consensus changes significantly June will be the name I stick with).

As part of this movement and in light of Hussie’s very fresh post about letting the fandom decide how the comic goes, Milk Conspiracy Theorist mentioned their support for June Egbert as the newfound identity of the protagonist. This is all fine, but Hussie swooped in and informally made the change canonical himself. The simplest and most likely answer is that he was just trying to be funny and supportive, but this is at odds with the post he made literally the day prior detailing how the fandom should collectively be handling the direction of Homestuck’s canon.

This has led to some deliberation among members of the fandom, specifically concerning how to keep track of Homestuck canon and fanon now. There are a lot of people who are happy about this direction because there are particular pieces of the story--and especially its characters--that they feel strongly about, and subsequently have ideas about how to treat them. On the other hand, there’s no shortage of people who are upset with the change because it renders the idea of validity and canonicity itself irrelevant (I’ve sporadically seen claims that “Homestuck is dead” because of this development, disregarding the fact that it’s officially been over for more than three years at this point).

The June Egbert movement has also attracted the attention of some who feel that the protagonist doesn’t need to be reenvisioned in this manner. To be clear, there are only a scant few people who are actively against the idea; more commonly, such detractors simply don’t feel too strongly about the idea one way or the other. The unfortunate thing is that this latter group has been lumped together with those more vociferously opposed. As it goes though, I’m very happy to say that the discourse has been kept to a complete minimum, with only a bare couple of individuals really trying to incite any actual drama over it.

The vast majority of fans across all major social media platforms are at least pleasantly accepting of the change, and many of them are outright over the moon with it. It’s a unique time in the fandom’s history that so many people share the same outlook on a topic, and I’m hoping that it’ll continue to inspire some measure of peace and understanding between the disparate factions we have today.

Indeed, between all of these things it’s been a rather busy time for the fandom. There’s only one more thing to speak of, and though minor it’s exciting in its own right: the Epilogues are being released in physical book form. This could explain the delay in the release of the books for Homestuck proper: the Epilogues are already completely in written form, which means they’re a prime candidate for being released as a proper book. Homestuck itself has to go through an editing process in order to be ready for physical print, which we can easily imagine being more intensive than whatever they needed to do for the Epilogues.

The book in question, as confirmed in the essay that Hussie released on Saturday, will in fact contain both of the Epilogue paths in the same book. To make it exciting, they’ve made it so that you have to flip the book upside down in order to read one or the other. This was an instant purchase for me, but I’m not sure how many other people went for it.

Largely speaking I’m hoping as many people as possible will support the Homestuck products that Viz puts out, not even to speak of What Pumpkin’s ongoing projects. We’re all hoping that the things coming out heralds even more to come in the future. I might be projecting overly much in saying this, but it feels as if there’s an uneasy feeling in the air concerning Homestuck’s future as a property. In the HSD and assuredly elsewhere, I’m sure people want it to succeed, but there’s a lot of confusion about the direction it’s going in now. Hopefully we’ll have some more answers in the weeks to come.

Nothing more for today.

---

12^th of September 2019 - Meetings in Real Life

This is actually a retroactive entry, being written in October, but it concerns something that feels more than appropriate to mark down. I had the very fortunate opportunity to go to California, and there’s a number of people from the area that I asked to meet. Before I talk about that though, I realize that I never talked about a previous occasion wherein I met with WoC last year in late August.

We both live in the same state, so such a visit was inevitable. Not dwelling right next to each other, we decided to meet up in a city that was about halfway between us. For the occasion I made explicitly sure to wear the hat I won from him in a bet which says “WOC Is A Loser” on it. For the occasion we kept it simple and got lunch at a wonderful pizza place, as well as some gelato afterwards.

WoC has brought up the idea of hanging out again since, and some of his ideas are fairly normal (I believe he mentioned a New Year’s Party at some point?) while others are frankly ridiculous (roughing it in the Alaskan wilderness for an indeterminate amount of time). I’m unfortunately flaky, so it’s difficult to get me to actually agree to such a thing and show up. Nonetheless, I’m sure at least one future hangout is assured.

To return to the topic of California, I had the pleasure of meeting with no less than four people from the HSD while in California. Three of them were also mods, which in our minds made it the first intercoastal HSD mod meetup, or perhaps meetup in general. The first individual I met with was Toast. He traveled by train to meet me in San Francisco, at which point we decided to get food and check out the infamous Toblerone Cave where Hussie laid his treasure back in late August.

Toast seems just as chill and collected an individual in real life as he does online--the only thing I have to cast doubt on now is his taste in food. While we actually got food at a local place which was quite delicious, he’s been suggesting for months that I should go to the west coast burger chain In ‘N Out. I went there after his visit, and I’m sad to say that the food was positively trash. I have my own ideas for burger places to go to should he find himself on the east coast at some point.

Next, I ended up meeting simultaneously with Teratosapphic and Barry in Sacramento. We had to keep the visit short due to time constraints, but it still managed to be fairly entertaining. We kept it strictly to food, and visited a place called Smashburger. The way they both spoke about it on the way there was rather amusing: it was said that this place had fairly unique food, where they ball up the ground beef and smash it onto the grill to make a flat, more well-done burger patty. They made this sound like a complete novelty, but I couldn’t help laughing as I informed them that we have those literally everywhere in the midwest--we just call them steakburgers instead (although I don’t know why, smashburger is a far more appropriate term). It’s hard to tell what they might have been like separately, but together they were fairly energetic; indeed, the visit overall felt rather frenetic, and it was fun to talk with them about random things for the evening.

Finally, I had the unexpected delight of visiting Spiral back outside of San Francisco. In keeping with the previous visits, we got some delightful Hawaiin food at a place nearby and had a picnic of sorts in a local park. Spiral herself was exceedingly quiet and calm, which she later explained was caused by a busy day at work. Even with this, she offered some interesting details about the park we were eating at, and even went so far as to show me a place that she likes to sit and read in peace and quiet nearby. This visit was also short, but rather refreshing after a long period of time spent on the road.

In totality, these visits were an absolute delight to be able to participate in. It’s weird to think that I’ve met no less than five people from the HSD now, and it’s safe to say that I’ll treasure the memories of these visits likely forever. There’s always a sense of surreality in the moment where you’re both in the same area, but trying to find each other. Further, the feeling of recognition when you see their physical face for the first time is strange, but good.

There are vague plans to meet up with two more people at some point soon. These individuals will be Horse and Skyplayer, both of whom I’ve invited to my town to have pizza with. Skyplayer is moving to the east coast, while the ordeal with Horse will be in preparation for a far different visit in late October. Namely, he and I will both be going to a live episode of Perfectly Generic Podcast. It seems only sensible that going with someone you’ve met before would make it a more enjoyable experience.

Often enough, people who are less used to this process of visiting people from the internet will remark that it feels awkward and weird at first. I would be lying if I said it wasn’t weird and awkward at first, but it also doesn’t take long for that feeling to pass. If you’re really good friends with the person already, then before you know it the conversation becomes natural again, as if you’ve always spoken that way. These moments are something that are extremely important to me: getting to meet and know other people, and to become fast friends with them, is a fundamentally good thing. I wonder who else I’ll get to meet as the years go by.

Nothing more for today.

---

1^st of October 2019

For a time we figured that incoming bots would no longer be a problem. Makin raising the security level of the HSD meant that they were no longer able to message users, so we didn’t really have to do anything about them. With Pesterquest and other important things happening, though, he had lowered the security level so as not to discourage people new to Discord (the highest security level requires a verified phone number, which assuredly puts skittish people off).

We had hoped fervently that the bot waves would simply stop by this point, but the last several weeks have dashed those thoughts against a wall. As soon as the security level was lowered the reports of bot messages came trickling in again. I had personally grown despondent about this, because the idea of cleaning up all of the bots we had simply left unaccounted for was daunting. Last week though, I was taken by a fiery mood and discussed the problem with the other mods. We’re all thoroughly sick and tired of seeing bots clutter the join channel, and the reality of the matter is that it endangers our users.

In the course of an afternoon I single handedly banned 867 bot accounts going back to July (as an aside, I noticed that many of the accounts we had previously reported to Discord were in fact coming up as Deleted Users, although it’s difficult to cross reference accounts and make sure that Discord itself was responsible for this action). In addition, we talked about enacting a rotating schedule for volunteers to keep an eye on the join logs for bot accounts. There are a few mods like Shitler, Reti, and Wadapan who are on board with the idea, and their willingness to help out with this thankless task is extremely admirable.

Unfortunately, it feels like the bot accounts have become different somehow. I theorized that there was more than one botnet trying to get into the server a while back, and the patterns/characteristics of certain bots indicates that I was right: there are multiple groups of different bots trying to get into the server and harass our users. This isn’t that big of an issue normally, but I’m growing increasingly worried that there’s a new botnet which has been trained to stay online and gain a role color--both of which are features we use to distinguish real people. Regardless, there isn’t much we can do about this besides banning accounts which are obviously fake. Discord as a whole hasn’t been particularly helpful, so our hands are tied in the meantime.

We had come up with an idea to stop this before, which involved creating a verification channel to vet incoming users. It would have involved a simple passcode/agreement system to get in. Our problem with this was that we didn’t understand how bots find users to message them exactly--I figured initially that it would involve scraping the names off of the sidebar, which means as long as they’re visible then our users are vulnerable.

Qweq recently brought up a brilliant workaround to this idea, involving specific user settings that would hide the verification channel once someone gained the role to access the rest of the server. After working through the logistics of it, it seemed a perfect plan. Tmtmtl30 offered to create a bot that would accomplish the verification process, and we quickly got to work testing the system. After a bit I realized that everything necessarily depended on the idea that the bots can’t message people that aren’t visible on the sidebar, so I decided to contact DeltaPsi in order to validate our theory.

It was nice to work with Delta again; I hadn’t talked to her in a while, but even with the lengthy absence she was happy to help out. She’s more intimately familiar with bot development than Tmtm is (or any of us, for that matter) so she has access to a lot more of the toolkit and understands their limitations. After some testing, she confirmed our worst fear: bots are able to message people even in contexts where a human wouldn’t be able to see their username. This meant that our plan was, in effect, a complete waste of time.

Spiral and I discussed the issue briefly; along with others, we were both really looking forward to a potential end to any bot problem we might have. Physically keeping up with the massive waves of bot accounts is exhausting, and it’s always stressful to consider the risk to users in general. We assume that most of our users are smart enough not to click on a virus of some sort, but strictly speaking anything is possible.

This aside, the server has been experiencing some very troubling shifts in activity. I can only profess to know what’s happening on the Discord server and to some extent the subreddit; all other spheres of the fandom are outside of my scope entirely, but they’re nonetheless related. As it is, the Discord server has severely declined in activity over the last few months. September in particular has been an utter drag.

It bears stating that this is a relative assessment: I’m primarily worried about this from the perspective of someone who was around when it was more active. On a more objective basis, there’s still a hefty amount of activity for the server as a whole; most channels are actually retaining their own levels of activity. I predicted this would happen a long time ago, but it seems that the one being hit by far the hardest is altgen.

Altgen used to see over 5,000 messages on a daily basis with few exceptions, and often enough it would exceed that with room to spare. However, after getting moved to the bottom of the channel list, it’s lost a ton of steam--within the last few weeks it’s dipped down to under 500 messages a day, which is absolutely appalling. This all prompted me to ask a couple of questions: what do we want out of altgen? We envisioned it as a containment channel, did we want to keep that going or is this sort of gradual decline actually what we wanted out of it?

Valkyrie and Anervaria posited that we’re always going to need a containment channel to throw people into if they’re fucking things up too much, which I agree with. The channel declining is just a natural result of moving it out of sight and out of mind. Even more influential is a policy change enacted back in July: Makin mandated that altgen bans no longer exist, and that offenders will simply be banned from the entire server. This has a double effect of permanently removing people from the equation, as well as discouraging them from talking there in the first place.

With all of this in mind, altgen’s decline has been not only understandable, but practically inevitable. It would take a truly herculean effort to get it back to its former level of activity, but I’m not really sure anyone wants to accomplish that. From a statistical perspective it annoys me, but a lot of altgen’s contribution was mere spam and the lowest of low quality input. It’s arguable that we’re actually closer to a true representative example of how the server works without it, and it would be interesting to run a comparison based on removing the channel’s messages from the overall count.

All of this is not to say that altgen is the only place being affected by lowered activity, it’s simply the most dramatic example. The rest of the server has been marginally quieting down as well, but that’s been true ever since April 2017. The interesting point is whether or not this is true with the rest of the Homestuck fandom, and if so, to what extent. As a direct point of evidence against the idea that the rest of the fandom is also experiencing this downturn, the subreddit has actually been experiencing a slight increase in activity since about February of this year (the earliest point at which I was able to get statistical information for the subreddit).

However, Makin disputes this: he firmly believes that the entire fandom is experiencing this shrinkage, but that the subreddit is still experiencing some limited growth because of an influx of fans from Twitter. I’ve seen no explicit evidence confirming this idea and am inclined to disregard it, but a couple of things are worth pointing out here: first it would be difficult to get any sort of quantitative understanding of Homestuck Twitter because of its very nature. The platform prohibits the formation of any sort of centralized groups that one may observe, instead it’s rather fluid or even chaotic.

This gives rise to the second thing, which is that I feel the only metric--as bad as it is--that one could possibly use to determine a population shift is the behavior of so-called Big Name Fans. Without getting into too much detail, one might be able to keep track of where specific content is coming from, both in terms of who’s creating it and where it’s being posted. This runs into a few problems though, such as actually drafting a process that can reliably do this and produce information in the first place. Even more important is that this would be an undeniably creepy process, and it would be arguably unethical to keep track of people’s posting habits in this manner.

Returning to the main idea here, with the minor exception of the subreddit it does seem that the entire Homestuck fandom continues to shrink. Unfortunately, there isn’t anything to be done about this; the overall problem is not that any of these places are explicitly bad (it’s most fair to say that they appeal to different people for specific reasons. It would be remiss of me to avoid saying that I personally, immensely dislike Twitter as a platform and think it’s an awful space for fandom activity), but that there is a marked decrease in new fans coming into the fandom. If I’ve said this once I’ve probably said it a hundred times: no matter what kind of community you are, you need a steady influx of new users or your base will become smaller.

What could be responsible for this gradual loss of size? After some consideration, the most likely explanation is source content. That is to say, as time goes by the fandom needs more work to subsist off of or else it’ll stagnate. Pesterquest coming out was a small gust of wind in the sails, so to speak, but I think it runs into a problem: who is the audience? Who exactly is Pesterquest targeted towards?

The simplest and most correct answer is that Pesterquest is targeted towards people who are already fans of Homestuck. The game and its story are still in their early stages, but the narrative already resembles that of the Hiveswap Friendsims to a great degree. Both games revolve around concepts and developments that would be utterly lost on people who have never read Homestuck before. In short, they are derivative works. There is nothing wrong with this by itself, but it becomes an issue when these are the main--realistically only--sources of substantial content coming out of What Pumpkin (P.S. Hiveswap celebrated the second anniversary of Act 1's release on the 14^th of September. The community is disappointed that it's taking so long, but also trying its best to be understanding--there were a flurry of artposts dedicated to the topic which were variously supportive and wholesome, or at least just commemorative).

To bring all of this around, the problem is that the Friendsims and now Pesterquest are only enjoyable for or attractive to a really narrow audience. They require prior knowledge of something that was already kind of difficult to get into, which means they likely aren’t pulling new people into the fandom. Thus the problem: if the desire of the creators is to make something that existing fans will like, then they’re doing a pretty good job overall. If they want to do something like draw new people in--or, relatedly, make money--then this is not going to accomplish that goal.

Purposefully appealing to only a specific band of people will lead to obscurity. In some contexts this is both understandable and preferable: not every work can or even should be something that attracts everyone. However, the team working on Pesterquest, and especially whoever’s working on the Homestuck property as a whole, need to figure out how to draw in new people entirely to the fandom. Without that influx the fandom will continue to decline, and eventually things like Pesterquest won’t have an audience to begin with.

With all of this dreary stuff about the state of things, I do think it’s important to highlight that really cool and new things do come out of the fandom even now. Recently we’ve become increasingly aware of a fan project called Felt Mansion. Developed by a group from France and released about a month ago, this game is styled as a classic RPG and wrapped up development just back in August.

Overall, the game is an absolute beauty. It’s not perfect by any means, but the amount of care and love put into it is plainly evident. I’ve only started playing it within the last couple of days, but Makin finished it wholesale before announcing it to everyone on the server. He has done nothing short of sing its praises, which is remarkable--he typically has more negative than positive things to say about any given work, so the fact that he enjoys it so much is worthy of note.

After the announcement in question, more and more people have at least deigned to give it a try. The first part of it seems to be hard to get through, but after that a lot of people have been properly hooked. The game itself is chock full of little references to things both in the comic proper and fandom in-jokes--the attention to detail is nothing short of magnificent. It’s also important to note that the game has between ten to twenty hours of content, which is patently absurd for a fan project.

Indeed, this is doing a great job of tiding us over while waiting for more official content. The fourth episode of Pesterquest comes out tomorrow, which people are naturally excited for, but that content in particular is so little spread over such a long period of time. It’s good to have more than just that to go off of in the meantime--many, including myself, are hoping that this wonderful fan game inspires more people in the fandom to engage creatively and make their own things.

Relatedly, another neat fandom project to come out yesterday early in the morning is a fanzine led by yoitscro, entitled Pro8lematic Faves, in development since March 14^th of this year. “Problematic faves” is a term originating from Tumblr referring to people (or in this case, characters from a story) who exhibit viewpoints or engage in behavior that is seen as bigoted, but are still widely celebrated by a large group of people. Thus, the focus of the zine is characters who cause problems but are still well-liked by a huge portion of the fandom.

The primary focus of the zine is art, which was contributed by over 50 different people. All of those involved appear rather talented--after pouring through the zine for a while, every single piece of work has clearly had a lot of time and care put into it, and some even come with commentary from the people who made them. As a bonus, there’s a short fanfic of sorts written by Aysha Farah involving a heavily fourth-wall-breaking discussion with one of the antagonists from the Epilogues.

Again, it’s important to pick out these sorts of things out of the fandom and celebrate them. I would feel that way even if the fandom wasn’t contracting, or even if it was expanding; one of the measures by which a property is judged is how much the fans love it and engage with it. Seeing works like Felt Mansion or Pro8lematic Faves is a good sign, although it’s hard not to miss the days where it felt like such things came out more often.

It’s my fond hope that, at some point, we may approach a balance: surely there must be a level of activity where everything feels new and exciting and one never runs out of stuff to look at, but without becoming overwhelming. After some time to consider it, the Homestuck fandom back at its most active between 2011-2013 was absolutely unwieldy and contained a fair share of undesirable people who did nothing but feed off of the mania. My bias is peaking through considering the time and conditions under which I started writing this document, but perhaps how things were (or at least felt) back in 2016 and 2017 would be ideal. Maybe someday we’ll see that again.

Nothing more for today.

---

24^th of October 2019

On the 11^th of October, we were made aware through an Instagram post that Hussie dropped off three more toblerones in Taiwan. I discovered this information really quickly for once, so I made sure to inform Makin, who happens to be in the area for unknown reasons. He said that the chances of grabbing one would be unlikely, as the cache was somewhat far away from him, but that he would try.

I asked him to pick one up for me if he made it in time. As it happens, he was successful and did indeed get there on time. Graciously he picked one up for himself and “one for drew who desperately begged me to get him one,” as he said it. This was a very exciting opportunity and the fact that it worked out in our favor was rather miraculous. Over the next several days it only seemed to get weirder though.

On the 19^th of October, Hussie dropped off 20 more toblerones in South Korea. A fan from the subreddit, /u/lasagnaphil, was the first to find the bag later at night, but before he could replace it he was ushered out of the park by a guard. This lead to confusion in the morning as other Korean fans came by, with some angry that the entire bag was already gone. Thankfully phil brought the bag back and offered up his own toblerone as an apology for the incident. At this point, Hussie made it clear that he’s granting wishes for all of these toblerones now, including the ones from Taiwan.

As an aside, my toblerone actually isn’t eligible for a wish because I didn’t pick it up myself. I later emailed Hussie about this: after some quick introspection I already felt bad that I had taken the opportunity to get some fandom memorabilia away from a local, but the wish on top made it feel like a true waste. I asked him if he would grant the wish if we deposited the toblerone bar somewhere else in the area and he said yes. Thus, Makin will drop the chocolate bar off somewhere in Asia at some point in November and we’ll probably turn it into a small event if possible.

Makin, on the other hand, did in fact receive a wish. Most of those we know about have been for relatively simple things, such as canonizing an idea in Homestuck proper (a la June Egbert), or including a fan character in official properties. Makin’s wish was not simple: he wants the MSPA forums back. He recognizes the unlikelihood of getting them back in a useable form, but he described that he would be fine with only getting the archives for them if they exist. He calculated that there are over 2,000,000 posts about fan works on the forums that were completely lost after they got hacked. Since making the wish he has not updated us on the results, but he has not said they were a failure either. If we’re really, really lucky, then perhaps he will be successful in his efforts.

To return to the original topic, the toblerone developments have been rather exciting for most. It’s become a question of “where will the next batch be found?” though it’s hard bordering on impossible to predict such things. The reason Hussie was traveling in Asia is not publicly known, and there’s little reason to believe that he’ll purposefully travel anywhere else soon. That having been said, something did happen on the evening of the 24th that caught us all by surprise.

The official Homestuck Twitter account posted a picture of a pen box in a place called Baldwin Park in Chapel Hill, North Carolina (where the live episode of Pgenpodcast I’m going to on the 26th will be located). This is a departure from the norm so far: we’ve exclusively found out about toblerone caches through Hussie’s Instagram account, and so far it hasn’t been just one bar in each place. The pen box is likely not big enough to contain even a single toblerone, and it was posted on the Homestuck Twitter, so naturally this sparked curiosity: what’s in the box?

METY, fellow mod on the subreddit, actually lives in Chapel Hill, and as soon as he heard about the post he set off to grab the pen box. In lieu of writing about the occasion myself, he actually took the time to write up the events of the meeting. The next several paragraphs will be his writing entirely, as enclosed in brackets.

{I was lucky enough to have my plans at the time the tweet made it to Discord unceremoniously cancelled, so I went back to my dorm room, checked Lit like usual, and saw the tweet announcing the pen box drop. Now, I spent the last few weeks hoping against hope that there'd be a toblerone at the Chapel Hill Pgenpod live show because that wasn't completely impossible. So I looked at the tweet, didn't recognize the sculpture, and almost gave up on the map because it wasn't aligned north/south but then I saw something that was in my town and lost my shit.

I knew immediately I had to go. This was my task. Something like this NEVER happens here in my suburban corner of the country, it's always in some big city. I'd waited my entire life since I was aware of them waiting for an ARG like this to happen near me-- and now I'm at an age where I can just randomly leave in the middle of the night to do something like this. This was my opportunity, and I, like everyone else at the time, was convinced it was a wish toblerone. This was IT. I'm doing it man. I'm making this hapen.

I called up my friend who has a car, and she soon picked me up (after I ran to a closer location so we could save even the slightest amount of time). However, about halfway through the (~10 minute) car ride I found out that someone else already got there, but all the toblerone drops had more than one prize and we thought the person who found it might still be there, so we kept going.

Nobody was there when we got there, though. I was kind of in denial and searched a ton of increasingly unlikely places, including the empty box they'd hid it in multiple times, but we just hung around and tried to contact the one who found it in hopes that they'd come back and show it to us.

After about 10 minutes of this, a group of four guys, including meems, from a school about 45 minutes away showed up. And Cro, the big name cosplayer and a guest at upcoming the pgenpod live show got there at about the same time. (I actually asked if she was Aysha at first because she introduced herself as someone in the show, and even though I know what Aysha looks like I didn't want to embarrass myself by not recognizing her, if it had been her.) Both of them had to come from a lot farther than I did, and as far as I can tell I would've made it there first if I heard about the tweet earlier. (GOD DAMN IT)

Cro was very talkative and nice, we talked about the live show and our presences on different Homestuck media platforms. When she first got there, we asked her if she had any advance knowledge about this, but she said she'd rushed over when she saw the tweet just like the rest of us.

I kept anxiously refreshing the Twitter of the one who found it but got nothing except that they drove back with it and would reveal it once they returned home. This only added to my disappointment because the absolute first thing I would've done if I got it (besides freak out) would have been to post it to the Discord. It was so exciting to have all these people count on me for something like this, it was a little like being the guy who found the E Bear.

But the impromptu meetup was still fun. More people kept arriving, and most of them who hadn't shown up by then were teens driven by their parents, and they'd roll down the window and we'd go "Looking for toblerones?" and "Nope, they're gone." It was actually kind of funny how often that happened, there were like 4 of them. Cro kept introducing herself to the teens and advertising the live show, so I did a lot of talking with the group of four.

It is just absolutely surreal to meet someone who knows about all this bullshit you know about because you spend too much time on a specific corner of the Internet, and ESPECIALLY when it's not because you told them about it. Meems put his hands on his head and gasped as if he was going NUT when I told him I'm meeting up with Drew, and later when I said that I'm on a CaNMT album. (His side of the story is also probably worth hearing from.) We threw around terms that my much less involved friend found crazy-- "Makin", "Dave's eyes, curiosity satisfied", "Vrasky" "What is your hottest Retcon take?" I've never even met someone in real life before who's read CaNWC, so it was just… insane. It was so fucking awesome even if I was still disappointed.

And so I was pretty happy as we all decided to leave. My friend ended up driving Cro back to her car with me and we talked about her meeting Aysha and Hussie, she described Hussie as "as soft-spoken as a gentlehorse" which is consistent with everything I've heard about what he's like in person. Oh and of course I talked to her about Vriska because duh. Cro says Kate mischaracterized her beliefs on Vriska and she doesn't actually hate her, and I just admitted to her that I still wish Vriska had stayed dead.

Cro came across as extremely nice and I'm looking forward to seeing her again at the live show. We dropped her off and my friend and I just hung out, and that's when the one who found it posted the letter. I got angry again about missing out on that, especially since they posted a bunch of Vriska stuff with their friends but mostly it was just knowing I was SO CLOSE.

This story isn't even over yet. I'm about to see all of these people again at the live show, almost certainly plus the people who actually got the pen box. Right now, though, I just can't believe any of this ever happened, and I know I'm never going to forget it.}

Clearly, the evening turned out well. It was a pleasant surprise that Meems is also in the area, and now all three of us (and a few others) will be getting food together before the Pgenpodcast episode starts--it’s an exciting occasion, and I look forward to it greatly.

The actual victor of the hunt is one NihilisticNips on Twitter, who posted the contents of the box shortly after returning to their home. It contains a high quality bar of beef bacon (or at least the wrapper) and a note signed by: Aysha U. Farah, the creator of Pgenpodcast Kate Mitchell, and a writer for the various Homestuck properties named Lalo Hunt. The note in its entirety says: “We represent a small faction of radicals who have seized control of the narrative. Inside this box is not the wish-fulfilling candy of an eboy. This is the salted meat of cold, hard canonicity.” This can be interpreted in a lot of ways, although with the significant meme date 10/25 coming up tomorrow, it can hardly be unimportant.

In true meme date fashion, there are whispers among the ranks that something big is going to happen tomorrow. There is no strong confirmation or denial from any WP officials at this point, which only seems to intensify the possibility. Common bets are that it will be an announcement for Hiveswap Act 2, although at this point it seems foolish to place hope in the notion. There are other possibilities, but nothing solidly founded. Time, as always, will tell what happens.

Not everyone is strictly happy about these developments, though. It’s important to note that several people, including such individuals as cookiefonster, Red, tmtm, MrNostalgic, and a slew of others, are disgruntled for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the general idea of passing Homestuck as a property off to other people (for example, Red states: “if u are making homestuck anything and u are not andrew i am sorry i dont want it”).

There is also ample concern over whether WP will actually release longform, substantial content again. If such content does come out, naysayers suspect that it won’t be good, or they describe that their interest has simply waned too much. Spiral commented: “i dont even care about act 2 anymore because i dont think i am going to particularly enjoy it / *assuming it comes out,” which just about encapsulates the less enthused members of the group.

One person in particular was significantly more upset about the ordeal. Misha was uncharacteristically cynical about all of this, saying in totality: “this is what homestuck is now.” When asked for clarification, he expressed sadness that the enormous story and fandom has dwindled to its current state. He’s particularly upset at the idea that the fandom now seems to consist of dozens (hundreds at most) of hardcore, ultra-dedicated fans, many of which are focused on gaining recognition for still being around.

A recognizable term for this idea is clout, which I first heard in connection with how Twitter’s platform works. Fans with more followers and recognition than others have more clout, which means that they effectively have more power and sway in the community. This is largely seen as a positive thing on Twitter and similar platforms like Tumblr, but it’s not seen as important on the Subreddit and Discord (if the notion is not in fact looked down upon by some).

In effect, Misha thinks that the fandom has been reduced to a small number of fierce fans who scramble for clout through any means possible, and that the physical prizes found in small ARGs like the Toblerones or the signed letter are simply the logical conclusion of this behavior. He finds this depressing compared to the vast, sprawling form that the fandom used to have back in its heyday, or even just a few years ago.

I can sympathize with this viewpoint, although I don’t really see where else the fandom could have gone. I’ve been saying literally since I started writing this document that Homestuck fans were doomed to fade away as time went by, and this sort of narrowing focus was inevitable without something to spur intense growth like we witnessed back in the early 2010s. I am not really saddened with what we’re doing now, but more that the state of things got to this condition in the first place.

It may still prove to be that this perception is inaccurate, which is a small piece of hope. Lurkers are still an important aspect of things in that they don’t post at all, which means they essentially take content in without giving anything back. There is a not-insignificant chance that the vast majority (as in, over 90% probably) of Homestuck fans do this, and are simply waiting for something truly big to happen before they bother to participate again. The alternative is that the only people left who care at all are, as I said before, the ultra-dedicated.

I sincerely hope that this is not the case. A few times when we heard of a toblerone being found, and especially with the pen box tonight, I was hoping that the fan who made the discovery would be someone completely unknown to our circle. Yet each time I have somehow been disappointed--the pen box even was found by a friend of Skyplayer’s. It feels like there is a solid set of 50-100 fans who are all at least tangentially aware of or related to each other. I desperately wish for new blood to be introduced to the fandom so as to keep things fresh and interesting.

Regardless, some of the old energy has necessarily seeped into things what with 10/25 coming up soon. Makin is preoccupied--extraordinarily busy even--such that he neglected to set up a community stream. I’ve gained enough experience that I decided to take up that mantle, and it will be the first time I’m handling the stream completely by myself. Such occasions are always fun, and I’m looking forward to what we can do with it. Coupled with the possibility of an official announcement tomorrow, things feel alright at the moment. If I were to offer any words to my friends in the community: these moments of positivity are precious, and it’s important that we hold on to them while we can.

Nothing more for today.

---

25^th of October 2019

Today has been far more interesting than any of us could have reasonably expected when we woke up. At 9 AM EST, there was a twitter post from Kate stating that there would be a “message” three hours later. With nothing left to do in the interim, everything proceeded as normal. The community stream was scheduled for 1 PM EST and to last about 6 hours, so as to accommodate those in European timezones, as well as American.

As we usually do we had a prestream starting about an hour and a half before the stream proper. Then, as promised the message was released: to complete shock, Homestuck 2 was announced, and the first update released. Stylized as Homestuck^2: Beyond Canon, the description states that the outline was written by Hussie, but the actual production of content is being guided entirely by a team of numerous individuals. It states that Hussie and Kate “initially led” the writing, but it is now being done by a team of people including Aysha U. Farah, Lalo Hunt, “fandom talents” including a Pip Dillistone and optimisticDuelist (all four as writers). Xamag is also on the project, heading the art team.

It bears repeating that this is far and beyond anything we could possibly have expected. The site was announced today officially and also included about 30 pages of content already. Reactions were severely mixed--as to be expected--but the surge in activity is nothing short of incredible. There have been dozens of posts on the subreddit and over 30,000 messages on the Discord server today, and with the way that the release schedule is planned (monthly, but with the possibility of more frequent content) there is hope that we’ll have plenty to talk about for ages to come.

It’s important to note that certain aspects of this have been heavily criticized by the Homestuck fandom on a near ubiquitous basis though. There is the ability to support the team creating Homestuck 2 through a Patreon account with four tiers: $2, $5, $20, and $100. The description for the $20 tier specifically mentions “side stories” and other material that won’t be available to non-backers, and this specific detail seems to be by far the most contentious thing to come out of today.

The actual quality of the comic has drawn mixed comments, with some praising the format (a mix of the more visual nature of Homestuck proper with some of the prose of the Epilogues, which are being labeled respectively as “panels” and “prattles”) and expressing thanks that there will in fact be a continuation of the story at all. Detractors have pointed out that there is some visual artifacting from improper scaling of objects in the panels, and that the prose is often longer than necessary (this is probably temporary, but time will tell).

Unfortunately, things got heated to the point of vitriol in various spots: someone on the subreddit created a post decrying Aysha’s involvement, describing it as a pyramid where she’s at the top at the expense of people underneath her, and especially the fandom at large. This was already disrespectful enough to warrant being removed, but then in the comments the original poster and another began spreading objective lies about Kate and their involvement in the Homestuck fandom.

There may be plenty of reasons to dislike Kate, although I can’t speak to the veracity of any of them myself, but spreading lies and being disrespectful to the point of inciting hatred is point blank unacceptable, and after some deliberation I banned them. Though I appreciate the return to activity, I forgot that there is a small, active portion of every fandom that somehow makes things miserable for everyone else.

Similarly though, Misha was so rankled with today’s proceedings that he practically exploded over it all, stating that the team in charge of things were “mocking, attacking, and depriving the audience of content.” His viewpoint was echoed (far less strongly, though) by members such as TartyTart. This all felt like an inappropriately strong condemnation bordering on bad faith, so I asked for some clarification. He is operating under the assumption that the production team is 100% aware of all of the criticisms levied against it, and claims that they are going so far as to actively ignore it.

A significant reason for Misha’s upset involves the Patreon paywall, which he is inordinately furious about. Otherwise, he has asserted that the tone with which the new team has taken over the property is agitating. He compares it to longstanding works such as comic books like Spiderman: “... I feel in any other franchise when the writer's baton is passed there's a certain degree of / respect and anticipation? / like ‘oh man I hope you guys can like what I make’ / here it's been replaced by a disinterest and passive aggressiveness that well / I can't even call defensive.” Personally I’ve noted this feeling in previous altercations with WP staff, but not today with the release of Homestuck 2. I’m not on any extreme side of this argument so I feel particularly unequipped to discuss this at length.

Upon further reflection, there are other, similar details that I could write down about this, but it doesn’t feel particularly wise or prudent to do so at this point in time. There are accusations being levied, but I can’t find any proof to substantiate or refute them, so I’m going to avoid including such things in this document. The overall point is, I had hoped that the rifts in the fandom might be healing as time went by, but clearly there is still a lot of room for anger between disparate parts. I’m annoyed that an occasion like this has been marred by such divisions, whether ancient or contemporary in nature.

It’s difficult to tell where this might go. Historically, the members of the fandom I’ve talked to have often complained about their criticisms and concerns going completely unrecognized by officials, which is a more than understandable problem. Conversely, members of the production team more than likely feel overwhelmed with the amount of people trying to provide feedback, to the point that they can’t hope to address it all even if they want to.

I can only hope that some sort of system is put in place where communication is easier to accomplish so that this intense divide can be healed in earnest as Homestuck 2 goes forward. To be sure, the fandom at large is not always reasonable or accurate in their assessment of things. However, when appropriate and legitimate criticisms are brought forth, there is an onus on the people in charge of the project to do their best to listen and address problems.

This aside, the rest of the day was still rather interesting. The community stream proceeded well (if a little derailed by the Homestuck 2 announcement), but another rather upsetting development showed up partway through the day. Someone noticed that all of the music albums on the Homestuck Bandcamp page was being rearranged, with significant alterations to the organization and removal of some content like album or song covers.

I’m not privy to the exact details of what’s going on, but I’ve been informed that this is extremely bad by Makin and a few others. Reorganization means that credits to the composers linked in a wide variety of places are now completely worthless, and no one is sure why this is being done in the first place (one possibility is that the music is being prepared to be put on Spotify). The production team for Homestuck 2 and WP made it clear that they were not responsible for the change, which means that Viz is entirely to blame.

This development, combined with the chronic inability to contact anyone at Viz with regards to Homestuck and an enormous host of problems with the website, has made people progressively more upset as time goes by. There is notably increasing anti-capitalist sentiment on the Homestuck Discord, some of it joking and some of it very genuine. Viz messing with things like this with no realistic oversight has only deepened those sentiments, and now people across the entire Homestuck fandom fear the fact that Homestuck as a property is now subject to the whims of corporate interests.

Though some of it was rather unfortunate, today was absolutely wild with activity; it was wind beneath my wings to experience it, although at this point it’s unclear how consistent or sustained the increase in activity will be. I’m disappointed that the fandom feels as fractured as ever, but there is nothing for it except to keep on suing for peace between people. Maybe someday this goal will even be realized--who knows what’s in store for us as time goes by?

Nothing more for today.

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26^thof October 2019 - Pgenpodcast Live Showing

As I’ve said would happen in recent entries, I attended a live recording of Perfectly Generic Podcast today. This introductory statement is way too simple to fully encapsulate today’s proceedings; it was a wild event from start to finish, and it reminded me of things that I did all the way back in 2013 and 2014 within the fandom, stuff I had all but forgotten.

In the introduction to this document I briefly state that I attended some meetups in real life with other Homestuck fans from my area back when I first started reading the comic, but I never described these meetups to any degree. There’s one event that stands out most in my mind, which the Pgenpodcast showing reminded me of: a simple outing to a park in the city nearest where I used to live back in college.

It’s rather cliche to say, but things felt simpler back then. There was a simple but potent magic to getting together with other people to celebrate the webcomic, which compared to the fandom nowadays, felt markedly less polarized or cynical. The meetup I have in mind was organized by someone who went by the handle of “Kc Nubs McShouty III,” a name lifted almost wholesale from Homestuck proper.

A group of about one or two dozen people showed up to the park in the afternoon. We didn’t do anything particularly exciting together, but rather we just cooked some food or shared snacks we brought with each other and talked about ourselves and the comic. To be honest it was a fairly pedestrian event in terms of the fandom’s level of activity back then. Yet, like I said, there was something magical to it. That afternoon was something I remembered fondly for a long time afterwards, specifically because of the connections I made with the people there.

Going to the podcast recording today was like blasting my brain with that feeling, which I had all but forgotten. It was something of a shock when I recognized the sensation, and the realization of what was going on was so exciting as to be almost physically agitating. In order to effectively convey this idea, I’ll write as complete an accounting of today’s events as I can (as a warning to easily bored readers: this will contain a lot of details that are almost certainly superfluous, but I feel obligated to be as thorough as possible in order to satisfy the curiosity of various people who weren’t present).

Before the show proper, I arrived in Chapel Hill at around 3:30 PM. METY, Meems, and I all had plans to get together, talk, and enjoy some food. After similarly meeting with Toast, Spiral, Tera, and Barry in California, I thought of something: meeting in real life with people I first met online has always been an invigorating and meaningful experience for me, ever since I started doing so nearly a decade ago. I decided that I want to commemorate such experiences with a gift to the people I happen to meet.

In highschool, thanks to a friend in my history class I learned how to knit. I haven’t developed that skill terribly much, but I have made countless scarves as gifts for people on various occasions. It’s a rather specific item, but they look nice and have utility. More importantly, it feels more meaningful to make something myself than to buy something, so scarves are usually my go-to when I want to show my appreciation for someone.

I made scarves for all of the people I met in California and shipped them out at the beginning of this week, as well as a small letter to each. Similarly, I made six scarves for people I would be meeting with today. The first person I encountered was METY, with whom I spoke for a solid hour. We were both rather taken with the fact that we had the opportunity to attend the show, and to meet with each other in real life, and we wondered exactly how the show would proceed as we were both unfamiliar with the format or its typical content.

Meems arrived soon after, and together with a couple of his friends, five of us went to get pizza before the show. I’ve mentioned before that meeting with people in real life like this is initially awkward, but this time it didn’t quite feel that way. There was too much excitement to worry much about how we spoke with each other, or if we were being embarrassing.

Half an hour before the show started we decided to go to the venue and find good seats. Aysha U. Farah, Kate, and Cro were all on stage already and setting up and speaking with members of the crowd. Meems, METY, and the others found seats in the front row, but I admit I was a little nervous; I always worry about imposing on other people or taking up their time, so initially I sat without going up to speak with the hosts. Appropriately, my silence was broken when Horse showed up.

Horse didn’t share my particular concerns, and he worked quickly. He asked if I was indeed Drew, and after I affirmed so, he sat down next to me and we small talked for a bit. After giving him his scarf, I also gave METY and Meems theirs. At this point, Horse claimed that Kate had actually confused us for each other, and asked him if he was me. I had no idea why Kate would be asking after me, but before I could figure out why, Horse got the attention of both Kate and Aysha, and pointed me out to them.

I was still immensely nervous at this point, but they were both more than welcoming. After introducing ourselves to each other, I decided to hand out the rest of the scarves. To specify, I had already asked Aysha if she would like one some time ago, which she was receptive to. I initially hadn’t planned to bring a scarf for Kate or Cro; I simply don’t know Cro, and there has been a decidedly tense history between Kate and various figures on the HSD and subreddit.

However, I felt like this was an important opportunity to share some good will. It feels weird and difficult to assess why things have been tense in the past, due both to the fact that I wasn’t personally around for whatever happened, and that it feels like old history in general. Regardless of any details from the past, the here and now are a different matter. This is also cliche to say, but sometimes a kind word or action can make a big difference. I feel like I already come from a plausibly neutral position (while still acknowledging that I’m necessarily biased), so I decided that I would make a scarf for Kate anyway.

I was vaguely apprehensive about this because I wasn’t sure how they would feel about a gift from someone who’s a relative stranger, but both Kate and Cro (as well as Aysha) seemed delighted when I gave them off. I’m extremely glad that my offerings were accepted and made them happy, and in retrospect I think this set the tone for when the show started.

I won’t go into details on the content of the show as a whole (once the episode is released I’ll edit this entry with a link to it for anyone who wants the full experience). As an overall appraisal, it was far more entertaining than I expected it would be. I would be lying if I said I was spellbound or that it appealed specifically to me as an individual, but all three of them are actually pretty good entertainers. I found myself laughing at their jokes, and what they had to say was entertaining and even quite interesting at times (for a bulleted list of major features of the show, see this post that METY made in the subreddit).

The second half hour of the show was a Q&A session, but directly prior to this Kate specifically mentioned me and the rest of the subreddit/Discord team and said that we were doing a great job taking care of our communities. This comment by itself already took me by surprise, but then she went on to say that at this point she “has no beef” with our sections of the fandom. This was immensely gratifying to hear, although after some consideration I’m not sure it’s quite that simple.

I take these statements as a good sign that all parties involved are at least trying to work towards "bridging gaps" and stopping hostilities between each other. I think that more conflicts in the future will be impossible to avoid simply because of how many people are involved, not to speak of opposing personalities and ideologies (a pertinent example may be found in the comments section of the thread METY made--there are some significant reservations from a lot of fandom members who seem particularly mistrustful of what’s going on, or are extremely skeptical). Hopefully with increased communication and interaction with each other, newly developing problems can be resolved quickly and in a more peaceable manner.

I’ve been keeping it quiet for the last couple of months because I wasn’t sure how appropriate it is to talk about it, but Aysha and Kate spoke of it during the show, so I feel like it’s fine to write about: Aysha has her own private server where a number of people from numerous parts of the fandom have been talking for several weeks now. Her personal friends were invited organically, and others of us gained access by willingly donating a few dollars to her Patreon in support.

During the show, Aysha said that her server has become something of a “demilitarized zone,” which is a rather apt description. Whenever chief members of each side have talked in any serious capacity it has been an extraordinarily tense process (Kate overtly described this during the show, mentioning how she and Makin argue with each other), but every single time I feel like the overall result is at least a mild decrease in hostilities. It may be that this process is what precipitated in Kate’s comments during the show, although it’s hard to say.

To be clear, I’m loath to describe anyone and anything in Aysha’s server with any significant detail. It’s private for a reason, and even if it weren’t for that, I don’t feel like I understand the people there or their history enough to say anything of importance. They deserve their privacy, and I will not say anything more of matters transpiring there without their explicit awareness and permission.

This all being said, I didn’t have much time after the show to rub elbows, but there were a number of fun interactions I feel are worth recording. I got to say hello to NihilisticNips, the recipient of the pen box at the nearby park (METY was polite but still reasonably salty after losing the prize to them). A very kind member of Aysha’s server, Wren, found me after the show and offered me a sticker of a character from Homestuck, which she was handing out to various people. I had the opportunity to speak with someone who used the subreddit a long time ago but has since stopped. It was very loud and I had a hard time hearing them (to the point that, regrettably, I didn’t quite catch their name), but it was nice to meet someone else and listen to what they had to say of their experiences.

Before we left the venue, I had an idea: signed Toblerones are Hussie’s thing, but I had a box of Sour Patch Kids I had purchased to eat on the lengthy ride home after the show. Struck with sudden inspiration, I asked Aysha, Kate, and Cro to all sign the box, which they graciously agreed to do. I’m pleased that I now have ostensibly the only relic in the Homestuck fandom quite like it. As she was signing it, Aysha made a comment to the effect that she and the other hosts were “the Sour Patch Kids.” It’s quite unlikely, but a small part of me hopes that the label sticks in some way--I found it rather funny.

After everyone--a considerable group of about three dozen people--left the venue, I needed to leave very quickly in order to make it home at a reasonable time. The crowd decided to make its way to the park where the pen box (or as someone called it, the Meat Spot) was placed on the 24th. This was in the direction of my car, so I got to spend a little more time talking with METY and Horse before I left.

METY and I, for our part, were utterly gobsmacked with how the day went. At one point I specifically described it as “insane,” to which Horse responded, “You think that’s insane? Watch this,” and without another word handed METY no less than $40. He steadfastly refused to take it back, but METY seemed uncomfortable keeping it for himself. I suggested that he give it to Meems, who was the one who paid for our food before the show. Unfortunately Meems had already left, and METY gave some of the money to NihilisticNips, which I found rather amusing given the circumstances.

In person, Horse seemed both more and less mellow than I expected. This could be explained by the fact that, as he claims, he was awake for over 30 hours by the time the show started. He didn’t do anything wild or crazy, at least not overtly, but there were small things that stuck out to me. At one point on our walk towards the park, he began to kick his feet against the pavement and seemed to do a little jig as he walked. METY and I wordlessly exchanged a glance at this, but of course it was completely inoffensive--it was just one of many strange things in the day.

To be honest, there are so many more details like this that happened today which I could describe, but what I’ve mentioned here is already a lot. Anymore would just bloat the entry, and would be kind of a distraction from the overall point: this was a very good event. At one point it felt like I had been transported directly back into 2013 and was at that meetup with Nubs McShouty III again. Obviously things are different now, but I was reminded of how it used to feel to be truly excited about what was going on.

I’ve often complained about the fandom shrinking, ever more as time goes by. I still hold that this is an important trend that should be counteracted if possible, but I wouldn’t be doing my due diligence in writing this if I didn’t look at the other hand. The Homestuck community is indeed smaller now than it used to be, but the spirit of it is very much still alive. It looks different now, but after today I think I’m more okay with that. Skeptics and cynics abound, but I have some hope that they can be brought around to enjoying Homestuck again.

I’m still going to push for getting more people involved and expanding the fandom’s size (an increasing audience is strictly necessary to make this a successful venture, at least in a financial sense), but I’m personally a bit more comfortable with the way things are going right now. There are a lot of people who are unhappy or mistrustful of the team in charge of Homestuck 2, which given the contentious history of the fandom is kind of understandable; Misha’s comments yesterday serve as a potent example of this mistrust, and it’s going to be a lengthy process for the production team to overcome (although, in accordance with the idea that you can’t please everyone, it’s difficult to say whether this will even be possible in some cases).

I think it’s important to emphasize that, while I’m very interested in maintaining peace between different parts of the fandom, I’m also supremely concerned with making sure that the audience feels heard, and that what they have to say is properly recognized by people in charge. While high profile members of the fandom interacting with each other is a good start, it would be completely inappropriate to forget users in general and how they fit into things. The least I and others can do is keep trying to reach out to people, and especially to keep the peace. With luck, I think that this could all turn out to be something truly wonderful.

Nothing more for today.

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28^thof October 2019

There were conversations some days ago concerning the Homestuck wiki which have turned up again for various reasons today. Though I didn’t fully understand why at the time, people on the HSD talked for a long time about how we could make a new Homestuck wiki and how much work would be involved. The reasoning, I gathered, was that the article quality on the current wiki is pretty specious at times, and that it was significantly difficult to add new information or create new articles. However, I thought this was a passive problem: new discussions today revealed that it’s more serious.

According to various users, apparently a vast majority of admins responsible for upkeep on the Homestuck wiki have become totally inactive. It seems there is only one minor admin left named Blackhole, who is stubbornly refusing to allow the creation of new articles (or amendment of extant ones) that address content outside of Homestuck proper, such as the Epilogues or Homestuck 2. Combined with criticism aimed at the entire Fandom website (centered on horrible support and monopolistic tendencies, if I recall), people are openly discussing the options available to address these problems.

One such suggestion was to engage in wiki edit wars--or as someone else described them, “revisionist attacks.” Essentially, the plan would be to get as many people as possible to add new information to the wiki and essentially overwhelm the admin so that they aren’t able to remove everything. Personally this seems ill-advised, because wiki admins have the ability to do mass rollbacks with little effort involved. No matter how many edits or contributions are made to the wiki, returning it to a state from before the new edits would be trivial, and it would render the effort wasted.

The other suggestion, which as I said was already in discussion some days ago, is to create a new wiki. There are a number of options available for doing so, such as using Fandom again, another wiki generator, or making an independent website wholesale. These choices already entail some difference in how much effort would be required to pursue the project. However, the true difficulty is less in determining what platform should be used, and more in the fact that there’s simply so much information to be catalogued and organized.

Homestuck by itself, let alone considering all of the stuff associated with it, has a ridiculous amount of stuff involved. Merely creating pages for everything worthy of discussion and interpretation would be a herculean task, not to speak of actually filling those pages with accurate information. Enforcing quality standards on top of that makes it seem all the more daunting, to the point that it’s unclear if there’s anyone dedicated enough to make it happen.

Makin commented on this issue, saying that because of the sheer amount of work involved, he expects that it won’t actually be accomplished. If there are websites that get created (one such already having been made for Homestuck 2), then they won’t be populated appropriately and will essentially fail due to lack of upkeep. This is a rather grim portrait of the future, but one can always hope he’s wrong, as we often do when he makes such predictions.

More relevant to the HSD in particular, it turns out that Makin’s Toblerone wish did not work out. It seems that at some point while the forum pages were being transferred between servers, the data became corrupted. Some users such as Niklink and Kratospie suggested the possibility that the data is still recoverable if we were to consult a specialist, but there are a lot of factors involved and it could get way too expensive, way too quickly. From our current standpoint, it seems that the MSPA Forums are truly lost forever.

In a post Makin made on the subreddit to explain, he describes that “we only have 7k archived pages out of millions and millions regarding fanworks, fanventures and MSPA discussion.” It’s a pittance compared to what we used to have, and I can tell how much this failure distresses the people who were actually around for the forums. The only silver lining I can see in this is that it’s inspired some of us to be more conscious about archiving things and preventing data loss.

Makin had a backup wish in case this one failed, which was for a release of any official information about how a key aspect of Homestuck’s story works. This part of the story, a video game that kicks off the plot called SBURB, is outrageously complicated and the fandom in general has had countless questions about its various components and mechanics. Our interest in SBURB is based off of speculative power from years of wondering how exactly it impacts the story, and also for storycrafting/fanfic purposes.

Hussie seems to have agreed to this wish, but he stated that the person who would disseminate that information is not himself, but optimisticDuelist. Now a writer for Homestuck 2, oD is mildly infamous in the HSD for his treatment of various themes in Homestuck. Described by TartyTart as “BKEW but with even weirder takes,” he creates video essays that seek to explain certain ideas like gnostic themes and classpecting. However, a lot of his writing appears to be tenuous to us, like it’s reaching too hard to make a point that isn’t actually substantial.

With this in mind, hearing that oD would be responsible for explaining something as vast and complicated as SBURB was somewhat alarming. If I can go so far, I would describe it as nearly the worst case scenario for what we were hoping to see. It’s turned into a monkey’s paw situation, and after some deliberation, Makin decided to email Hussie again about it.

Makin was already considering this even before we learned oD would be handling SBURB: he describes that Hussie and others involved did everything they possibly could to get the forum servers back, to the point that even though it didn’t work out, he considers the wish fulfilled through effort alone and doesn’t want to foist more work upon them.

Further, Makin submitted some reasoning that relies on handing over Homestuck to the fans: he suggested that oD shouldn’t write the SBURB mechanics down because it would be “trading one tyrant for another,” with regard to canonicity and laying out details that don’t actually need to be explained. It’s not clear if this reasoning will go through or if the cat is out of the bag--whatever the case, I hope that things won’t be made worse through this interaction.

Nothing more for today.

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31^st of October 2019

Hiveswap Act 2 received an announcement trailer today, which has been received fairly positively. Naturally, we’re excited to finally have some kind of confirmation that it’s still being actively worked on, and there seems to be substantial progress for it. As we were hoping, it seems that the connectivity with Friendsim is intact, and that characters from it will appear in the new installment of Hiveswap.

The excitement is palpable, with the usually quite inactive #hiveswap channel exploding with thousands of messages throughout the day. This announcement combined with Homestuck 2 and Pesterquest has actually really interested people, and it seems that things might finally be moving again in a significant way.

It would be unfair of me to say that there’s been no criticism, though. Most complaints surround the sheer amount of time it’s taken to get to this point. It took four years to get Hiveswap Act 1, which felt like an inexcusable length of time for what we got. A similar release trailer for Act 1 as what we got today was released one year before the game was actually published. If this trend holds true for Act 2, then it will have been over three years since Act 1 came out that we get the next chapter.

It’s understandable in light of deeper problems surrounding Hiveswap’s development over the years, but this is still rather vexing for most who have actually been around to experience all of the delays. I think it’s important to bear in mind that, when the developers were freshly beginning work on Act 2, they mentioned that they were retooling the system to hopefully make it easier to produce future episodes. The delay between Act 1 and Act 2 would make sense in light of that idea. We still don’t know for sure when Act 2 will come out since the trailer only says “put it on your wishlist,” but maybe it and especially subsequent acts will be released more quickly than Act 1 was.

A more salient point is that the developers also claimed they would be providing more updates as to progress on Hiveswap going forward. As near as I can tell, this promise was not kept; it makes it a lot harder to stay optimistic when you simply don’t know anything about what’s happening, so in that vein I sympathize completely.

Visually Act 2 seems to be more of the same, but with a different writing team (also being led by Aysha U. Farah) such that there is significant hope that it will be more accessible and of better quality than Act 1 was under Cohen. The verdict is still out and things aren’t perfect, but the fact that they’re moving at all is a relief. Being in a standstill and being unable to even see the way forward agitates people. I hope that we can steadily move towards a dynamic where things are more stable and positive.

Nothing more for today.

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1^th of November 2019

Today, Wadapan and Gitaxian publicly revealed a website they’ve been working on called Shill Seekers. Wadapan compared it to this document, describing it thusly: “... I think the SPAT/Seekers distinction can be pretty effectively summed up as ‘SPAT is about us, Shill Seekers is about the shit we talk about’.” Indeed, the website is filled with an assortment of articles the two have written, concerning an assortment of topics that we talk about frequently in mspa-lit.

This is a pretty interesting treatment of what we talk about, and though the articles don’t necessarily cover what we say about the various topics, they’re still pretty informative and well-written. For the purpose of this document, I think it’s safe to say that this is a pretty interesting catalog of the things we talk about--if anyone reading this is unfamiliar and would like at least a cursory exposure to those ideas, Shill Seekers is an effective resource you should look at.

Wadapan and Gitaxian’s website seems to be another in a gradually increasingly list of independent websites run by members of the community, including my own and Skyplayer’s homestuck.info. This is all personal speculation, but after this and conversations I’ve had with other people, it seems that there’s increasing dissatisfaction with the array of “large websites” that we have access to as platforms for discussion. Whatever platform one may use, whether it’s Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, etc. it seems that there’s ever more criticism of them for one reason or another.

I developed my website because nothing that’s already well-established was able to accomplish what I wanted to do. This may also track with the idea I stated in a previous entry about preventing data loss; I know Skyplayer is just as conscious of archiving data as I am, considering that’s a large part of what homestuck.info is explicitly geared towards. More information is inarguably better than less in terms of preserving history, and having more people who are actively engaged in this process--generating and archiving information--is always something I will support, assuming it’s being done responsibly (various forces, which I am being purposefully vague about here, have reminded us that keeping an eye towards privacy is still very important).

Data archival is only one decidedly specific aspect of this though. I’m departing past the realm of speculation and descending into complete wistfulness here, but perhaps this could be the beginning of an era where web nerds begin to forsake larger, centralized platforms in favor of more specific places. It would be a miracle to witness a return to forum style discussion boards and individual websites that are more specifically geared towards personal projects. I think that there’s a gradually more pervasive attitude that large websites suck, both for technical and ethical reasons. The Homestuck fandom in particular could easily fuel its own propagation and management, if it chose to do so.

Nothing more for today.

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2^nd of November 2019

There were some administrative changes to the server today. For a very long time we’ve resisted adding a global official rules channel based on the principle that leaving rules unspoken makes it easier for mods to be flexible in their rulings on matters. That having been said, we’ve also run into the problem of people using this as an excuse for behaving like utter reprobates--after some well-founded criticism over the current system, Makin was convinced to make at least a few global rules.

He tasked me with writing up a short list, and after some discussion he appended these guidelines to the #welcome channel: Rule 0: Mods have the final say.

Rule 1: Be respectful of others, present or otherwise.

Rule 2: Do not disseminate backer-exclusive material for Homestuck^2. (Discussing it is fine.)

Each channel also has its own set of rules that you are expected to follow. These can be checked in each channel description. If you're confused or have any questions, feel free to contact the related mods for clarification.

The channel has duly been renamed to #welcome-rules, and the hope is that this will give us a better foundation to get rid of shitters without necessarily becoming more authoritarian in how we do things.

Truthfully, these rules are simply codifying how we’ve always handled things, so there shouldn’t be that much of a change in how the server works except we can bypass snarky rulebreakers more effectively. The only actually new thing is the rule concerning dissemination of Homestuck 2 backer material; this is paywalled and, while we disapprove of keeping certain kinds of content only available to backers, we also want to support the team in charge of the project by discouraging piracy of such material.

Otherwise, Makin also announced that he was accepting mod applications from people who wanted to keep an eye on the Homestuck category of channels (because Photino is currently doing it by themselves and they’re usually pretty busy), and more importantly, altgen and althomestuck. There was a recent incident where a couple users said obvious slurs, and we realized that we need more people to moderate these channels because the volume of messages is simply too large for the current team.

To be honest, there’s a larger ongoing debate about whether or not we should just outright delete those channels. The rhetoric is that they don’t add much value to the place and end up just becoming repositories for shitty memes that are hard to moderate. However, when the mod applications were opened up, I suggested the possibility of deleting them, and there seems to be plenty of people who would hate to lose them (Makin suggested that we might delete them anyway just because, and force altgenners to go out among the rest of the community. This might be a joke, but appropriately enough for him, no one is quite sure).

There have been about ten people who submitted applications, but after significant discussion in the mod chat, we decided to go with the following people: Prime has been made a shitposting janitor, Raar is promoted from shitposting janitor to pseudomod, and Jman005 and an old but relatively quiet member of the chat named Dioxazine have been turned into Homestuck channel category pseudomods. Misha was also given the hs-pseudo role because eastern-media is usually dead as fuck, experiencing less than a dozen messages per day on average, so he can handle a little extra responsibility.

It’s exciting to have more people on the team, and I look forward to seeing how they respond to being in a position of authority. All of them seem fairly reliable based on exposure to them over the years; I’m optimistic that once they’ve settled in, they’ll do just fine. Truthfully it could be said that we’ve been long overdue for an expansion of the modteam--the ratio of mods to regular users has been dreadfully askew for a very long time.

Nothing more for today.

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18^th of November 2019

A strange confluence of events occurred just recently. Makin added a new shill to the list today, mentioned some time ago by tmtmtl30 and officially recommended by Gitaxian called “God-Shaped Hole.” This work is highly controversial even without reading it, because it was written by a rightwing neoreactionary called Zero HP Lovecraft. Suitably, it spawned a lot of discussion--heated and civil at various times--about the story’s underlying themes and messages.

It is difficult bordering on dangerous to try and explain such ideas here--they are too complex and pointed for me to want to try in the first place. As a very brief treatment, God-Shaped Hole touches on ideas of sexuality in modern society and equality (as befitting of the author’s political views). For those unfamiliar, neoreactionaries hold that the democratic system of governance and equality are undesirable, and they actively seek a return to more stratified forms of society such as monarchies or even fascist dictatorships. The logic is that people feel or do better when they have a place or station that is designated to them, instead of having the freedom to choose. Obviously, this idea doesn’t hold up as soon as you factor in ideas of systemic oppression, modern or otherwise.

That all being said, what makes today strange is not simply the addition of a new shill, but the fact that the author of the work discovered Makin’s shill list and began talking about it on Twitter. We found out about this and it led to some very intense self-reflection on our part. We’ve had the opportunity to speak with the authors of a few of these works in mspa-lit, which has always been fun. Given the political nature of Zero HP Lovecraft, however, we wondered if it would even be possible for a civil discussion to occur if they found their way here.

In a show of peace and openness, Makin invited the author to come onto the HSD and talk as long as he remains courteous. The answer to this invitation was purportedly ambiguous; it is thought that Zero HP Lovecraft may join, but it would be on the downlow. I’m sure that any outright confrontation would be fairly intense. Further, I’m vaguely worried how all of this might be interpreted by people who are already critical of the HSD.

Truly though, we’ve done our due diligence in pointing out what we consider to be the moral failings of God-Shaped Hole over the course of the evening. Everyone in mspa-lit who has read it has made it clear that they don’t agree with the work’s underlying ideas--if people who don’t like us want to try and use our discussion of it to paint us as bad people, then all I can say is that it’s a plainly unreasonable claim. I hope I’m finally getting to the point where I don’t care about more unfounded criticism against us.

Nothing more for today.

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21^st of November 2019

Today I was alerted to a handful of people on the HSD issuing threats of violence--some joking, some serious--towards other people, especially content creators for Homestuck 2 and Pesterquest. One in particular, who does not deserve to be named, specifically created a list they called the “Hussiephant Hitlist,” obviously a play on the word “sycophant”. This sort of idea comes from the idea that Hussie gave direct control over Homestuck to people who sucked up to him, which as far as I’m aware is inaccurate and thus insulting.

Far more important than accusations of obsequiousness are the threats of violence. This goes against all of our rules, spoken or unspoken, and all of the people who participated in it were banned immediately. Unfortunately, even after this was taken care of, the matter inflated rapidly into a bigger controversy and attracted a lot of criticism from various people. It’s understandable to be concerned about such things, but the way that people latch onto this problem is rather aggravating to me.

I had to explain this to a few people, but I’ll record the bare substance of the issue here. In totality there were about four people who engaged in these threats of violence. In the short term that’s rather alarming, but it’s only concerning in the short term. When considered in the larger scope of things--including how many people there are on the server and how rare of an occurrence this really is across the server’s history--it’s far less alarming.

I ended up talking with people trying to claim that the entire server and the subreddit fomented this sort of culture or even celebrated it. The former is simply untrue, and the latter is a baldfaced lie. If this happened more commonly then I could maybe see where the accusation comes from, but in this instance it’s just ridiculous.

It feels like people try to leap on these edge cases to try and make broad assumptions about how the whole server works, which actually really frustrates me. Typically what happens is that the offenders are newer users or people who never say anything. It’s impossible to detect these things before they happen. As soon as they do happen they’re taken care of, but the fact that it happened at all is enough evidence in some peoples’ eyes to condemn us. This is completely unreasonable; we aren’t psychic or omniscient, it’s not possible to predict these things before they happen. I guess being sour about this won’t help though, as I mentioned in the last entry, I need to stop caring so much about unfounded criticism.

To pivot topics, Wadapan suggested I write about things that have been happening in #general. I haven’t considered this of much note given that it’s happened before, but perhaps it’s at least worth a mention: the activity of #general has been increasing substantially. Unfortunately, this sort of thing is often associated with a now-expected inverse: the decrease in conversational quality.

There have been more and more complaints from the pseudos taking care of #general lately, with regard to topics being broached or people misbehaving for fun. WoC finally snapped recently and started “going ape shit,” unleashing himself on the populace and bringing it back under control. I’m not sure how effective that’s been in particular, but all of the affiliated pseudos seem pleased with it. We’re probably going to have to be more forceful about people going to #altgen at this rate.

Nothing more for today.

---

26^th of November 2019

Following up on the previous entry with regard to #general becoming more shitposty, we had a lengthy discussion in modchat about how exactly to deal with the problem. I condensed our options into two choices: we can put #altgen back at the top of the channel list so people more easily see an alternative place to shitpost; or, we can get rid of altgen entirely and ban shitposting for good, serverwide.

The first option is clearly more preferable for anyone who even vaguely understands how to relax. Banning shitposting outright is completely unacceptable given how much of our overall culture is rooted in it. I have to admit that I’m being slightly disingenuous--there’s a third option that simply relies on us doing more work to keep things under control. That idea fucking sucks though; the other two I suggested are far better because it leads to less for us to deal with in the longterm.

Some hours after these deliberations, Makin came back and settled the matter by putting #altgen back at the top of the channel list next to #general. I’m pleased by this, although I’m not quite sure what will happen. It should drive up activity as has happened in the past, but I’m afraid that it’s become so inactive that it might actually be effectively dead. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re able to shock some life back into it one of these days.

Nothing more for today.

---

27^th of November 2019

I’ve talked occasionally about this seeming mutual enmity between What Pumpkin and various pieces of the fandom. Some fans continuously attempt to draw conclusions from incomplete or ambiguous information. As if this wasn’t enough, some of them also use this to fuel their suspicions or misgivings about how WP works or what it’s doing.

WP dislikes this for obvious reasons and, combined with an admittedly flagrant disrespect seen on the part of some fans, they use it as reasoning not to clarify things as much as they otherwise could. However, this lack of transparency and explanation just leads to increased misgivings from more and more fans, and so the hostility between both groups intensifies as time goes by.

I’ve seen this enough over the years that I have no reason to expect it’ll change, unfortunately. There seems to be no end in sight and, while I understand why each group behaves the way they do, neither party’s actions seem truly justifiable to me. At this point all I can wonder about it is whether it’s even possible to break the cycle of animosity and mistrust.

I guess another thing to think about is who carries the larger responsibility in all of this. I guess I’m of the opinion that, due to being a much smaller, cohesive group of people and given the inherent nature of their position, the onus is on WP employees to ignore the irascible members of the Homestuck fandom in favor of keeping better fans informed and happy.

There will always be a subset of people who aren’t pleased with what you do, no matter what. However, it’s not appropriate to point to those people as an example of why well-behaved people should be punished alongside them. It’s not fun to deal with, but mistreating large swathes of the audience due to the actions of a few is petty and shows a distinct lack of appreciation for the good fans. Like I said though, I’m not sure if I’ll ever see a true resolution to this conflict. I’m not sure if other fandoms go through this process, and whether they go through it once or if it’s a constant problem.

Nothing more for today.

---

10^th of December 2019

There was a recent, massive outage on Discord caused by the failure of Google servers which hosted Discord’s services. This outage happened on the 8th and lasted for a couple of hours. However, the search function was down for a much longer period of time, spanning about two days. All messages sent in that time frame are completely unsearchable, although they can still be read if going through the backlog. This is frustrating due to events on the second day of the outage.

On the 9th, there was a massive Bread celebration in #altgen that lasted anywhere from half an hour to an hour and a half. I can’t use the search function to determine exactly how many messages were sent, but it was at least 15,000 based on how long I was around to witness it and the rate of spam. In all I would consider it a glorious return to form for #altgen, especially given that it was recently moved back up to the top of the channel list.

#general and #altgen both seem to be experiencing a rejuvenation of sorts, which I’m happy to see. Conversely, though, #mspa-lit has been getting quieter as time goes by. It’s a very busy time of year for people in school, as it’s more or less time for finals for everyone, so a lessening of activity is probably to be expected. However, this time it feels like it’s more pronounced than usual (or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that each time this happens, it gets worse).

Makin has similarly been busy with real life concerns, and has been talking less than we would usually expect him to. Frankly I’m also guilty of this, and I’m sure a few other power users are similarly busy. All of this contributes to a general lack of energy in mspa-lit, retreading certain topics, and a greatly reduced message count overall. I fear Makin’s water filter theory is not working, given the current environment.

When there’s an abundance of activity, making a barrier to increase the quality of activity makes sense. When activity is sparse, however, this just means people will gradually stop using the channel. It’s worth pointing out that things are actually looking up a bit on the server as a whole, but mspa-lit in particular is slowing down a lot. I hope that there’s a simple and effective way to reverse this trend--likely if Makin, myself, and even just a few others start posting more frequently, then that alone will return things to normalcy.

Nothing more for today.

---

14^th of December 2019

There’s been growing unrest in the mod team as of late, for various reasons. A lot of it stems from increased consideration for the content creators of Homestuck 2 and Pesterquest. A lot of this consideration is necessary and good, in the sense that remaining respectful of other people is important. However, in doing our due diligence we seem to be running into more and more people who are only venting their spleen in the most aggressive way possible, with little care for how it affects others.

We’ve been toying with a few ideas that we feel could improve things. One such advisement was to completely ban all discussion about happenings on Homestuck Twitter, which has become increasingly dramatic and self-cannibalizing according to users who view it often. I’ve spoken in the past of my viewpoint that Twitter is a despicable social media platform as a whole: it tends to exacerbate the worst conversational qualities in people through a combination of various factors, which I won’t go to the trouble of listing again.

We would of course allow discussion of tweets that are strictly relevant to Homestuck content, especially important announcements. The main problem is people discussing drama endemic to Homestuck Twitter, especially as it involves various members of the team. A lot of people have expectations of the content creators to behave one way or another. I personally think some of these expectations are valid--professionalism should be required when working in any sort of official capacity, especially on a project as big as Homestuck--but people have differing ideas on what should be expected and in the end it becomes an enormous chore even just to discuss, let alone to implement any sort of policy on the matter. So in this regard, it would probably be best to just ban discussion of dealings on Homestuck Twitter.

This policy has not been enacted yet (or even debated much, really), although it may be in the cards at a later time. For now, we took a more internal route of examining our channels and seeing if anything could be cut out. To that end we focused on two: homestuck2 and althomestuck. The former hasn’t really been much of a problem, it’s more that the channel is usually completely dead and thus useless. Now, #homestuck will serve as a discussion place for both properties, and will be converted to a spoilers channel for a period of one week following updates (a generous period of time given their average length so far).

On the other hand, the latter has been an increasing problem for some weeks, as it was made to keep shitposting out of #homestuck but seems to have served instead as the gathering place for people who simply want to complain about things (especially people and things on Homestuck Twitter). This is neither fun nor productive, so we decided to archive it and lump its functions in wholesale with altgen.

The activity in altgen has been growing significantly after the mods interested in that channel (Valkyrie, Reti, Raarzard, Dingus, and Sea Hitler, with special mention for Anervaria) began discussing ways to develop interest in it again. I’d say that the shitposting culture there is the strongest it’s been in several months, possibly over a year. I have full faith that they’ll be able to integrate any shitposters without too much trouble, and hopefully we’ll see a net gain in activity.

The more unsavory figures at the center of all this are either being beaten into shape as we speak, or they have decided to leave. There’s one user in particular I’m not sure of yet who’s named Ashrahn, and has been an object of significant controversy: they’ve been engaged in some weird back-and-forth with a Twitter user named abraxasGrips. Both are saying that the other is targeting them but there hasn’t been a lot of evidence put forth by either of them.

I would like to settle this somehow by reaching out, but I’m stretched thin as it is, and I really can’t afford another distraction right now. Besides, whenever I try to solve disputes like this it doesn’t seem to make things much better anyway. This debacle and others like it have actually contributed greatly to my desire to end all discussion of Homestuck Twitter drama, as I simply don’t want to deal with them anymore. As it is, lumping althomestuck in with altgen seems to have accomplished that to a large degree anyway.

Another shitter that comes to mind was a fellow named Lord Calidor. An active user first on the subreddit and then later on Discord, he spoke explicitly in parodying fashion of a character from Homestuck named Caliborn. He’s been the object of fascination for some time now, as no one was quite sure how serious his act was. Unfortunately, interactions with him recently took a turn for the worse after althomestuck was collapsed: he finally dropped the parody and lashed out at some of our mods in DMs after being chastised repeatedly. It’s weird to see him go, but not really all that surprising--we knew that this would probably come to a head, as it often goes this way with highly specific and dedicated accounts such as this one.

The restructuring wasn’t very thorough, but hopefully it will be effective. It’s hard to tell what the ramifications for this will be, and I’ve largely given up predicting because I’m wrong as often as I’m right. That having been said, I actually feel significantly engaged and optimistic about things for the first time in a while. I think that becoming a little more insular and not discussing the drama of other platforms is a good step--it doesn’t do much to include anyone, and in the end it just discourages regulars from talking for various reasons.

As we go into the new decade we’ll probably have to continuously figure this stuff out over and over again. As more time goes by, I increasingly realize that nothing is ever solved forever. Things will never stop from keep happening as long as the HSD is around, and it’s a struggle to stay interested and happy in light of that. However, in the short term, things can and do improve. I’m still happy to be here, and as I’ve said before, I hope the HSD persists for as long as it possibly can.

Nothing more for today.

---

23^rd of December 2019

At least once a year it seems, someone out there in the fandom creates a blog or some other outlet for making callout posts against the HSD and anyone else they happen to disagree with. This year, merely days away from Christmas, it has happened again. We were alerted to the existence of a new callout account on Twitter last night and spent some time laughing at how ridiculous it was, but I’m afraid that by today it led to real repercussions, even if they were relatively minor.

I’m going to neglect to post the actual page in question, because I’m personally miffed about all of this for various reasons. Callout accounts are universally mired in pettiness, relying on misleading or outright fabricated information in order to make their claims more sensational (in this case, posting screenshots that are plainly and sloppily doctored). This isn’t new or surprising given how many times we’ve put up with it before, but for some reason seeing it yet again has been far more irritating than I expected.

A lot of the claims being put forth concern events that happened years ago now, which makes it feel even more pointless this time around than it did in the past. The biggest accusations are that Makin knowingly put underaged mods in charge of the NSFW channels (explicitly untrue) and some nonsense about paying children to mod the server. This second one baffles me the more I think about it, it’s so absurdly garbled that I can’t even tell what it’s supposed to mean. The reality of the matter is that none of us have ever gotten paid to do this, and if any of the mods aren’t okay with that the rest of us would reasonably expect them to step down.

I think part of my frustration stems from the fact that the callout account was explicitly endorsed by Kate. This is a disappointing spit in our face in light of how transparently false the information is, and especially considering how much we’ve been trying to improve the server. In retrospect I guess expecting a different outcome was foolish. Given that it feels like all of this is kind of coming out of left field all of a sudden, I haven’t felt quite so disillusioned with the idea of “Homestuck fandom diplomacy” in a very long time. I no longer see the point in trying to understand the detractors in this scenario and others like it.

On the other hand though, this has had an unusual effect on the mod team. Far from discouraging us, it seems that almost everyone on the team has sort of rallied behind Makin this time. More than just myself, I think we’re all tired of putting up with this kind of trifling slander at this point. To be clear, it would be hugely inappropriate to suggest Makin deserves no criticism for anything. However, as more time passes from the original altercations that these accusations bring up, the more evident it seems that they come not from a place of genuine concern for the afflicted, but instead from personal grudges and biases.

Makin has his own explanation for why people might behave this way regarding him, but I’ve always maintained that he makes things out to be more complicated than they really are. To tell the truth, I don’t think the why necessarily matters at this point anyway. The fact of the matter is that there’s a loose cabal that hates him and will never stop trying to sue for his removal from the fandom. Conversely, Makin will never willingly step down regardless of the scale or validity of the accusations against him. These facts alone preclude any potential debate on the issue, and so it all serves only to make everyone involved more tired and upset when it happens.

Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t bother writing much more about this. I’m considering making a more adamant personal rule about not dealing with anyone or anything from Homestuck Twitter because of all this, as interacting with them seems to bring nothing but pain and misery. In the end it only serves to make me angry, and time has already proven to us repeatedly that it doesn’t actually matter what we do in this regard; there will always be people trying to harass us for one thing or another. It is a virtual impossibility to satisfy these people, so responding and capitulating to demands from them isn’t really an option.

Admittedly my frustration is temporary, because as with every callout account like this one, it will amount to nothing in the long run. Our reputation has been assaulted yet again, but time will pass and we’ll proceed as normal as with each time this happened before. Doubtless, too, we’ll go through all this again in less than a year’s time or so. The inevitability is almost as dispiriting as it is funny.

Makin, for his part, seems totally unbothered. I’m sure that on some level he’s put out by people attempting to drag him through the mud yet again, but he’s been through this song and dance enough times already. More than anyone I think he understands the transient nature of these events, as well as the inherent absurdity of claiming this place is unsafe or unwelcoming to people given everything we’ve done over the last few years. I think that my temporary annoyances aside, we’ll be just fine.

On a far more positive note: today Raar, Anervaria and Valkyrie initiated another Bread Ceremony in altgen. They had been planning something for around Christmas and I regret that I missed it today, but it lasted for an hour from 6:21 PM to 7:35 PM EST. In that hour they brought the channel’s messages for the day to over 17,000. Based on this we can estimate that, for the Bread Ceremony from near the beginning of the month which lasted approximately an hour and a half, they sent between 20,000-25,000 messages. The Discord search function is still broken for that period of time and will likely never be fixed, but I’m content with that approximation. It’s good to see altgen returning to form with an endless stream of truly awful shitposts, it gives me life.

Nothing more for today.

---

30^th of December 2019

Some weeks ago, Disney started airing a new Star Wars show called The Mandalorian, which has turned out to be far more interesting and popular than any of us really expected it to be. The first season finale actually just came out, and some of us haven’t had the chance to watch it yet. Those of us who have were being rather inconsiderate with spoilers though, which is a rather serious faux pas given the nature and history of our community.

Makin was among those who hadn’t seen the finale, and issued one warning to stop with spoilers. Someone made what they thought was an innocuous reference, but Makin wasn’t fucking around: in retaliation he “deleted” the entire channel of mspa-lit and shunted everyone into #general for a few hours.

Makin recently gave me access to the channel even when it’s down so that I can record stats in the evening, but he went the extra mile this time and revoked even my access, renamed it to #deleted-channel, and made it so people couldn’t see message history if they were tabbed out and came back in. At first I figured this was just an extension of the usual prank, and went about my business.

I remained largely unfazed until people started seriously asking for mspa-lit back, and then in mod chat Makin said: “uhhh I did delete it / sorry I got really mad / I really like the mandalorian / I'll just make a new one / we have the pin archive at least.” This successfully convinced me that he had actually deleted the channel, and for the first time I felt true despair.

In retrospect this was more believable than it should have been because I’ve literally experienced it before: a personal friend was in charge of a group server, but she got so angry once that she completely deleted it. As it is, I wholly believed Makin and said as much in chat. I nonseriously said, “I quit,” (to which Makin later said no take-backs) and then revealed the ruse for what it was. Everyone had a good laugh about it, and I was enormously relieved.

The exact words I used to describe how I felt as it happened were, “i just lost my will to live for a solid ten minutes,” which Daniel found extremely amusing. I’m just glad the channel actually isn’t gone. I should never have believed Makin’s jape though, considering how invested we both are in preserving knowledge.

It was a nasty shock, but at the end of the day everything is still intact going into the new year. I’m actually rather pleased; this year as a whole was more subdued than usual, but with the return of a variety of official content coming out it feels like things are picking back up. Especially given the energy and dedication of some of our new mods like Valk and Raar, it seems that their target channels are experiencing some rejuvenation. I’m pretty happy about all this. Though a full write up of the subreddit and Discord server is probably needed, in general things are looking up. I’m hopeful we’ll be able to keep this momentum up into 2020 and things will continue to improve.

Nothing more for today.

---

2020

2^nd of January 2020

The Twitter callout account described in a recent entry is essentially imploding, if not in content then in reputability. I’m not sure how this was determined (it seems that they came out and said it themselves) but it seems that the account is being run by a person who was recently banned from the HSD called Phoebe. This person has attracted the ire of just about everyone for various reasons that are largely unknown to me, although they are apparently extremely racist²⁰⁰. I don’t have any concrete evidence of this personally, so it would be wise to take such information with a grain of salt.

What we do know for sure--as Makin has released the screenshots--is that Phoebe begged to be unbanned from the Discord server shortly before the callout account was created. Since Phoebe runs this account, it effectively destroys any possibility that it might have accomplished anything. All it does is further underscore how far people are willing to exercise petty grudges and try to get us punished. It’s interesting especially to note that the account has completely failed to gain any traction with callouts pertaining to figures who aren’t Makin.

To expound on this, various figures have only latched onto the information in the callout posts that concern Makin, but strangely ignored just about everything else. There’s vague discussion happening about getting Andrew Hussie, of all people, to come out and publicly denounce him, the subreddit, and the Discord server. The idea is that in so doing they might undercut his influence. This is completely preposterous and it only served to increase the entertainment of this entire debacle.

And make no mistake, this has indeed been very entertaining to us. It very swiftly became a meme to say, “Why haven’t I been called out yet?” or to otherwise complain about being left out of the out-of-context screenshots that the callout account has been posting. I believe Misha might have started this, and up to now he still hasn’t featured in any of the callout posts, much to his disappointment. This has been somewhat puzzling, as he’s distinctly one of the least fearful of any “repercussions” of being called out and thus says things that we understand should be causing a stir.

The account in question has also started posting images with names censored, although this is hampered by the fact that literally anyone can join the server at anytime and search through its archives instantaneously. Tera noticed this and discovered it had been included in a post (although it was not actually the subject), celebrating: “THATS ME / IM IN THE CALLOUT” (although it’s since determined that the person in the post was actually Wheals). Others have been similarly irreverent to the criticism, soaking in the ironic glory of being called out.

I haven’t seen this kind of manic energy in a very long time. There are all sorts of people crawling out of the woodwork to mock the callout posts: “remember to spam chat so when tensei says something problematic bigwarnings screenshots parts of your messages,” Carlarc remarked. Makin, of course, also participated: “why can't I get callouted by someone who's competent and not a moron?” There are countless examples of this throughout the day from all manner of people, although it should be noted that it died down at intervals. Then, inevitably, someone would post a new screenshot and the circus would start all over again.

At some point it was brought up that, while Phoebe started the account, it may actually be an old phantom who runs it currently, someone named Voidfire. I briefly described Voidfire back in one of the earliest entries of this document (22nd of August, 2017 for details), but the overall idea is that they were something of a conversational menace, and they were banned all the way back in December of 2016. The fact that they might still have a hand in all of this is bizarre and absolutely hilarious.

As the initial entertainment value began to fade away, more serious aspects of all this were inevitably introduced. Even Cookiefonster came in with an uncharacteristic bout of salience:

… why does Kate support this callout shit / I also don't like that Kate goes ahead and shits on hsd after the "we have no beef" promise from the live panel / … / I'm also confused that the callout account gives infamous banned users who everyone agrees are terrible as examples of why Makin is evil.

These and other issues with the callout posts were considered. Naturally, it’s troublesome to us that people try so hard to discredit this place and the people in it. Yet, it comes back to the fact that ultimately these posts affect us to almost no degree whatsoever. Really, it’s just the principle of the thing that bothers us more than anything.

However, a couple people began to speak out as the discussion ran its course. Speaking to the rampant cajoling taking place over the callout account, Qweq said: “... people's actions here are beyond just trying/wanting being funny. it already reached bad faith.” Such sentiments were mollified for a while, but resurfaced later in the day. A particular low point of the conversation was when Makin jokingly unbanned Archiewhite, who has been barred from mspa-lit for over a year, possibly two at this point.

Archiewhite is clamorously against Makin’s actions and history to the point of irritation, and the conversation immediately turned sour when he was allowed back to talk. He accused me of undergoing Stockholm syndrome for my continued support of Makin and the server, which he backtracked by claiming it was a joke. This only served to piss me off enormously and effectively stopped the fun completely. After much repeated nonsense like this, Archie finally left the conversation to pursue whatever his own devices were. I should hope that he stays far away from mspa-lit so as to spare us of his verbal drubbings²⁰¹.

This unpleasantry aside, the day overall was pretty fun, but in the evening it did take something of a turn. Despite absolutely trashing on the vast majority of the callout account’s posts, it did raise some issues that people in the HSD considered important. To us, this was far more worth discussing than anything the callout account had to say: the opinion of nebulous Homestuck Twitter²⁰² doesn’t matter to us except for what entertainment value we can extract from it at this point, but we’re far more serious when it comes to the matters and concerns of our own users.

Specifically, the issues we talked about involved two age-old problems that have surfaced repeatedly in the past. The first involved “rogue mods,” or explicitly VirtuNat and WoC, who have a tendency to be overly harsh on users in general. Or, I should say, they had this tendency, as it has not really happened in a matter of some months. That having been said, they still operate in a way that makes a series of people uncomfortable: Tera, Andrew, Qweq, Oda, Kratospie, VR, Multivac, Gitaxian, Canis, bellicosePhodopus, and Moonjail²⁰³ were all among those who professed a distaste for Nat and WoC’s general demeanor.

A huge element of that distaste comes from their casual flair for insulting individual users using derogatory language (which, I must stress again, has not really been an issue for a while). This caused us to review our policy with the usage of the word “retard,” which has been a subject of repeated debate over the last so many years. It’s been massively complicated due to the fact that it’s used liberally within Homestuck proper, and due to a rather pronounced degree of inconsistency in how mods treat the issue. We’re all pretty tired of this debate, and after so long we were somewhat able to obtain a consensus. Despite WoC being at the center of this controversy, Makin followed up on an obtuse tradition and gave him the final say in this matter.

To WoC's enormous credit, as soon as he was made fully aware that he had final say on what was going on, he didn’t just barrel ahead and install his own opinion on what to do. He first extended an invitation for comments from everyone in the discussion. Then, after a period of consideration, he delivered an explanation of his stance that was well-thought out and actually took into account all of the various factors that plague us right now. I’m not at liberty to explain what was said in detail, as this all happened in the modchat, but people on both sides of the issue were fairly satisfied with his reckoning of the situation.

Still, there remains the overall problem of trying to figure out where mods stand in the scheme of things. A huge question that was posed today is whether mods are held to the same community standards as everyone else. The answer is unambiguously yes, but there is intense disagreement as to what those standards should even be. Everyone has a different idea of what it means to be a good user and follow the rules, which is a necessary downside of the more ambiguous rule system we have.

I’m still of the mind that the ambiguity usually plays into our favor when deliberating on matters of a case-by-case basis, but people like Canis and Moonjail both suggest that there’s a lot of hypocrisy present in how mods behave and are treated as opposed to the common user. I’m not comfortable with hypocrisy, although I’m guilty of it myself on occasion. Makin’s rebuttal to all of this is that most of the HSD is perfectly content or else we would hear more complaints, especially in the surveys he does every so often.

Personally, I feel that he makes a mockery of that process too much for it to be strictly effective at allowing people to voice their complaints. There are a lot of systemic issues present in how we do things²⁰⁴, but it’s difficult to tell how much of that is our fault specifically versus a fault of how these systems function in general. There is always a faction of people who will be unhappy with what’s going on and seek to change it--the difficulty is in determining the validity of their complaints and weighing it against the opinions of the rest of the people involved. I’m sure we’ll return to this issue many times in the future, but for now there doesn’t seem to be any clear resolution.

Nothing more for today.

---

8^th of January 2020

Part of the content of the callout posts has concerned Cerulean’s involvement in the server, and his work on Aradiabot. This had been a problem even when Ceru was still a mod and worked regularly on stuff here, but since the callout account started up his claims have become more forceful: he now suggests that Makin “tricked” him into doing hundreds of hours of work for free.

This argument automatically doesn’t sit well with me. All of the mods have contributed an unbelievable amount of time to keeping the server going, but literally none of us have been paid for that effort--it’s just not possible to be compensated adequately for it²⁰⁵. That having been said, it’s not even necessary. There’s an unspoken expectation that, if you’re a mod, you’re helping out because you like the server enough to dedicate some free time to it.

All of this is to suggest that if you expect to be paid for your effort or otherwise don’t like it on the team, you’re allowed to leave at any time. Indeed, this very thing occurred with Dioxazine²⁰⁶ just recently, although they left presumably because they didn’t feel like they could dedicate enough time to keeping up with stuff. They asked to be removed and we obliged without problem. There are literally no hard feelings between us, as it’s mutually understood that sometimes things don’t work out and you’re entitled to do something else with your time.

With this in mind, Ceru’s lamentations seem less valid and are actually somewhat irritating. His regrets about being part of the HSD mod team are being used as ammo against us, which is its own non-issue in the grand scheme of things. However, it was pointed out that we’re still using Aradiabot despite Ceru not being around. This is actually a more interesting detail, and leads to some considerations: if Ceru is bothered about Aradiabot being used without compensation, why hasn’t he manually removed Aradiabot or--if he’s not able to do that--requested that we stop using it? Further, what’s stopping us from making a new bot as a replacement regardless?

The first question is mostly unclear, although I suspect it’s because Ceru doesn’t like confrontation and is afraid of initiating discussion with Makin, regardless of how justified that is. As to the second, the answer is that there’s literally nothing stopping us from making a new bot. So, that’s precisely what we did: Makin charged Nat and WoC, as the resident bot experts, to craft something that performed all of the functions Aradiabot did, with room for more.

From all of this, ArquiusBot was born. It still has some work that needs to be done, but Nat and WoC both put in around 30 hours by their estimate and got it running with almost the full suite of functionality that Aradiabot had, with plans to introduce more features as time goes by or as people request them. Makin was very pleased, announcing it to the server and declaring: “This is why they are still mods, btw.” Indeed, despite all of the recent controversies and discussion of why we keep them around despite how they treat users occasionally, it’ll be nice to have something concrete to point to as evidence of their skill and usefulness.

Nothing more for today.

---

9^th of January 2020

Late at night we somehow got on the topic of discussing gross or otherwise off-putting comics, including “Boys Club.” Boys Club is famous for being where the ubiquitous meme Pepe comes from. The comic in general has a simple premise and doesn’t actually seem to go anywhere, based on the descriptions I’ve heard from other people. It mostly involves a set of people living in apartment and messing around, with rather sophomoric elements.

After hearing an example of Boys Club’s scatological humor, I was reminded of something I discovered many years ago that fit the bill of “gross or otherwise off-putting,” but turned up to 11. This comic is literally called “Electric Retard” and is infamous for being exceptionally vile and offensive; indeed, being disgusting is kind of the comic’s most notable feature. WoC and I have discussed the work a few times in the past, with him describing it as “distilled shock humor.” Everything I’ve said about it thus far only manages to undersell just how horrible it is.

In the course of the discussion last night I made the grave mistake of linking to it--I fully warned everyone in the chat that it was “the worst thing ever,” but after looking at it themselves a bevy of people were immediately rather upset, including Moonjail (“yikes / delete that”), Canis (“there’s cursed, and then there’s this”), Multivac (“oh i dont like this”) and Velikiy (“drew that is just disgusting”). I found this response amusing but completely understandable, and deleted the link after about 30 seconds.

WoC and I continued to discuss it for some time, talking about the overall nature of the comic and its author. However, Moonjail commented some time later, asking if we could stop talking about it. He explained that it probably isn’t a good idea to discuss such things given that there are people literally trawling through the HSD for callout-able comments. All of it hearkened back to a time where the community as a whole was way less conscientious about what was posted and how it was discussed.

Fitting that particular tone, this led to Skyplayer linking some old comics, including a sped-up gif of the infamous NOMW, that were almost explicitly designed to elicit shock and outrage from those that read them. It was determined that this was inappropriate in a larger overall discussion about what sort of content should be allowed, and after a couple of complaints Skyplayer was warned. She was explicitly upset at herself for this and left the conversation to do some self-reflection, but at that point the damage was already done.

Toast and Moonjail assumed opposite sides of an idealistic battle concerning community standards, especially with regard to policing or even censoring content. Toast is an absolute proponent against censoring things, saying that to allow people to express their opinions is always better than to disallow it. He even referenced the concurrent discussion, claiming: “all the people whining about me being mean / kept on doing the thing they were mad i did / yet i dont ban them / why? cause im not a wuss / yet i guarantee if they were in power id be perma'd years ago.” As much as I tend towards actually exercising moderating powers, this point makes sense to me.

Conversely, Mines responded: “sometimes… beliefs can be bad,” in defense of the idea that not everyone actually deserves an equal voice. This point also makes sense to me in certain scenarios: some of our historied discussions in mspa-lit have centered around the idea of what to do with a neonazi spouting their beliefs. Some people are so vociferously against them that they assert violence is an appropriate and necessary response to silence them.

Makin and I (despite his overall resistance to censorship alongside Toast) at the time both agreed that in such a situation, systematically reducing their ability to tell lies or spread misinformation is ideal. For me personally, some discussions in the HSD are like this: sometimes you must simply step in and reduce someone’s ability to speak, for some reason or another. It’s not ideal and we avoid doing it unless absolutely necessary, but the reality of the matter is that sometimes it is necessary.

Toast, for his part, doesn’t agree with this and is adamant against being censored in almost any way. However, Moonjail described that comments which are posted purely with the intent to upset other people should not be permitted. This sort of argument is completely fine and even promotes greater understanding of each other, but before long we noticed Toast getting somewhat rambunctious.

Toast eventually lashed out at Moonjail at what might have been a joke, but was nonetheless worded way too harshly. After backlash from a number of people, I spoke with him in DMs and implored him to reconsider how he was approaching the discussion. Additionally, I asked him to apologize to Moonjail for lashing out.

Toast can be a very stubborn individual sometimes, but ultimately I trust in his ability to accept criticism and think critically about it. He proved my trust to be well-founded by apologizing to Moonjail in short order. He did not proceed without his principles and so fell back to defending his thinking, but even just the fact that he apologized for acting out of line made me feel better about the entire affair. I think there was a noticeable shift in the tone of the discussion after that, being less hostile and more reconciliatory.

Unfortunately, Makin did not share my outlook on the situation. After waking up, Makin reviewed the backlog and made a relatively drastic decision. At around 6 AM EST, he decided that Toast needed to learn there are consequences for his actions (“the fricking frick”) and removed him from the mod team. While not feeling particularly strongly about it, I do understand this decision and think it’s fairly warranted.

Toast, of course, took it a little more hard; to his credit though, he still took it fairly well. He threw out some jokes and witticisms, but after contemplating the idea for a bit, he seemed rather despondent: “i wont leave the server / but i will probably post here less because otherwise i would be less sincere and probably overall less enjoyable to converse with / … / i would probably just be more of a dick if i stuck around.” So at the very least, he’ll probably take a break from participating in the HSD.

This worries me greatly, and makes me sad: Toast was the first person I talked to in earnest from here, and he’s singlehandedly responsible for getting me to participate as much as I have in the last three years. However, Toast is self-aware enough that I think he knows what’s best for him. Despite the incident from last night, everyone in chat bid Toast farewell and voiced that they hope he comes back soon. I echo their sentiments in full, it won’t be quite the same without him here.

Nothing more for today.

---

19^th of January 2020

It’s been an interesting few days, to put it mildly. A wide assortment of things have occurred, including something that has been rather despicable, and then other stuff that was rather amusing. I’ll begin with the depressing stuff first, because I don’t want the good things to be overshadowed by what could ultimately be considered trite nonsense.

The sad news, predictably, is that the callout stuff on Twitter has reached a head. It’s been escalating slightly at times for the last several days, but Kate and Griever themselves kicked it up a notch. Griever pulled a repeat of his stint where he rejoined the community, posted something absurdly derogatory, and then left. Out of nowhere he posted on the subreddit condemning Makin for “putting a minor in charge of an NSFW server,” which is kind of strange.

The reason I say this is strange is because the original claim didn’t involve the NSFW server, it involved the NSFW channels. This is an important distinction for a couple of reasons. First, it seems that they can’t really keep the content of their complaints consistent, which further indicates that they aren’t actually bothering to follow up on information they get or otherwise verify it.

Secondly, MasterEmp was, to our knowledge, not a minor at the time they were responsible for taking care of the NSFW channels. The same follows for Cerulean and the NSFW server (edit: Wheals helpfully cleared this up after this entry was released. He describes that Cerulean lied about his age to get into the NSFW channels when he was still 17, but later by the time the NSFW server was created he was of legal age). If the basis of the concern is that we used to put minors in charge of NSFW content, this alone completely undercuts the validity of what they’re trying to do. None of this is even to speak of the fact that Makin didn’t even want NSFW stuff involved with the HSD, he simply put them up because of popular demand.

Griever wasn’t the only one involved, as I mentioned. Kate also tacked on a response to the post, initially claiming that Makin “oversaw a child porn ring” and then stealthily editing it down to “oversaw the sexual exploitation of minors.” The gravity of this accusation is unbelievably serious, which makes it all the more flabbergasting to me that she would post such a thing. If they genuinely believe that we put minors in charge of NSFW material that’s one thing, but as far as I’m aware this accusation literally came out of nowhere.

Indeed, I think that’s kind of the crux of all this to me now. I don’t even know where some of these claims are coming from. I’m pretty sure the ultimate origin for this current string of accusations is still the Twitter callout account we were dealing with at the beginning of the year, but accusing us of sexually exploiting minors is beyond the scope of anything that was posted on that account. At this point I think what’s going on is that the original accusations have gone through some sort of spite-driven game of telephone, because as the claims go around Twitter, they seem to get progressively worse based on nothing but their own perceptions.

Regardless of how it’s gotten to this level of seriousness, there’s an overarching problem with it all: whenever pressed for evidence, the people pressing these accusations are either unable to come up with any or point to the original callout account, which has been thoroughly debunked at this point. Literally all of the evidence from that account was taken heavily out of context, edited so as to be misleading, or outright fabricated.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, pointing this out hasn’t stopped people from latching onto it. I’m always just a little more sad whenever I witness the bullshit amplification principle at work. Not only that, but I think it’s accurate to say that the bullshit in this case is being solely propelled forward by people who hate Makin (not even the subreddit or Discord even) and want to see him removed.

I understand he’s had his fair share of altercations in the past--I’ve never been one to shy away from criticizing him when I felt he deserved it--but resorting to spreading malicious lies to try and “bring him to justice” is baffling and, I would think, self-defeating. The scale and severity of the claims being levied against him are patently absurd at this point, and I can’t help but scratch my head trying to figure out why.

In the end, there’s really only two explanations that make sense: either they genuinely hate him that much (which is in itself disturbing considering how far they’re going to trash his reputation), or they hate the fact that he’s in charge of communities that are often irreverent of who they are or what they do. The second option makes me a little sick to consider, given how much I’ve wanted to openly associate with the content creators in the past.

Of course, there is what could be considered a “third option,” which I have no doubt certain people reading this will cry out in support of: “perhaps they hate him because everything they’re saying is true.” I’ve already addressed this, multiple times in fact. I’m forced to believe that anyone who continues pressing this kind of thinking is not actually operating in good faith, because the alternative would be that their reading comprehension and critical thinking are poor beyond description. Let this idea and all others like it be put to rest for good.

Anyway, the overall point of all of this is that it fucking sucks. We immediately banned Griever and Kate from the subreddit for being slanderous and hostile, which naturally led to them intensifying their callouts on Twitter. It seems they inspired a bunch of copycats as well, either directly or implicitly: we’ve seen about a dozen people or so from within their personal spheres who have explicitly drawn up plans to try and raid the subreddit, with one person saying “if enough of us do this, maybe we can make the subreddit nigh unusable!” which further adds to the complete absurdity of all of this.

Another one of the claims levied against us is that we make our communities “unsafe for LGBT and minorities²⁰⁷,” but truthfully both the subreddit and Discord almost never suffer from people who try to exclude or harass marginalized people--and when such incidents pop up, we appropriately take care of it as soon as we’re aware it’s happening. This is yet another thing I’ve pointed out that doesn’t seem to stick with the people who are trying to make these callouts.

I think that the irony of a group of people claiming we’re unsafe for people and then proceed to try and raid us themselves is lost on them. When I step back and consider all of this together, it’s actually kind of funny in a perverse way: I’ve tried to explain to them that we pretty thoroughly check the subreddit to make sure things are going smoothly, and then of course we end up banning the people from Twitter who are raising a stink. It’s more evidence in the pile to suggest that we actually do our jobs and keep the community safe.

In fact, I would go so far as to call this particular claim insulting given just how much we’ve done to protect our community. I’m not sure if any of these people are familiar with the child porn raids we experienced back in 2017 or 2018. I can’t remember if I’ve explained that situation in depth, but it warrants a revisit here: back when I was first modded, it was because we were getting raided constantly by bands of outsiders who would spam gore and porn, pretty standard fare for online stuff honestly. Some time after that, we got bots and random accounts from people who were spamming actual child porn on the server.

The very first time this happened, we immediately went into overdrive: Makin immediately raised the security level of the server to make it harder for new accounts to post; most of the mods were constantly vigilant, roaming through every channel regularly to make sure that if anything was posted, it was deleted immediately. Ngame and I personally had a few nights where we didn’t sleep because no one else was available to watch for a while; we collected evidence from the intruders, such as message and account IDs, and reported them directly to Discord Trust and Safety; Makin further assisted Discord in catching the people responsible (something he’s done in other circumstances too; there are a few actual pedophile rings in the Homestuck community at least that Makin has helped to dismantle).

With all of this in mind, it’s nothing short of infuriating that people on Twitter are trying to point to us being uncaring for the safety of our users, or even actively harmful to them. It makes my blood boil to hear them spout shit like this, frankly; I have a feeling that if they were in the position we are, they would probably fuck it up enormously or simply quit because it’s too much to handle. Our community has become extremely stable and safe through our concerted efforts over the last few years.

I wonder if any of the people currently engaged in this bother to take a look through the submissions on the subreddit before they do their thing. Enough of them have surely looked at it by now that I wonder what they must think. Taking a cursory glance at our front page, every single one of these posts is utterly benign or outright supportive of Homestuck and its affiliated works.

This contrasts heavily with claims that we are “a stomping ground for bigots and bigotry behavior… literally doing nothing to protect the homestucks in their fucking server” and exhibiting “rampant racism, homophobia, transphobia and genuine shittyness towards anyone who doesnt fit their agenda” (not linking the owner so as to protect their identity). The hypocrisy in that tidbit about excluding people who don’t fit with agendas would be delicious if I didn’t think it was completely unaware of itself.

We’ve deliberated on all of this in the Discord server a bit, and while it’s frustrating to me personally, most other people don’t seem to care too much, or even find it amusing. Makin and Tensei have both commented on the proceedings: the former asserts that the number of people involved is so low that they’re basically unable to accomplish anything of note or cause any serious damage. The latter insists that the only people who are seriously bothered by any of this take things on the internet way too seriously. After some consideration, I think I agree with both of these points, although that doesn’t stop me from being upset about it to some degree.

I was supremely angry about all of this after Griever and Kate performed their spiel on the subreddit, but now that a couple of days have passed I don’t think I have it in me to actually be angry anymore²⁰⁸: this is all just too inconsequential, and it’s all happened before to no real effect. However, I’m still rather sad²⁰⁹ that these things are happening at all. It’s indicative of some really deep schisms in the community that will probably never be healed. What makes it worse this time is that people who have been officially involved in creating Homestuck content are tossing their hats into the ring.

I used to consider Griever a friend and I enjoyed talking with him about various things, but this is the second time he’s essentially come out and stabbed us all in the back. At this point I’m not sure if he does it because he genuinely believes it’s a problem or if he’s being opportunistic and trying to increase his reputation with people who hate us. Perhaps it’s both, but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter which one is true: both explanations are dispiriting and rob my confidence in him.

Kate is the more upsetting figure in all of this. After this happened I went back and read my entry on the visit to Chapel Hill to see her Pgenpodcast live recording, and that entry was pretty optimistic--cautiously so, but it still spoke of hope for the future. The reality of what we’re dealing with now makes it completely tragic. Kate seemed fairly reasonable and nice in person, but online she appears to be nothing short of monstrous--her accusations have gradually become more outrageous, even crossing into the realm of delusional thinking. More than anyone else, I’m disappointed in her for advancing these false claims so far and for proving my hopes wrong.

As it is though, I think I’ve talked enough about this. There isn’t really much more to say about it: barring something truly explosive happening, everything seems to be a retread of stuff that’s already happened in this debacle. It’s possible that this could escalate further, but I’m not sure how that would be possible considering the claims lobbied against us now.

What next, one might ask? If the past is any indication, the number of people who are outraged will shrink until the callouts stop, either through critical thinking and gradual reassessment or through general apathy. I’m sure that all of this misinformation that’s been gathered or generated will be useful in future callouts against us though.

That having been said, it feels like all of this has served to strengthen our resolve as a mod team. As said previously, most of the people here aren’t taking the claims seriously or even find them funny. Despite that though, I’ve noticed that the tone on the mod team has been one of increased solidarity. We come from a rather diverse set of backgrounds and circumstances in the Homestuck fandom and in real life, and it makes me proud to see everyone standing together on these issues. I really appreciate the rest of the mod team and this community, especially for how they’ve responded to the circumstances that beset us now.

On that note, it is time to move on to brighter and better things. The community has been bustling recently, although I do want to point out one neutral thing that I still found somewhat amusing: #writing has consistently been the least used channel on the server since it was created, sometimes going days without a single message (the most I counted in a row was four or five). Due to its extreme inactivity, we discussed and decided shelving it would be appropriate²¹⁰. We talk plenty enough about writing in mspa-lit as it is, there’s no reason for it to exist at this point.

Then a few days ago on the 15th, Skyplayer described that she had found her “Internzi badge” recently, which brought up something that happened during one of For Fans By Fans’ puzzle contests in the past. She described it succinctly:

Short version: During the FFBF arg I joked in this very chat that the ARG was being ran by an Intern. They took on the Intern persona and we had a blast with the puzzles. When they left FFBF their friend asked me to [put] together a goodbye present from a bunch of other fandom artists. Then they mailed me the Internzi badge they had made for their internsona.

This is a rather wonderful interaction by itself, but the conversation was heightened when joined by the very person in question. Internzi showed up and chatted for just a little bit, and though it was brief, it was a rather heartwarming encounter.

This aside, last night there was an extremely bizarre occurrence that I don’t think many of us will soon forget. One of the most prominent and popular characters from Homestuck has the online handle carcinoGeneticist, and as is to be expected in this fandom, there are plenty of copycats who assume this handle for various reasons, either because they like it just that much or they want to roleplay. As it is though, today we had two people who talked with each other using this handle, which quickly ballooned into nearly 20.

Obviously, this rapidly resolved itself into complete madness. Normally this sort of stuff would be banworthy, but Makin himself interceded and said that the people involved could “do this for an hour.” Without hesitation, everyone sharing the handle and more besides popped into the general voice channel, and outlandish amounts of mic spam and memery ensued. The sheer scale of the chaos was impressive, and while some were surely annoyed, most involved seemed to have a really good time.

As the hour passed the situation slowly increased to a fever pitch, and by the end of the hour the noise was incomprehensible. It was like being awash in a roiling sea of Homestuck bullshit; the energy was of a magnitude I haven’t seen in the voicechat for a very long time. One user named endeviousElf called it the “carcinoGenocide,” which I found to be an extremely suitable name for the event. Even a couple of mods were involved, with some just listening, but I know that Valkyrie actually changed her appearance to resemble another character from the comic and play along (as well as she could play along in the impressive din, anyway).

Then, as all things must, it ended the moment an hour had passed. To their extreme credit, everyone involved immediately stopped and changed back to their normal profiles, and they made no attempt to extend the event. It reminded me of some of the best moments of altgen with more restraint. Makin seemed to enjoy it as well: “I’m sorry to say I’m considering instituting a ‘KARKAT HOUR’ in every channel of the server,” he remarked. I don’t believe that we’ll see this happen again anytime soon, but that’s undoubtedly for the best.

Finally, I want to comment some on Arquiusbot’s development over the last week. Nat and WoC have both done an amazing job installing new functions and fine-tuning them: they’ve completely replicated the functionality Aradiabot used to have, but have somehow made it work even better. On top of that, they’re using their control over it to add a variety of fun and crazy functions, including some stuff Makin has requested.

For some days now, discussion of Star Wars has become increasingly frequent, owed especially to the release of The Rise of Skywalker recently. These conversations are all over the place, variously talking about the new movie and what we thought of it (spoiler: the consensus is that it’s fucking bad) to how it compares with the prequels to extended universe nonsense. The exact content of what we’re talking about doesn’t necessarily matter, it’s more so the fact that we’ve been talking about it a lot.

Makin finally had enough of this the other day, so he created a containment channel and associated role so he could get rid of the topic. This was effective if somewhat of a hassle to implement, so he requested that Nat and WoC build a command in Arquiusbot to make it so that, whenever he feels like it, he can enact the ban against Star Wars and automatically send people to the containment channel. The command is styled as “D--> execute order 66,” upon which for a period of five minutes using certain Star Wars related terminology will get you canned from the channel until someone comes and removes the containment role. This has actually been extremely effective at curtailing Star Wars discussion and keeping it from getting out of hand, a result I find more entertaining than it has any right to be.

Similarly, there is now a command for freezing the channel (Makin’s infamous ZA WARUDO) which he used to have to do by hand. Not only can he do it with a text command, but the bot posts a gif of the process in question, which automatically adds some more gravitas to the occasion. The channel remains frozen until he submits another text command (“D--> time resumes”), and though he was trigger happy with it at the start, his usage has fallen into more normal patterns. It definitely adds a bit more of a punch to the whole process though.

Honestly, I can’t say enough good things about Nat and WoC’s work on Arquiusbot. They are extremely attentive and quick to implement things that are necessary or even just fun. There’s an enormous amount of potential surrounding this bot, and I think I speak for more than just myself when I say I’m excited to see what we all do with it in the future.

Nothing more for today.²¹¹

---

11^th of February 2020 - Makin Steps Down

It has been a very long few days. Sometime last week, the hostility between the HSD and subreddit versus Homestuck Twitter reached its absolute height. Andrew Hussie himself reached out to Makin, declaring that he wanted to see what options were available for easing tensions. Makin responded in a decidedly undiplomatic manner, and Hussie was not pleased.

I’m not sure how at liberty I am to discuss the contents of the subsequent conversations. After this initial problem, I stepped in to speak in Makin’s place and negotiated with Hussie what was to be done. Makin and I conferred between ourselves, figuring out how to respond to certain questions. Hussie asked us for explanations and evidence of what was going on, and I did my utmost to provide those things. Perhaps most importantly, we provided proof that the source of these escalating tensions was a malefactor specifically wanting to sow discord between our groups.

After all of these things, the three of us came to some critical agreements. First, the HSD and subreddit were not responsible for abetting criminals in any fashion, which was a key allegation on Kate’s part. Second, the fact that all of this trouble was possible because of a single bad actor indicated a deeper problem, being that there was no possibility of trust or support between our communities. Third, even if Makin isn’t guilty of the more heinous things he was being accused of, his history and current involvement in managing the community precludes coming to terms with each other, and opens the door for more of these events to happen.

With this last one, the three of us further concluded that it would be necessary for Makin to step down and hand control over to someone else. We agreed to this, but submitted conditions that must be met before he did so. Despite the initial rockiness of these negotiations, Hussie was amenable to the evidence we provided and our explanations. Thus, he graciously agreed to all of the stipulations we laid forth.

This process sounds pretty straightforward in the way I describe it, but it was actually a very intense set of conversations going back and forth almost constantly over the course of a few days. It was messy to untangle everything that was actually going on and reconcile accounts with each other. I think it’s safe to say that none of us were strictly happy with what was going on or how it had come about. This was a grueling dialogue about what we needed to do in order to secure the best possible future for the wider fandom.

By the end of last night, the 10th of February, everything had been arranged and agreed upon. Makin officially transferred the server and subreddit over to me, and we provided a subreddit post describing what was going on. It seems that the vast majority of comments were overwhelmingly positive. Some people had reservations of course, mostly in the sense that it felt like Makin was being used as a sacrifice to ensure peace. There were at least two people who were extremely upset for basically opposite reasons (one felt that this was a signal of the death of the subreddit and HSD, while the other felt that there was still no guarantee of the subreddit “defending marginalized people”).

I’m not sure what Makin thought of these proceedings once all was said and done. To be sure, this is probably one of the hardest decisions he’s ever had to make. One of the conditions I submitted to Hussie was that once he stepped down, Makin would be able to remain on the team in a purely creative capacity; I’ve mentioned before that he has a unique capacity for galvanizing the community in times where it would otherwise have died.

At first Makin seemed more or less fine, but then today he disappeared at a time where he would otherwise have been talking. There are some extenuating circumstances that I can’t really speak about, but I think it’s safe to assume that he was extremely demoralized. It is my and all of our hope that he doesn’t feel the need to go away. That above all would wrack me with guilt: whether he deserved to be removed for all of this is still, in a sense, debatable. I don’t want him to feel like he was unwanted by anyone, and I certainly don’t want him to feel like he should go away. He’s an absolutely critical fixture of our group, and he doesn’t deserve to feel bad about what all has happened²¹².

There’s not much else to say about this for now. Extenuating circumstances aside, this is just about the most positive outcome we could have hoped for given how this all started off. We should be relaxing after all of this as best we can, and yet I’m kind of stricken by this sickening sense that something isn’t right. I don’t know what’s to be done or what the future looks like for us. I never wanted it to get to this point.

Yet, what’s done is done. I can only hope that things will continue more or less as normal after this, administrative changes notwithstanding. Everyone on the server and subreddit are either unaffected or are even happy with the change. Mspa lit is not going away, I explicitly kept it around so we could keep our culture and shills talk. Makin is still on the team even if he has no authority or power to make policy. For Makin’s part in all of this though, I can only hope that he doesn’t feel too bad. If he feels obligated to leave after this, I will forever regret that we got to the point where we are now.

Nothing more for today.

---

Two (and a half) Years of History

Note: I originally wrote this on SPAT’s 2nd anniversary, the 9th of July 2019. Given what’s happened, I’ve repurposed it and changed the writing to fit here instead.

It’s officially been two years since I started writing this document. I’ve described most, if not all, of what I wanted to say. There are surely smaller parts of the community that I didn’t touch on, like the culture of the less used channels, but to be fair they often don’t really have a proper culture. Their activity is just too low--the only thing that I could possibly record are people who are arbitrarily regular participants, which isn’t really interesting on its own.

Rather, the “more important” parts of the place have been recorded faithfully enough for my purposes. Over time, the server has de-escalated severely in the amount of drama that happens. This is ultimately for the best; while drama confers entertainment for those who are sufficiently distanced from it, there were a lot of hurt feelings for a while. Naturally here still are hurt feelings sometimes, but it’s usually more manageable now.

Our community members--by which I mean the people I know--have changed a lot since I joined. Some have changed for the better, and some probably for the worse. The actual shape of our community has changed greatly since I started writing, as well--the memberbase looks nothing like it did two years ago, with lots of the old guard simply gone and many new regulars who have themselves come and gone. Of those remaining, there is a very relaxed atmosphere that I would personally say counts as friendship, even if just casual.

I asked for people to write down their thoughts and feelings on the server if they felt like it. Their responses have been nothing short of amazing, with about 50 users providing their input and constituting nearly another 50 pages of writing. I am beyond delighted with their enthusiasm, and their writing is all pretty interesting as well. I highly recommend anyone who’s reading this to peruse what they’ve said.

As for the future, I would be deluding myself to say that nothing of note will ever happen again. I actually feel optimistic that we have a while to go before things wear out, and I’m sure there will in fact be various things that spur me to write; sometimes the weirdest things inspire me to do so, and it’s not inconceivable to think that they’ll pop up every so often. If this is to happen, then I’ll attach them to this document in the regular manner.

Conversely, as far as regular entries go I believe I’ve covered most of everything that I feel was necessary to say, as well as a hefty amount that I didn’t expect to comment on. As it is, it can be said that the first, largest part of SPAT is done. I brought up the possibility of closing this document around June of 2019 in mspa-lit, and everyone present was surprisingly understanding of the idea. There was no accusation of laziness or suggesting I was making a mistake, only support and kindness. That’s the sort of community spirit that I want to point out and remember, when I look back on this document and the time I’ve spent with these people. Above all, I want to crystallize the idea that the users I prized were good people worth talking to.

It’s been over three years since I joined the HSD, and I’ve met a lot of people that I variously consider good friends. I’ve talked endlessly with more of them than I can count, and in the process I’ve learned a lot about them. I’m familiar with people from around the globe that, without this place, I would not have met otherwise. All of them are unique and interesting somehow, and talking with them has helped me to grow in ways I could never have expected. I wonder, too, how many more people we might meet in the future.

As I laid out at the very beginning of the document, I pursued writing this as a way to preserve all of these memories, armed with the foresight that one day I’ll probably stop talking to these users or participating here. Looking back across past entries, I think I’m satisfied with the result. Even without all of these pages though, I doubt I would ever forget my friends here--even those who might not remember me.

As to the reader, for anyone who may possibly be examining this document far in the future, do me a favor if you feel so inclined: all of these strange, wonderful people don’t deserve to fall into obscurity. Even past the words in this document, there are countless moments and experiences that we’ve all shared together. We exist and existed, and for all of the times we’ve had both good and bad, these people deserve to be remembered. Keep us alive in your mind for me, if you can.

Thanks everyone²¹³.

---

When I first thought of ending SPAT in the first few months of 2019, I immediately knew that I wanted to get the thoughts and feelings of people here straight from their mouths. This page is a monument to the time that we've spent together, and to the spirit of the document I've written.

Most of these are untitled; those with a title have them included in the table of contents. There are footnotes in a couple, so keep your eye out. As I've requested elsewhere, please keep the memory of these people with you--they deserve it.

---

Andrew

Being the first to join the server, I feel obligated to go on a long retrospective rant about how the server’s humble beginnings and how it’s grown over the years, and while I could do that and I love HSD to bits (probably more than I should, if I’m honest), I feel HSD’s little uniquities have stacked on top of each other for so long that it’s become something quite esoteric and sort of hard to explain. I’d imagine that the goings-on and characters seem quite bizarre to an outsider to the server. I’ve been around to witness the entire life of the server so far, from its first day as basically just an Overseer v2 game chat to whatever it could be called now, certainly not just a Homestuck server, and with SPAT ‘ending,’ I feel a sort of melancholy.

SPAT hadn’t always been around, of course, and though in truth I haven’t even read most of it, it was nice to know that some things were being recorded. It’s important to me that something be left behind, that things are recorded, and I’m glad SPAT fulfills that purpose, however I do feel that SPAT is somewhat inaccurate to HSD as a whole because it, like nearly all historical records, only tells of the ‘drama,’ events, and important things. That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t really transcribe the day-to-day normalcy very well, I’d say. Things that aren’t noteworthy but still happen, irrelevant things that are what keep the server going.

It’s not like we’re on razor’s edge waiting for the next Homestuck content to come out, we’re talking to each other about music or books, sharing our personal endeavors, thoughts on odd subjects like politics or food, and just generally being a community. It’s what keeps people here, much more so than Homestuck does, at least from what I see and from what I feel personally. Not everyone feels the same way, of course, but that’s sort of my point. There are a lot of people in the server and even outside of mspa-lit/cafe-mspa/read-shills or whatever name that channel has at any given moment, which is Drew’s (and most people mentioned in SPAT’s) main haunt. That’s not a criticism on anyone’s taste or habits, it’s just an observation and a sort of disclaimer; no one can be everywhere, and splitting one’s attention to several channels of decent activity is draining and somewhat of a hassle.

Point is, I hope that these user-submissions into SPAT showcase to outsiders a more mundane version of HSD than SPAT proper so as to better convey the general vibe, I guess, of the server as a whole, or else one may get the wrong idea. The old Romans, for example, are thought of as philosophical and such, but the Pompeian graffiti reveals the greater truth of the everyday of the civilization and peoples’ senses of humor, their hobbies, their preferences, their friendships, and so on, and that’s what I hope these are.

“Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!”

---

Anervaria

HSD to me

Hi, I'm Arya, but most people know me as Anervaria, and if you're really old, you might know me as CreatorofJanespeak. I joined HSD nearly three years ago now, it will have been three years on August 8th. On my three year bizarre adventure on Discord, I've seen a lot of things and joined a lot of communities. I've matured and learned through my experiences, even though I feel like nothing has changed since I was like 13. I've met friends who I feel who I can talk to about anything, and I've met some pretty shitty people too, ranging from simply being an asshole all the way up to being a pedophile. But throughout it all, I feel as if HSD has always been there as a place that I could come to when I want have some nice conversations and nice laughs. And I think that trait is what really makes the server special to me. I'm not sure if many other regulars in the server feel the same way, but still, I think HSD is pretty cool, yo. Thanks to all of you who have unintentionally made my days better just by joking around with me for three years.

wackyZany

---

carlarc

i don't really know how to… do this, so i'll talk about my perspective of the server and what I perceive of my growth on it i guess. not a lot of homestuck stuff because the read-shills community has mostly outgrown it.

i do talk about it in other channels, primarily #homestuck and #original-characters, but for the most part my homestuck talk in #shills is making fun of people ‘classpecting’ themselves or others, which is somewhat hypocritical since i love getting into ‘real’ (talking about how they work) classpecting discussions.

it’s been very interesting to look at what past-me used to say, and what i say now. when i make jokes now, i try to make them funny. give them punchlines, make them the usual drew/tmt-me banter, and having them fit and not derail the conversation (unless i don’t care about it).

way back 2 years ago, i was about as much of a relentless garbage poster as you can get. my jokes weren't even nearing jokes, they had no punchline, i kept spamming meaningless garbage sentence by sentence Andrew-style (basically sending a message every word) and trashing up the channel.

the worst moment i’ve been able to dig up is sending a screenshot of google results when i was looking for the flashlight redline joey video and asking the channel to tell me which link to follow, because i hadn't seen it at that time (i have no idea how i didn't get banned from that). which is kind of really fucking embarassing.

i also try to actually participate in discussions: if it's something (that I perceive as) serious, i'm not going to joke around. if i actually care about the topic, i'm going to discuss it and give my takes on stuff, while reading & responding to what others say. i also often attempt to steer discussions back into place and berate people who make useless statements (like, “what the fuck” or “this conversation sucks”), if it’s something i feel deeply enough about/am actually engaged in.

it doesn't happen very often because there just isn't that much stuff i actually do care about that's talked about, what i do care about others probably don't, and i'm really bad at starting conversations, something i have no idea how to work on. this has the result of me not really doing noticeable things: the last real result in SPAT of me is just disappearing, which is kind of a bummer and highlights how vacuous i am. i don't want that, i want to be more.. important, i guess. but i have no idea how to do that.

i feel as if over time, i've matured somewhat, at least in conversations and when i actually want to be mature. i'm still pretty bad at it though (i got jobbanned from space station 413 less than a day into both of its premieres). hopefully i get better, since i actually do want to make an impact in things. i'm just too fucking bad at being mature to even have a chance at it, which is entirely my fault.

but on the server itself; it's kind of Great. people (used to) shit on makin for his "problematic" hands-off moderation style (or too hands-on in mspalit, where he keeps banning conversations he deems too 'general' or 'nsfw'), but HSD is without a doubt the best discord server i'm in.

it strikes a great balance in a lot of things: it's woke, but not too woke (as in too centered on LGBT+ stuff), it's memey, but not too memey (there's altgen for that), it's feels like a community, but not like a hugbox, and it's filled with good people i talk to every day. there's no other community like it, and i dread the day it dies, since i don't know if anything could actually fill its void the way it does. it’s the first real internet community i’ve been in, so i don’t know how i’d go hunting for another, especially since i don’t have many interests that aren’t linked to HSD.

and on the community proper, it’s for the most part pretty good. from the readshills community, pretty much everyone ‘fits’ together, and knows how to talk in the channel. some people are more abrasive than others, but if they go too far the other mods just tell them to quit it. it’s actually healthy to a degree, since it prevents the place from getting too.. soft? i guess that’s the right word for it.

it’s actually pretty jarring sometimes, because when new people come in they have no idea what the ‘unwritten rules’ are of the channel.

they often hellopost, talk about #general-tier stuff (it’s hard to encapsulate what exactly that means, but it’s mostly talking about IRL stuff that’s mostly interesting to themselves and doesn’t fit the tone of other conversations in the channel, which are mostly veiled in several layers of irony), and make empty statements that don’t really.. fit the conversation.

i’m probably being a hypocrite with the latter two points but it’s what i see, i guess?. i’ve this process happen with a bunch of people, but the last one i remember is actually Rina, who quickly adapted to the customs of the channel.

i don’t want to talk that much about specific users, because i feel it’s kind of… weird? like, it’s intrusive or something. plus, there are a fuckton of people worth talking about, so it would take me forever.

i guess that’s pretty much it. wanted to add my part to SPAT because it’s a great project, and the other reason should be pretty obvious if you look for it.

---

cookiefonster

I wrote some stupid extremely self-absorbed HSD autobiography or something back in November 2017 and let Drew attach the first part, which was the least self-absorbed part, to SPAT. I don't know what the hell I was thinking when I wrote that thing. I promised Drew I would finish it because at the time he seemed genuinely interested in it.

Here I am about two years later with SPAT concluded, with everyone given free rein to submit things to the "user contributions" page. I have a turbulent relationship with this server and have done a lot of embarrassing shit on it over the years, but if I'm given the chance to contribute I may as well give a pseudo-conclusion(?) to that embarrassing document I made and say some positive things about HSD.

First off, I fucking love Homestuck, like way too much. And I really enjoy talking about it on this server, probably more than anywhere else. HSD is home to people who know the comic through and through and have a sufficient variety of views on it to make discussions always interesting.

Second, I kind of love the concept of the Shills List? Normally Makin is the absolute last person I would ever give a sincere compliment, but I can tell from the several works on the shills list I have read that he has surprisingly good taste in media and knows exactly what media people would enjoy if they liked Homestuck. I've only read a few works on the shills list but I deeply, thoroughly enjoyed all of them. *Especially* Transdimensional Brain Chip, please for the love of god don't be turned off by the crude art. It's kind of scary how well the shills list accomplishes its intended goal.

Third, SPAT itself blows my mind. I've always been a fan of history documentation, and this journal documents HSD's history thoroughly with lots of honesty and passion. I'm very glad to witness its completion and hosting on its own web domain. I hope it stands for many years to come as a documentation of not just the Homestuck community, but the nature of online communities in general which I think is a topic many people don't give enough appreciation.

I'm also obligated to say the Homestuck fan music community blows my mind, but I really don't have anything to say about it that hasn't already been said in other attachments to SPAT which I highly recommend reading.

---

Cuil

Hi, I’m cuil, a semi-regular in read-shills or cafe-mspa, whichever makin has decided to name the place this time. I started posting there when I first read SPAT - where i came to the conclusion that read-shills was an exclusive club that was hard to get into. The person I am, I immediately decided to try and get in - and to my surprise, it was far easier than i thought it would be to get in. I just said hello, and people seemed to accept me - even without reading any of makin’s titular shills.

Even after becoming inactive several times - sometimes for months on end, the same people were there to welcome me, time and time again.

Once you get in, read-shills is like a family. the homestuck fandom as a whole is one - but shillsregs share a... tighter bond, perhaps, messed up as we may be. some of my best friends are shillsregs - the people in there are amazing.

This wasn’t supposed to be some long ramble like some people can sometimes embark on - just a reflection of sorts, a goodbye to SPAT. SO! long story short...

THANKS.

thank you to the shillsgang, to drew for introducing me, to the HSD as a whole, and to makin, the supreme saltlord, the wacky and zany, long may he live.

to those reading this in the future -

i hope you’re well and thank you for reading my little thing, and, of course, SPAT.

cheerio.

Cuil

xxxx

---

CyclopsCaveman

“when Kanzaki posted about wanting to create a place where people could gather in peace. I feel like he achieved that goal.”

On June 30th, 2019, at approximately 11 am EST, the website knzk.me was shut down indefinitely. A relatively small corner of the internet, the community was unique and special in the larger community it’s a part of, the fediverse.

What is the fediverse? I won’t bore you with the technical underpinnings, people much smarter than me have explained it to death already, but there is a basic gist that’s important for some context. The fediverse is a group of websites that runs on software that federates. You can set up your own site that uses Twitter-like software (Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey et al), or in some other cases there are softwares that attempt to mimic other sites like YouTube (PeerTube) or Instagram (Pixelfed). The aforementioned federation means that your website is able to communicate with other websites that are set up with this software as well, in much the same way that you can email someone with a gmail address from a completely different domain name.

Many users typically gravitate towards an already established community, and may sometimes move from site to site, depending on personal motives. Most fediverse sites are an instance of one of the aforementioned Twitter-like softwares. The two major softwares are Mastodon and Pleroma, although there are a few more. The common name for the series of federated websites is the fediverse. Some others that were naturalized on the Mastodon platform may also refer to Mastodon specifically (or Masto, for short).

Mastodon, the software that KNZK ran on, was created by Eugen in 2016 and pulled in a relatively small amount of people at the start. Most major upticks in new member counts came in migration waves from other platforms after various controversies or general dissatisfaction cause mass groups of people to choose to leave their previous websites for others. The majority of users speak English, and typically start out on the flagship instance, mastodon.social, or one of a few equally popular websites.

In August of 2018 one of these migration waves hit the fediverse from Twitter. Users were either banned in large capacities for one sleight or another, and whether just or unjust, this sudden increase in bans was what caused many users who were already dissatisfied with Twitter and its moderation policies to seek out a new home.

“I was fed up with the current social media options, especially twitter,” wrote Idopa, a former knzk.me user. “The algorithm was annoying and blatantly pushed their own agenda, the sponsored posts were getting to be very creepily targeted, and reporting shitty posts / accounts did nothing. I think this was also around last August when they were going to start suggesting posts that your friends supposedly liked but they didn't. Bottom line I felt powerless and frustrated so I wanted to see what other options there were out there.”

“as to what brought me to the fediverse? i'm not sure, honestly,” wrote Evelien, another former user of knzk and a relatively popular user on the fediverse, with about 1,000 followers on her currently active account at the time of writing. “it was during this big migration off twitter, in, like, august or something. everyone was getting banned and i was told people with old accounts that got suspended before were especially being targeted. i knew i had an old account that got banned (still no clue why. never got an email) so anxiety was startin' to creep up on me. i saw like, 2 people mention mastodon so i thought i'd do some googling. i had the tab open for the google search for like, 2 days straight 'cause finding where i was supposed to go was confusing as hell. i guess i ended up figuring it out!”

This was the environment at the time of the Twitter migration to Mastodon. It was one of new discovery, and the beginnings of a community from the ashes of an old one.

KNZK, however, was a majority Japanese website. The staff was all Japanese and most users of the website only spoke Japanese. There was a dedicated app made for KNZK, called KNZK App (which is still under active development to my knowledge), which has a description on the Apple App Store in Japanese, and the App itself’s primary language is Japanese. KNZK was, for the most part, largely isolated from the English-speaking sector of the fediverse.

Yet people still managed to sign up for KNZK. In fact, as people signed up for KNZK and began posting and interacting with other users across the fediverse, it drew yet more people’s attention to the website. In short order, KNZK had amassed a sizable English-speaking community.

Here should come the inevitable stories of the culture clash, and strife caused by the sudden influx of new users, none of whom spoke Japanese, but that wasn’t the case. In fact, most users time on KNZK was peaceful and included lots of positive interaction with the site owner, Kanzaki-san.

A lot of this had to do with the very “hands-off” moderation employed on KNZK. “when it came to the administration,” writes Evelien, “it was quite lax. it's kind of what everyone on the instance wanted, though. if there was harassment or anything terrible happening, we would always be able to cross that language barrier and kanzaki-san would listen to us.” Aleums, another former KNZK user, wrote, “knzk was a fantastic admin. He really just wanted his users to have a good time and trusted us to self-govern, and would only rarely take action. He was kind and interacted with our posts, liked our selfies and chatted to us. When he did have to take administrative stances they were sensible and well-explained. I never had trouble with him and the good will he embodied led me and others to treat him and the instance in general with respect.”

Many users had fond memories of KNZK, and those that spoke English felt welcomed on the website in spite of the language barrier. When asked of his favorite memory from KNZK, Aelums wrote, “It's gotta be the time @knzk and other japanese speaking users made a music hellthread and started tagging in random other users from the instance. We didn't share a language but we all enjoyed music and had a great time sharing things, listening to each other's recommendations and having our notifications destroyed.”

Kew, another former KNZK user, wrote of the same question, “Maybe not technically a memory, but a post: when Kanzaki posted about wanting to create a place where people could gather in peace. I feel like he achieved that goal.”

“It's funny to say but my favorite memory was the blackout in December,” wrote Idopa, “It was so unique in that it was the only time you could ONLY interact within your instance and those of us who were still active on knzk made friends and of course made jokes about it. It did feel like a little deserted island where you end up bonding.”

With the sweet must come the bitter. That blackout was part of a series of site issues that would eventually lead to the closing of KNZK in late June.

Many users are still on the fediverse, but some have chosen to leave the fediverse behind with the closing of their chosen website. It’s not difficult for those enfranchised in the fediverse to find one another again, but there will always be a KNZK-shaped hole in our hearts with the loss of a cherished website. Perhaps we can celebrate the joy KNZK gave us while it was there, and cherish the fond memories from a special corner of the fediverse.

From radical.town, with love,

CyclopsCaveman

Included here are the full transcripts of all the interviews I managed to collect before writing the project if you’d like to read some more personal accounts from people that were on KNZK. Enjoy!

---

Daniel111111222222

First thing I thought when I came into read shills, sometime in January or February of 2019, was that the shill list was a list of works you had successfully shilled to others. I thought I had walked into a gathering of master shillers. The only thing I had shilled was Worm, and that was to my brother.

After a short time I got used to the place. I don't fit it exactly, but I fit it well enough. (It certainly helped that I had already read Worth The Candle and other shills, and that I binge-read SPAT upon learning several days after joining that it existed.) All of the various internet communities that I've been a part of have been places where I deemphasise different aspects of myself. Perhaps across all of them, you could stitch together what I've posted and get a complete psychological picture of me, and this is the reason that I use different names in different communities. One day, I will retire "Daniel111111222222". I hope that when that day comes, I will have found a community that has much in common with read shills.

This channel is a pretty decent place to lurk. The main thing I get out of it is entertainment. I can drop in at any time and there is some long conversation between various characters. Most of the time, it will be something that makes me laugh, and if not that, then something cool and interesting. Every now and then, drama, interesting in its own way, and made more interesting when I care about the people involved. It occurred to me while writing this paragraph that it's very much like Homestuck itself. Perhaps the ease with which people roleplayed as Homestuck characters during the April Fool's event is a testament to that. I say all of these things as if all I do is lurk, but somehow I've become a part of the community too.

How communities of internet people die out or continue to live is something I think about a lot, and I don't have anything approaching a fully formed theory of that. What floats around in my head are things like Schelling points of conversation, and the amount of people/engagement being above some critical mass that ensures conversation is present at all times, and people having personal relationships with each other that go beyond being acquaintances. They need to be present, but not necessarily to completion. They can substitute for one another to a large degree, so internet communities can have a strong flavour of just one aspect. The server as a whole has Homestuck as its Schelling point (I am surely misusing that term), and read shills meets the critical mass threshold with style while being tied together through many personal relationships. And who can forget the shill lists themselves as the channel's Schelling point? A decent balance exists here.

Unless something unforseen happens, I think I will stick it out for another four years. I estimated one year, then doubled it to account for the chance that I underestimated the time, then doubled it again to account for the initial guess being too low as compensation for the first doubling.

SPAT is something that I'm glad exists. I would like more people to write documents like it, so that I may read them. I'm glad that young people can have much the same wonderful experiences that come with being raised by the internet in this decade as I did in the last one.

Keep being wacky and zany,

Yours truly.

---

Ephemerald

Of Homestuck and Discord

I vividly remember when I first joined the Homestuck Discord.

That's what I wanted to say, and I would go on a whole spiel to accompany it, probably washed out in excessive, irreversibly rose-tinted nostalgia. But as it turns out, I didn't vividly remember it. I had to call up the search tool and scroll through the archives to find my first message on this account. And after a period spent fondly remembering the idiosyncrasies of Past Me, I re-remembered a fact I usually forget: that I'd joined the Discord much earlier, on an old, abandoned, account. I decided to go back and take a look.

My old account, whose username at that point has been lost to time, even though I can take a guess as to what it was, joined the Homestuck Discord on April 5, 2016. It isn't hard to guess why I chose that date: sure enough, my first messages are me anticipating [S] Collide, which would undoubtedly arrive in a short period of time. I'd been waiting for years, of course, we all had. I could stand to wait a couple of hours more. My messages were drops in a toiling sea of fans, all shouting and clamoring for an actual conclusion. I barely recognize anyone from that time, going back. The short remainder of my messages were directly before Act 7, then a brief stint in May, and then radio silence.

It's hard to think of a work of fiction that's had such a dramatic impact on my life as Homestuck. After seeing snippets of it across the Internet for years — a fantroll here, a profile picture there, and on one infamous occasion, stumbling upon a link to that Act 6 Act 5 Act 2 flash perpetually zooming into a Zilly Santa — I had no idea that reading it in earnest would change as much as it did. Homestuck coincided with me beginning to take my art seriously, with me discovering Reddit, and therefore, gaining a broader understanding of the Internet and its subcultures, and with me getting a computer that could actually work, and didn't require constant antivirus scans to stay up to date.

I don't want to spend all this time going on tangents about my personal life outside of the HSD, though, because I'm not entirely sure that's what I want this to be about, or what you want to read. What I'll say is that /r/homestuck became an absolutely invaluable "companion text" to the actual comic, both while I read it, and while I suffered through the interminable Gigapause. Though it was clear I'd been denied the fandom's glory years (or inglorious, by the same measure), I could at least lurk through what remained. For months upon months, I watched the subreddit develop and change, especially once Homestuck began updating in earnest, and I began to pick up on important, recurring names. One of those, of course, was Makin, who at that point was Makinporing and had Lord English's billiards balls on either side of his name at all times.

I'm sure I happened to join the Discord because it was linked on the subreddit, or maybe on one of the accompanying Cyutube streams, and then thought nothing else of it. It wouldn't be until August 28, 2016, that I'd join the Homestuck Discord on this account. Back then, my account name was "Bill Cipher," and people were quick to make accompanying jokes. It was only about a month earlier that I’d permanently joined the platform (after a few false starts), with my only other major servers being the unofficial hub for the Cipherhunt (a worldwide scavenger hunt plotted by the creator of Gravity Falls, Alex Hirsch), on which I roleplayed as Bill Cipher and somehow got people to think I was Hirsch himself, and the official hub for a weird niche Internet community I’m partially responsible for creating.

Though many Discord servers came and went in the time since, as 2016 bled into 2017, and so on, the Homestuck Discord remained one of those universal constants, largely because it represented not just a Discord, but a facet of a much larger community — Homestuck itself. To me, Homestuck was the subreddit. It was those community streams where we’d watch Con Air Special Edition, it was the annals of MS Paint Fan Adventures where Cool and New Web Comic entered the mainstream. It was the people that tied it together, people I’d recognized while on the subreddit, and people I’d come to recognize since: Makin, of course, Tensei, Toast, Dingus, Wizard of Chaos, tripheus, MrCheeze, wheals, Niklink, Cerulean, yazshu, XenoZane, meems, and william_, just to name a few.

A large part of the appeal of the Homestuck Discord back then was, if you’ll excuse the incredibly obvious pun, the discord. There was this chaotic energy associated with the whole thing, presumably because of the zeitgeist — Homestuck had just ended, Volume 10 had been released, the Cool and New Music Team had begun production, and it seemed like everyone was creating their own takes on some kind of fan epilogue project. It felt like I was finally “in” on the fandom, in a sense — here I was, able to see the unfiltered thoughts of a community I’d spent years following. I still remember seeing Tensei first talk on the Discord at a time when the reaction feature had just been added, with everyone adding droves of :tenseifaces: to anything he’d say.

The most important part of the Homestuck Discord for me, though, was how it acted as a nexus to so many other opportunities. If the HSD was the fortress of the Homestuck community, then the Cool and New Music Team was its inner sanctum — a group of people carrying on Homestuck’s legacy by mercilessly, hilariously shitposting to the top of the charts, and managing to sneak in actual quality more and more often along the way. Joining the CANMT introduced me to people that would essentially become my closest friends in this community, and it gave me an outlet to share my art that could actually be seen by, you know. An audience. And the scope of the HSD’s rabbit hole never shrunk. From there, I joined the Unofficial MSPA Fans, the Oceanfalls and Vast Error Discords (and their respective music teams), and a whole host of smaller, more personal servers.

Despite the negative connotations associated with the term “splinter server,” what with their link to dysfunction and drama, being in these smaller, personal servers has been undoubtedly the real highlight of my time in the broader HSD community. Months spent in the CANMT Discord and elsewhere changed my viewpoint of the actual HSD to this monolithic, alien presence. It continued to grow, despite wildly inconsistent official and fan Homestuck output, yet it never shook off the chaos that was there from the start. I began to talk there much less, favoring the tighter nature of these team-based communities. Oftentimes it seemed like I’d only hear about HSD in a negative context — a bout of drama, a reckoning, personal gripes against the modteam, et cetera. In spite of this, there was one part of the server that had the feel of a smaller, recognizable community, and always had: #read_shills.

I can’t say for sure how long I’ve been lurking on #read_shills, though it definitely hasn’t been consistent. As far as its explicit purpose as Makin’s advertising corner goes, there’s no doubt it succeeds. The Shills List has inspired me to read works I never would have even heard of otherwise — and thankfully, they’re usually consistently high-quality. It isn’t hard to describe the shills in general. They’re rationalist, metafictional, metatextual works of commentary. I’d say their greatest commonality is exploring what it means to exist in various ways. The protagonists get meaning from the relationship between a work and its fans, from dealing with an absence of death and the inevitability of the apocalypse, from understanding and overcoming the limits of their universe. They’re harrowing, insightful deconreconstructions of what means to be a character in a work of fiction.

If what I’m saying seems like nonsense, and maybe it is, know that I’d describe the Shills List as, essentially, what required reading looks like in a world post-Homestuck — moreso after the release of the Homestuck Epilogues, which in any other server should have a spot on the list too. I think that the Shills List, and by extension #read_shills, is in a sense the end result of the Homestuck Discord, something formed because of the way Homestuck developed and ended, whether it was intended that way or not. Regardless, it has real merit.

The Homestuck Discord is everything I’ve described and more. It’s essentially the only centralized hub for the Homestuck fandom, and has been for some time. It’s full of users of essentially any kind, with enough channels that there’s a place to talk about nearly any topic. For months, it’s been my number-one place to get Homestuck news (anyone who mutes #news and #announcements are cowards). But it’s a very weird case, really, solely because it’s formed around Homestuck. It’s a work infamous for incredibly vocal fan participation, a mark hardcoded into its design as a pastiche of choose your own adventure games, and for its hiatuses, which only grew more frequent and longer as Homestuck piled on the convolution and malformed side projects. So how do you manage an idealistic hub of discussion for a work where the next update is a pipe dream, yet has a fanbase uniquely empowered by the medium to produce and discuss content?

Well... I guess you do it like this.

In spite of having thousands of users at any given time, it’s clear to me that the modteam of the Homestuck Discord knows what they’re doing. The channels have strict, clear rules, the team is diligent in fighting raids, there are always interesting and engaging community events, and decisions, even if they seem questionable at first, usually tend to work out in the greater interest of the server. Makin, of course, is at the center of it all — the face on the ~ATH scrapbook that is Several People Are Typing — and despite all the infamy and scorn he’s received, he really has achieved someone that no one else has. He’s created the Homestuck* Discord. Of course it’s a discussion hub for Homestuck. But in spite of the hiatuses, or really, because of them, it’s grown to be so much more. It’s a thriving community with its own separate injokes. It’s a place to share original art, writing, and music. It’s the library unpublished, full of works adjacent to the source. Because of all this — because of the music streams, the celebratory images, the Space Station 13 and SCP: Containment Breach games — the Homestuck Discord has its own identity. It’s developed into something beyond its parts.

Towards the start of the year, I decided I’d talk on #read_shills more, and make more of an effort to actually read the titular shills. As I said above, I wasn’t disappointed: some of the shills rank among my favorite works of fiction. Though I haven’t upheld my former decision as much as I’d like, I really do enjoy the channel. Like I said, it feels much more like a community I can engage with than other channels like #general (or #hangout, may it rest in pieces); there’s always something new to discuss, or some semantic discourse to get wrapped up in. Hopefully in the future I can talk more here, read more shills, and work my way up to the top of the charts. And from there? Well, I’ll have to shill something. Guess I’d better find something that’s worth the candle.

And then, of course, there’s Several People Are Typing itself, which I haven’t really talked about yet. I’ll put things pretty simply. It’s absolutely fucking mind-boggling that one person would put it upon himself to extensively, exhaustively catalogue the day-to-day happenings of their community. Especially one like this, a shifting, ravenous ouroboros of Homestuck and discord. But Drew did it. The ups and the downs, the cold hard stats and the poetics on the ephemerality of friend groups... And now we’re here. With the epilogues firmly behind us, and Hiveswap an impossibly long ways ahead. It’s really as good a place as any to close the curtains.

SPAT is really important to me because it’s something that I wish I had, for the community I helped make. I know what it’s like, to be a part of a group like this. To have a corner of the Internet all to yourself, to collaborate and build and create a project you can be proud of. To be a cornerstone of something greater than yourself, to work with the tedium of running things behind the scenes. To go through golden years and periods of incessant drama and to wonder if you’ll still be here, far down the road. And I wish I could have had a record of everything that happened. Something to remember all those conversations and arguments by. A way to chart what it feels like I’ve spent my entire life working towards.

I’m glad that the Homestuck Discord has that. I’m glad that I’ve been a part of this community for as long as I have, and even if we don’t get any more Homestuck content, I’m confident that I won’t be leaving any time soon, unless the crystal sphere surrounding the world cracks and the Internet is replaced by the thousand thousand Names of God.

I’m Ephemerald. Stay tuned.

---

Gitaxian

SPAT Was a Complete and Utter Failure

From the beginning, Drew’s constantly been concerned with ensuring the integrity of SPAT. At first, it wasn’t even shared at all for fear of influencing the culture it documents. Later, it would be shared with a select group of people (including me) privately, and then later as a public document. I followed it for a while, then stopped when I felt like I didn’t have the time to keep up with the absurd volume of words Drew was churning out.

In theory, SPAT is supposed to be an objective document to record and preserve the culture of the HSD so it doesn’t end up forgotten when the community inevitably dies as all internet communities must. If the goal is to preserve the culture being examined, the examination has to avoid altering that culture in the first place. At the same time, an account needs as much detail from as many perspectives as possible to be objective. This presents an inherent contradiction. Objectivity demands interaction, while preservation demands separation.

Drew navigated this dichotomy as best as he could. SPAT wouldn’t be what it is without having others around to fill Drew in on events he wasn’t around for and provide their perspective to him. At the same time his constant insistence that we not try to let it affect our behavior was vital in shaping it. Unfortunately, it was an effort doomed to failure, because both Drew’s goals were impossible.

~~~

You’ve almost certainly heard of the butterfly effect before. A butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane on the other side of the planet, as a complex and chaotic system amplifies even the smallest changes. Chaos Theory is the branch of mathematics that deals with such systems, and demonstrates the impossibility of predicting how they will behave beyond a certain point. The further away from the present you get, the more tiny changes have a chance to propagate through the system and create huge differences, and the more details you’d need to know to predict the future. Beyond about two weeks, predicting the weather becomes effectively impossible because you’d need so much detail to simulate anything accurately.

A Discord server makes the weather look impossibly stable. A single message can wildly divert the flow of conversation in seconds. Trying to predict what the HSD will look like in two minutes, let alone two weeks, is absurd. What this means for Drew is that preserving what the culture of the HSD “would be” without SPAT existing is impossible. No amount of telling people not to SPATbait (deliberately acting in a way they think will get them a mention in SPAT) will erase the fact that the existence of SPAT affects people, and even the tiniest effects will be amplified until the course of the HSD is forever altered by its existence.

Some hypothetical third party who’s not a part of HSD could view and document the message logs without affecting them. Drew, however, is trying to preserve more than the contents of those logs. He’s trying to preserve the culture of the HSD, the experience of being a part of it, what it means to him. Drew is able to do so because he’s interacted with the server, because he’s a part of that culture. Even when kept private, it no doubt influenced the way he thought, the way he interacted with others on the server. The moment it was made public, any chance of limiting its influence vanished. I can never be the person I was before I knew about SPAT.

In a way SPAT does preserve the HSD’s culture by recording it. At the same time, it destroyed that culture again and again. Each update captured what the HSD was, but nothing can ever capture what the HSD is, because anything that could alters its trajectory in unpredictable and unknowable ways. It is just as much a part of the HSD’s culture as it is a depiction of that culture.

~~~

What exactly does an objective account of the culture of the HSD look like? The most obvious objective account would simply be logs of every message ever posted to the server. It would contain everything, and have no bias. It would take way too long to actually read, but it would be objective. However, that’s not really sufficient for what Drew wanted to accomplish. Drew wanted to preserve the culture of the HSD, not simply its content. That culture requires a massive amount of context to understand. How could a scholar a hundred years from now, given those logs, truly understand the HSD without first knowing about Homestuck itself, let alone the thousands of memes, events, and shills that influence it daily.

Drew has of course endeavored to provide context wherever possible in SPAT to ensure outsiders can understand it. The question he then must have faced is exactly what context to include. As we went over before, even the tiniest and most tangential inputs to the HSD can have drastic effects on its output. Drew can’t possibly include the entire universe in SPAT, so he must pick and choose which parts he thinks are important to the HSD.

Those internal choices are matched, and in some ways exceeded, by the choices Drew must make for external reasons - choices made due to how SPAT interacts with the real world. Names have been censored and entire events have been excised from the record because Drew doesn’t want to make people the subject of gossip or create unnecessary drama. It would be irresponsible for Drew to ignore the way his writing affects people. Instead, he chose to take advantage of that fact and influence people for the better.

It is these choices that prevents SPAT from being objective. SPAT is not an account of HSD, it’s an account of HSD as Drew experiences it, and thanks to the input he often takes from us, as we experience it. The choice of what to include is a reflection of our perception of the HSD, our subjective experience of it, and our desires for what it should be. It couldn’t be any other way because that’s what HSD’s “culture” is. All the things that come to mind when you think of it, what you associate with it.

So SPAT can’t be an objective record of the HSD, because it can’t possibly contain every single unique perspective of what the HSD is. Instead, it’s a record of us, and who we are in relation to it. Twenty years from now, SPAT would be practically worthless to someone who never had contact with the HSD. To us, it’s a part of ourselves, a fragment of who we used to be.

~~~

SPAT failed to be an objective record that preserves the culture of the HSD, because it could never be that and never should have been. It’s something much more important. It’s affected us irrevocably, become a part of us, and in exchange we’ve put a piece of ourselves in it. SPAT is not a record of the HSD, it is the HSD. Twenty years from now it will serve not as a record, but a way for us to retrieve that piece of ourselves, to be just for a moment who we are now once again.

---

Ifnar

As the reader is already aware, Drew asked people on the discord to write something for the end of SPAT.

I really have no idea what to put here exactly, even on this day of the deadline, but I do feel that as a member of the mod team who appears periodically in the main text, I should add something here so this will just be a random assortment of stuff about the server.

I joined the server only weeks, maybe days after it was created for a reddit Overseer session during what was the summer holidays for me.

It was the first online community I was this level of active in, which, yes, is quite late in life comparatively.

I attribute this to my general anxiety and paranoia interacting with strangers.

Nevertheless, becoming a more active part of the fandom and helping the community be a better place through my moderation was a very nice experience overall.

Over time, several people have told me that I appear scary and stuck up, especially after becoming a pseudo.

This is obviously due to my grammatically correct typing whcih stands out among the more casual writing of the other server members.

I can't really explain why I type this way (though I've certainly made excuses for it over time) but it feels wrong to me to drop it, even though it is obviously accepted among the community.

I want to comment that I find this project pretty neat as a repository of documentation about both the Homestuck fandom and the discord community over the years.

The thought that academics have to take online events serious as a part of modern culture still warms my cockles and imagining someone slogging through the descriptions of meandering #cafe-mspa discourse fills the same niche.

Even had I had the idea for this, I would likely not have had the motivation to actually work on it so props to Drew for going through with this over the years.

---

Interrobang

“What can you say about HSD? It was HSD.”

- Philip Banks

Yes, you are certain Philip Banks (that’s b-e-a-e-n-k-e-s, no e) said that.

Memes aside, I think this quote sums up my experience here pretty well. Describing an internet community is a challenge - especially one with tens of thousands of members. One could imagine someone simply listing qualities of the group in question, until they feel they’ve captured everything (“what can you say about HSD?”) - but I feel that such an approach would inevitably leave things out. No, the only way to truly get a community is to live it (“It was HSD” - I guess it still is). SPAT, or something like it if we’re generalizing to communities in general, is in my opinion about as close as you can get to a good description - not a full one, but a good one. As for everything, and everyone, else - I just want to say its been fun. Thanks for the memes.

---

John Keel

Hussiemandias

I met a Homestucker from an ancient forum,

Who said—"Two vast and simple works of art

Live with VIZ Media... Near them, in the store,

Half finished a broken artist lies, whose frown,

And massive lips, which sneer and nothing more,

Tell that his fanbase well those passions read

Which yet survive, printed with empty words,

By the man who mocked them, and the spade that fed;

And on the website, these words appear:

My name is [S] Cascade, Thing of Things;

Play in Adobe Flash, ye Readers, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. From the dead link

Of that colossal Wreck, changed by the Heir,

The homepage of Newgrounds is linked today.

---

Linkslittlefriend

If i could be pleb to mod to pleb in a matter of days, then anything is possible for you.

---

Makin

WHY WE EXIST

A lot of criticism is directed at the elusive figure of “Makin”, the /r/Homestuck subreddit and the Homestuck + Hiveswap Discord, and I think people really don’t understand why, so I’m going to explain.

But first, we need to talk about 2D Minecraft clones.

On one hand, we have Terraria. Originally a straight ripoff of Minecraft with some bonus action, it’s now the second top rated game on Steam, extremely cheap and still receiving free updates. Most of them are ease-of-use features, things people have been asking for. One of the most loved PC games in history.

On the other, we have Starbound. A crowdfunded game, Starbound tried to ape Terraria’s success by offering a similar concept, scamming its userbase and promising features that, 7 years later, still aren’t in the game, or even supported by its engine. One of the most controversial PC games in history.

What’s the difference? People point at management techniques, or a better use of resources, but the truth is, Chucklefish, the Starbound company, is a pretty successful video game publisher. No, the difference is how they approached communities.

/r/starbound was instantly taken over by Starbound developers the moment the game got popular. /r/terraria wasn’t. That’s all it takes, I think. The Starbound developers didn’t set up the community so they’d get the most valuable feedback, they set it up so it would distract them from developing the game as little as possible, and it wouldn’t have any consequences on their bottom line.

Terraria developers understood that sometimes it’s important to let fans speak their mind in an environment not controlled by a corporation, and it provided a constant pressure to improve the game. The feature and feedback threads that mattered most were upvoted to the top, they didn’t get deleted so the developers could avoid any distraction. The incentive structures promoted what was most important to the fans themselves.

When I created /r/homestuck in 2010, I made it as the alternative to the MSPA Forums. While it’s a shame they are gone (with thousands of lost fanventures, discussion threads and projects), the truth is it had many of the same issues /r/starbound did. People with a vested economic interest in the franchise were deciding what was allowed to be discussed and what wasn’t, and they chose what caused the least work possible on their part. I suggest reading 1011686’s dissertation on the subject if you want to know more.

In the end, they didn’t even bring the forums back when they were hacked, so they didn’t have to pay any mind to it, and so /r/homestuck became the de facto replacement for a centralized fan hotspot (alas, while Omegaupdate exists and I appreciate what they were trying to do, I don’t think they were ever really active or successful).

If we want Homestuck to succeed and endure, we need to stay like /r/terraria. A clear separation between fan and official environs. A space where fans can (respectfully) speak their mind about the franchise without being “cancelled”, controlled, censored or harassed, but that also doesn’t devolve into mindless spam and hatred like 4chan’s /co/. A place where people enjoy the content instead of the drama about the content.

Some of the biggest name fans on Twitter heavily disagree with this approach. They want What Pumpkin to completely control fan discourse. They also desperately want to get hired, but I think that’s obvious to anyone with eyes. This is why you’ll see them constantly “throwing shade” at /r/homestuck and the Discord, baselessly calling their users nazis, homophobes, etc.

I have received multiple death threats, been painted as a racist, homophobe and, in one particularly silly occasion, a cryptofascist. Apparently fake screenshots and callouts, or screenshots of things I’ve said sarcastically, have been spread in private DMs to justify it all.

The “good guys” don’t do this. The truth is, they just want us to be gone because we're not them, and if people are going to /r/homestuck they’re not exclusively reading and posting their Approved Homestuck Opinions™. Last I heard, some of them even wanted to get Andrew Hussie fired or somehow disallowed from writing something like the Epilogues again.

While I’m sure that my style looks wacky from the outside, everything has been carefully planned to avoid as little external influence and control as possible. A completely different, healthier culture has been allowed to foster. A delicate channel design methodology has helped this, which I call the Water Filter theory, allowing initially shitposting #altgen tweens to pass through each main channel’s subculture standards until they become perfectly non-toxic users (qweq's entry is a perfect example of this). Until then, they don’t have to bother anyone outside their little bubble of alike-thinking shitposters.

I’ve got a lot of other plans in the backburner, letting the right people take over if I leave and making specific information available, so control of the biggest centralized Homestuck forum isn’t in the hands of anyone with business hungry or evil intentions. Discussing details of them in a public website would be beyond stupid, so you’ll have to trust me.

This is why Drew Linky, despite writing the really weird but interesting SPAT, is never going to inherit the server. As you can see from the many redacted nicknames, he will bend and break under negative influence, and cannot be trusted to keep /r/homestuck as free as it needs to be. Ideally, I’d get someone like me, who won’t allow death threats to endanger a silly internet forum. Does that person exist? We’ll see.

But there’s no need to worry about that. Indeed, I’ve been at this for 9 years and I can’t really picture any situation in which I wouldn’t have the minimal time to delegate responsibilities and choosing the right people to run /r/homestuck. This place will live on as long as Reddit and Discord exist, and maybe beyond. The big man hass the rock, and nothing beside remains.

---

The previous contribution might have made me sound like I'm obsessed and insane, but do not panic, because I'm about to be obsessed and insane about a different thing.

Let's talk SHILLS.

Though often mentioned in SPAT, I doubt many people have done anything more than give it (or homestuck.net/shills, or whatever URL the list has at the moment, gotta future proof this) a cursory look. I feel that people are missing extremely important and highly good fiction, so I'm going to go through every single shill in the list and explain in my own words why it's worth reading with minimal spoilers. I might add this to the page itself eventually, I dunno.

…And I Show You How Deep The Rabbit Hole Goes, by Scott Alexander

This is a perfect introduction to the list. It's really hard to talk about this without spoiling it, because it can be read in about twenty minutes. But I'll try.

The story is based on a common internet meme with a list of pills, each of which give unique powers. You're meant to choose one, and the pill you selected is kinda meant to cause an internet argument with whoever chose differently. "Well, I think immortality is better than mind powers", stuff like that. But Scott takes it in a different direction: what if he wrote a story where all the pills were taken by different people in a shared world? What would the consequences be if they were to exploit the silly powers to their natural conclusion?

This story really embodies the "rational fiction" ideals in a small package, making it the natural choice as the best shill to read.

Worth the Candle, by Alexander Wales

A writer with a strong talent for interesting worldbuilding and magic systems decides to put all of them in a single story, and drop a fictional copy of his 17 year old self into it. You'd expect this to quickly devolve into a power fantasy self insert, but it never quite happens. The protagonist has to deal with all the psychological baggage from his real life, also dropped into the game in fictionalized, gamified ways. Everything is examined, the narrative is analyzed, and no stones are left unturned. All done in really intelligent, subversive and entertaining ways. You'll never wonder "Why didn't he do that instead?".

This is the next Homestuck. Think about it. A game world based on the player's life and personality, and a story filled with random concepts that the author had consumed and worked on for years, over a million words long? I personally believe this is better. If you're willing to put in the time investment, I recommend starting with this one right after Pills.

Worm, by Wildbow

Do you like the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Now imagine if the world actually made sense, if the powers were used cleverly, and if the plots were actually good. A superhero story for people who have suffered too much of the average superhero writing. Enough has been said about Worm, I think, that I feel comfortable leaving this one as it is.

The Northern Caves, by Nostalgebraist

What would happen if Andrew Hussie had died right before releasing the insane end of Homestuck, and the hardcore fans unearthed it a long time after the death of the mainstream fandom?

A story loosely based on the history of the MSPA forums, it's particularly worth reading due to its format and use of the medium: you'll get a ton of forum posts that read true to life. Horrible signatures, horrible nicknames, and a culture you wish you could know more about. Unwittingly predicted some of the reaction to the Homestuck Epilogues. An excellent mystery story with some supernatural dips, just don't expect an ending that ties everything up.

17776, by Jon Bois

Honestly, if you're a Homestuck fan you've most likely already read this one. What if Andrew Hussie wrote a hilarious story about what football would be like in a future with virtual immortality and no limits, examined from the perspective of a naive newcomer? Not just for football fans, and featuring the most accidentally Dave-like character of all time.

Crystal Society, by Max Harms

The first "real" novel of the list, but available for free. A mildly sociopathic group of Artificial Intelligences has to work together to control a robot body and escape their current circumstances. What is an AI society like when every individual component was designed to achieve a different goal? Pretty amazingly well written sci-fi.

Modern Cannibals, by Bavitz

Another story based on the Homestuck fandom. Written by Bavitz, a mysterious writer with a penchant for literary writing of the highest quality, so expect Themes, weird prose and unique character voices.

The main character's friend has been taken over by Homestuck mania, and she chases him to a fan convention where Andrew Hussie is going to be at. Weird shit happens as you'd expect from the Homestuck fandom, including insane canadians, anime, drugs and rap battles. More of a serious story than you'd expect from the previous description, and the perfect read for someone wanting to get a feel of 2012's Homestuck fandom.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by EY

Go to the Worm description, read that and apply its message to Harry Potter. Featuring a highly controversial main character who is actually meant to initially be a little shit and mature by the end of the book. It's not required to know Harry Potter from anything other than cultural osmosis to understand HPMOR, though you might miss some jokes. Some scientific and "rationality" concepts are thrown around, so it doubles as a somewhat didactic work.

Unsong, by Scott Alexander

Imagine if everything in the Bible was to be taken literally. Yes, even that part. The protagonist wields his expertise in religious wordplay in a new world where scripture is a real magic, and societies struggle worldwide to adapt to the new state of events. A completely silly and hilarious story that Terry Pratchett might have once written.

CORDYCEPS, by Benedict_SC

Do you like SCP, or horror stories about memetic threats? This is actually a good, short, regrettably obscure take on that. The one story in this list where being rational is actually harmful to the user.

The Man From Earth, by Jerome Bixby

Okay, the very premise of this movie is a spoiler. It's available for free on Torrent sites, uploaded by the director himself, since he cared to get his life's work's story out there more than he cared about profit. Do you like normal people talking in a room about interesting stuff for 90 minutes? This is your film, but there might be some twists oOoOoO.

Beginner's Guide to the End of the Universe, by Crippledvulture

You... like Homestuck and Problem Sleuth, right? Now imagine if the adventure game mechanics were actually good. Another work where the premise is kind of a spoiler, so just expect a surprisingly poignant story based on tackling problems with Imagination powers. The best adventure ever made by someone other than Andrew Hussie.

Mother of Learning, by nobody103

An incredibly comfy story about an untalented mage taking advantage of a time loop... to study harder. There's also a city-wide invasion coming he probably needs to stop, and threats that you wouldn't expect from this spoiler free description.

This has taken a dive quality wise in the last two books, so it might not be in the list by the time you read this. The first couple books are definitely worth reading, however. Think all the whimsy and fun of Harry Potter magic combined with the mystery and growth of more complex fantasy stories and some original exploity twists to the genre.

Kid Radd, by Dan Miller

This was the story Wreck-it Ralph ripped off (and then its sequel, even harder). A video game character achieves sentience right in time for its game to be discontinued. He joins a team of characters from different video games to save others, and eventually fight an entity threatening the future of retro. The one good sprite comic in the entire internet. Video game mechanics from different games used together in clever, unique ways. An unique story that Ralph entirely failed to live up to.

Dream Drive, by Andrew Ball

Much like WTC, this initially by-the-numbers literary RPG eventually uncovers some twists that turn it into a sci-fi masterpiece. Expect a lot of character growth, with the main character constantly being called out on his bullshit and the "villains" often having justifications for being like they are. Many interesting twists to the dropped-into-a-game genre, but unfortunately the best ones are too spoilery to be included here. Just trust me.

Oh yeah, it IS hosted on literotica and has like five sex scenes. It's a 375k word story and the scenes only take up like 5k. Just skip past everything but the beginning and end of them, they're usually not entirely pointless.

Three Worlds Collide, by EY

A complex moral and philosophical quandary between a human ship and baby-eating aliens. Featuring the stupidest comparison between Hamlet and Fate/Stay Night ever put to virtual paper. Any takes I'd have on this story are already in the (very short) story itself, so you'll just have to read it!

Transdimensional Brain Chip, by Øyvind Thorsby

The art of this story is complete trash. Give this a pass if you're a baby that can't deal with that. Do you enjoy reading hilarious visual comedy about sci-fi plots that quickly devolve into insanity? Then don't give this a pass.

A chip is installed into idiot Ulf's brain, and it allows him to coordinate with alternate-universe, choice-splitting versions of himself. Those versions quickly diverge and they uncover a secret threatening every dimension. These idiots are the only chance to save it, through the power of throwing enough alternate selves at the problem.

Ever 17, by Kotaro Uchikoshi

The best shill on the list. It is also the most annoying shill to read, since you have to deal with 2005 visual novel graphics and "gameplay", but it is also the most worth reading. People who recognize the name Zero Escape or even Danganronpa somewhat know what to expect from this, but for everyone else, just be sure that this story uses its medium perfectly to deliver the best series of twists in fiction and outdoes them all. Do follow the guide with the order Tsugumi->Sara->Sora->You, please, instead of the one the guide suggests.

I can smell Drew seething at Ever 17 being called the best shill on the list from here. It is, deal with it.

John Dies at the End, by David Wong

This story is just fucking funny. While it does have the philosophical themes and munchkin-like exploits that this list is known for, this story mainly excels at making people laugh, which is an achievement in an otherwise horror story. Also the main characters are named John and Dave, which can't be a coincidence (or can it???). Actually published, a best-seller even, but sadly gone missing from the cultural zeitgeist lately. The movie is fun once you've read the book but otherwise trash and not worth watching.

The Library Unpublished, by al_fa

Don't read this before The Northern Caves. A similar type of story, where the internet and the power of choices feature prominently. Very meta, very mysterious. Don't want to say more about it

LOST, by Damon Lindelof

Wait this is actually in the extended shills list. Just watch it, okay? I hear Drew is going to stream it sometime this millenium.

Several People are Ty-pfft

If you made it here you either are a coward who skips to the end or a brave literary warrior still looking for good stories. Stop reading this then, you moron, and go read the stories above and in the extended list. Who knows if the original has had more stuff added since this was posted?

---

Misha

Spit for SPAT

Hi! I'm Misha, currently the (pseudo) moderator for the eastern-media channel. I joined the HSD April 1st of 2019, so well after Drew first thought of ending SPAT. I am not mentioned in this work at all in its current form, so you might be wondering what I even have to say being such a recent member that freakishly acquired a staff position due to his unbridled charisma and charm, and why I'd care about the HSD that much to begin with.

But first, let's talk about Hitler.

As we all know, before being a power-hungry dictator and general monster, Hitler attempted to be an artist. Now, many will tell you he failed to get into the Academy of Vienna because he was a mediocre painter - but this is rather unfair. It'd be more correct he painted the wrong things for the Academy of Vienna's tastes at the time. It might surprise some, but at the time, the modern art movement was already in full stride. Compare:

On the left, one of Hitler's works - on the right, Egon Schiele's Living room in Neulengbach, from 1911 - a student of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

In essence, the rise of modern art prevented an artist whose contemporary and strict style would've easily fit with the works of past generations. It'd be somewhat unfair to entirely blame modern art for this - Vienna still had its contemporaries represented in Christian Griepenkerl, who despite this fact rejected Hitler twice due to his own bias towards Classical portraits focused on human figures rather than vistas. Famously, he decreed, 'too few heads'.

After this, we know the story - the NSDAP, the Night of Long Knives, World War 2. And with the end of World War 2, came the American occupation of Japan, which allowed western culture to interact with the isolated country. And with that influence... came anime.

Now, wait wait wait, I know you're thinking, how does that relate? Well, Osamu Tezuka is the father of manga and anime de facto, and artists who studied under him defined what anime is today - Go Nagai alone created mechas, magical girls and the foundations of battle animanga in the span of a few years. And Osamu Tezuka's main inspiration?

Donald Duck. Yeah, he'd even send Carl Barks (the then cartoonist for Donald Duck and Undle Scrooge) signed Astroboy New Years cards for years.

Pictured here.

So in essence, the desire to challenge the foundations of art in Europe indirectly raised to the rise of consumer-grade degeneracy we see imported from the Land of the Rising Sun today. My point? That things often supercede their intended purpose in ways that we cannot predict, but that have value in their final form regardless.

The HSD is far from just the 'Homestuck Discord'. It is a community with its own values, history and qualities. It'll survive, in one form or another, far beyond Homestuck's own lifespan - even if under other forms, come calamity or simple boredom with the association, be it through successors or rebranding.

And I'll be there for it. Probably. Unless calamity is just really, really persistent before then.

---

moonjail

On December 31st, 2018, I finished reading Homestuck, about five years after I started. I stumbled into HSD, toppled headlong into altgen, and landed in /lit with a revolting flop.

I was left feeling sad and isolated by the holidays, like a lot of people, which compounded a broader sense of alienation that doesn't merit getting into. HSD did not help this. For a while. And now it does.

I make an unfortunate habit, both online and in person, of arriving late to well-established, close-knit communities, then getting dejected when I'm not welcomed with a tender hug and a stoneware mug of warm milk. It is difficult to accept that there are places where you will never belong, and people who will never like you. De facto oldfriend general was therefore pretty much the worst place to end up. At first I was concerned mostly with emulating the culture of the channel to endear myself to the existing users. I installed DoA pretty much exclusively so I could be involved in talking about it. DoA Burg still fucking sucks, by the way. I have yet to find an interest in playing further.

After a few months of these efforts, I've arrived at a point now where I'm relatively comfortable in the channel. I think most /lit users recognize me. A few like me. The in-joke still rules supreme, but I know most of them. And at least one person usually knows what the fuck I'm talking about, which is nice.

---

MrNostalgic

My Experience with the Homestuck and the HSD

(Sorry if this is a rambling mess, I’m not very good at writing)

Homestuck.

My experience with Homestuck, began in October 2016, the day the Credits came out. That day when I arrived at my university for class, I saw a friend sitting on a couch and watching something on her cellphone.

I got close to say hi, and while doing that I noticed the video she was watching; the art style caught my attention and I asked her what it was, she told me it was the end credits of a webcomic she had been reading for years, and recommended it to me.

So between classes I started to read it, and whew, I got hooked instantly, the story was funny and entertaining, and it was unlike any other webcomic I had ever seen before, so I just kept reading, and reading.

I spent my free time of the next 2 weeks reading the webcomic, so fast that I missed a lot of details, and being blown away by the story, the music, and, the flash animations, until finally, I finished it.

My first impression after finishing was that the whole thing was great, but because I had read it so fast and in such a short time, I decided to reread, making sure to take my time and appreciate some of the stuff I had missed, or foolishly skipped (cough The first Intermission cough).

This reread helped me see some of the most glaring issues the comic had, and changed my opinion of the end, at the time, of the story. I still enjoyed the comic overall, but I realized that it had problems once Act 6 started, the biggest ones being how the pacing dies just after Collide, and how Act 7 doesn’t give any resolution to the story.

Anyways, while doing this reread, I decided to look at what the community around the comic was like, and this leads me to:

Reddit.

I had been using Reddit for almost 3 years when I started reading Homestuck, after finishing my first read, so I was curious to see if there was an active subreddit for the comic, to no surprise there was, and I instantly subbed, wanting to see how the community interacted.

To my disappointment most of the content I saw consisted of shitposts and memes, there where some good stuff here and there, but there wasn’t much that I thought was interesting, so I never really used the sub. Only checking it from time to time to see if something interesting popped up.

I would most likely have ignored Homestuck after a while had it not been for:

Discord.

I started using Discord on January 7, 2017, after one of the mods of r/DC_Cinematic, a sub I was somewhat active on at the time, sent me a DM on Reddit, inviting me to their recently created server.

I had heard of Discord before, and even seen some ads for the HSD, but I was never really interested in using it, but I was curious about the server, so I created an account, and joined.

I spent a couple of hours chatting with the people there, had a good time, and realized how good Discord was for chats, way better than other apps like Skype, so I decided to look for other servers to join.

And so, I joined the HSD on January 9, 2017.

My first impression of the server was that it was a weird place, first thing I saw was WoC berating other users for not using Compact Mode, another user calling me a Furry because of my profile picture, and shortly after, Griever shilling Jojostuck to me.

But the weirdness made the server even more appealing to me, the combination of all those things happening almost at the same time made me laugh, I sure wasn’t expecting that to be the first thing a new user could see.

After taking a look at the server, I was a bit overwhelmed with the amount of channels it had, but decided to see what each one offered, instead of just muting most of them.

So I spent the next couple of days lurking most channels, watching each sub-community of the server, Altgen was the first one to be muted, the place was too wild for my liking, and the quality of the memes posted there was so low that I just found the whole place to be bad, although I did spend some time participating on the famous Hunger Games simulator, before it was banned for being spammy.

MSPA-Lit was next, I was a bit afraid of the channel, after all most of the mods chatted regularly there, and I didn’t want to commit a blunder that would end with me being banned.

Other channels where muted as well, mostly because their topics didn’t really interest me.

For the next few months I used gen the most, chatting almost daily with other regulars, and sometimes doing other activities, like playing Payday 2 with Shitler and Dingus, or watching random stuff on Rabbit.

After a while I noticed that while some users used the channel regularly, others moved on to use other channels more. This led me to try and give some muted channels another chance.

So, I lurked channels again, but again almost all of them failed to grab my attention, the exception being MSPA-Lit.

The same reason I was initially afraid of the channel, most mods being there, was now the thing that made me the most curious, I asked myself “Why do they use that channel in particular as a hangout spot?”

So I started to lurk the channel and chat there, and I noticed that the topics of the channel where more interesting than the ones would see in a place like Gen, all the time someone would bring a new topic, be it a new meme they saw, or some piece of literature they were reading.

I started using the channel so often, that Gen was completely ignored, and eventually muted. But I didn’t really care, the sense of comradery, as Drew would say, that I felt in Lit was way bigger than the one I felt on my time in Gen.

And the topics discussed there always managed to engage me, because there was always something new to discuss, be it the new shill Makin wanted us to read, or dumb shit like the Trolley Problem and it variants.

…

I’m glad I started using Discord, and I’m even more glad that I joined the HSD, it led me to meet users with whom I’ve had a lot of fun, be it by just chatting with people like Drew, Tera or Tmt, or by playing games/ watching movies and TV Shows with them and the countless other users of the server.

I feel like this document is a bit of a mess, but after hearing that SPAT was ending, I wanted to write a bit about my story with the Homestuck, and with the HSD, just as Drew did with SPAT.

Thanks for writing SPAT Drew, that document was a lot of fun to read, and one of the best contributions the server has ever received.

---

Multivac

SPAT Retrospective

He's finally here, writing for you

It's the Homestuck mod, Linky Drew!

He's smart, and strong, and funny as well

If you irritate him, he'll ban you to hell!

He's keeping track of the current events

In his SPAT book, with exciting contents!

Huh!

D.K.! Donkey Kong!

Huh!

D.K.! Donkey Kong is here!

I joined HSD right before its second birthday, and was soon wrapped up in THE PHYSICAL RETURN OF JESUS CHRIST. This was a rather unusual beginning to my experience (especially because it quickly led to the heady drug of altgen posting….), and it led to me perceiving HSD differently than I do now. In particular, I also was a lot more afraid of the HACK FRAUD admin that we have than I am today.

I’m not sure how long it took me to come around to readshills, but that’s essentially where I’ve stayed. In my time in readshills, and in HSD at large, I’ve seen a lot of wonderful events that couldn’t have ever happened without the amazing efforts and fresh, ahead-of-the-curve leadership of the HSD mod and pseudo team. The sense of community here is comparable to truly no other internet space, and that’s because the mods are truly grade a-material. Even the ones I don’t like, or frequently make fun of, contribute significantly to the health and growth of HSD, and probably will for years to come. In particular, I think that people coming up with their own shill lists is a severely underappreciated and under-celebrated feature of the channel.

I want to also make note of how SPAT gives monumental information for people in HSD. On updates, I find new documents about the goings-on in readshills and other channels, which often provide a completely new perspective that I would have otherwise missed. SPAT has been a superb HSD resource, and I imagine if one told Past Drew about its great value at the document’s inception, he would have been extremely confused, and probably called them a wiener. And yet, it has evolved in a very cherished way, and it truly adds something extra to this server.

In conclusion, read Conference Call, and ban Ever17 due to its kabbalistic obscenity: E17=י17 which sums to 27, which carries the meaning via gematria of “sin,” “weeping tears,” and “to perish.” Not only are these obviously reflected in the themes and plot of E17 itself, but I can only conclude that Makin wants to inflict kabbalistic harm upon us and make us cry. In related advice, vote Marianne Williamson for President, because she is the only candidate who can defend us on the spiritual plane, and has a clear policy goal of initiating Third Impact.

---

Neth

Having been an active user on the HSD for 2 and a half years at this point, I think it's safe to say I kinda like the place.

I don't want my Oh So Important Entry On SPAT That Will Immortalize My Presence In This Online Chatroom Forever to be overly gushy and sentimental, so I'll try my hardest to avoid that. Having said that, I can't completely ignore the frankly absurd impact the server and the people I met through it had on my personal development and on the most bizarre moments of my teenage years.

I joined the server on December 3rd, 2016, during my summer break. I signed onto Discord with the very clever (or so I thought at the time) username "hey hey hey", which was accompanied by a very crude MSPaint drawing of Fat Albert as a cat on my profile picture, a reference to a joke I heard on Game Grumps some millennia ago. Being my first real experience with real-time online chatrooms outside of literal children's games, I had really no idea what to expect. The Homestuck fandom was already mostly dead by the time I got into it, so the idea of a place packed full of people who had the similar emotional connection to Homestuck as me was both exciting and incredibly frightening for me at the time.

After embarrassing amounts of hesitation, I finally clicked the "Join" button. In the first few hours, I met some of the people who, to this day, I consider to be some of the most amazing and trustworthy I've ever met, and in my first week I had the (dis)pleasure to watch one of the first cases of server-wide drama outbreak to happen in this server devolve right before my eyes. The timing couldn't have been better. To no one's surprise, I got hooked into the community right off the bat. I eventually adopted a semi-decent moniker, deciding to call myself "Neth" after realizing the Fat Albert references would only be funny for so long, and adopting Ravio, my *actual* favorite character of all time, as my profile picture and representation to the world.

Eventually, days turned into months, and those turned into years. It wasn't all fun and games the entire time, of course. I've met my fair share of bullshit people, and I've experienced a sizeable portion of bullshit situations, some related to the server and some not; either way, I would go through all of it all over again if given the chance because yadda yadda made me who I am today. You know the drill by now.

I could mention my entire journey through the channels and communities of the HSD, but honestly I'm already getting a headache writing in this small as fuck notepad app, so I'll have to cut it short and give my personal thoughts in advance.

All in all, the HSD is only as unique as any other online community. It has its own inside jokes, its own manner of interaction between users and its own maniacal server owner. That being said, I think there actually *is* something truly special about it, a feeling you can't get anywhere else, no matter how hard you try. I applaud Drew, the mod team, and all the people who work hard to keep the server a wacky and zany place to relax in every single day.

Alright, enough of the sentimental schtick. I have to go tell WoC gargle chloride acid again.

See ya.

---

Niklink

I discovered Homestuck in 2011, in the middle of a highly transitional period for my personal entertainment tastes. In those days, Nintendo was the only videogame company that actually existed, at least according to my then-absurdly limited knowledge of the subject- and they were announcing a new generation of consoles that I was slowly realizing I would not be able to afford. This fact was threatening my entire existence as a person who only really woke up in the morning so they could get back from school and park their ass in front of some choice videogames. The concurrent surprise gift of a low-midrange computer (the same one I am using to write these words) led to a shift towards affordable piracy-based PC gaming, and with it an expansion of my online activities. The atrocious webcomics of 2009 gave way towards a more refined form of stupid shit. And Homestuck was just the thing I needed to forget that I fucking existed in the first place.

Homestuck became the blindingly bright ball of media-fire that my life-planet spun around. Staying up until late every night, because that’s when updates happened; even later if an update DID happen, as it demanded not only consumption, but analysis, discussion, dissection, mockery, and total absorption into my core being. Falling asleep during class everyday was a welcome side effect- it helped maximize the amount of time I could stay conscious perusing Homestuck. Becoming unable to discuss anything about what was demanding the entirety of my free time was unimportant, as I didn’t want to talk with my family and the people at school didn’t really want to talk to me. And while I fancied myself a loner, my good old human brain still required a modicum of social interaction. But if I was going to fill that need, I had to make it about Homestuck somehow.

Everything had to be about Homestuck somehow.

My first forays into the raging oceans were /hsg/ and MSPAF. Getting replies to whatever I was saying made me happy; Malcolm Brown made a little tune in response to one of my posts and I walked on air for a week. It was a time where, if sadness generally kept itself confined to its designated corner, happiness seemed to be in short supply as well, so I took whatever I could find. But it wasn’t long until I wanted more. I wanted the Full Homestuck Interactions. And that grim road led me to the foreboding gates of Pesterchum.

If you’re not aware, the Pesterchum fan client was really just an IRC interface, but its idiotic novelty translated into great simplicity. The client auto-connects you to a specific server, and from there all you had to do was browse the list of public channels and pick whatever struck your fancy and you would be instantly dropped into a wind tunnel of nigh-incomprehensible typing quirks. And it was full to the brim of people that didn’t care if I literally exclusively talked about Homestuck all day. I had found the place where I could set my tombstone, because I was pretty sure I was going to stay there until I fucking died.

Of course, that didn’t happen, because the community that I joined on Pesterchum wasn’t actually full of Homestuck fans. In a nefarious plot twist, it turned out that Pesterchum was actually just full of people that liked whatever was hot on Tumblr at the time. And as each ‘memo’ only consisted of a singular channel with user counts that never really exceeded a couple dozen, the new preferred topics of discussion simply supplanted the old ones. Suddenly, people just wanted to talk about Dr. Who and other Tumblr-adjacent interests that I didn’t share… and the more the conversations changed, the more I realized that I actually didn’t like any of the people in our memo. I just liked talking about Homestuck. And coming to the realization that you’d dumped over a year of your time with people that you didn’t really enjoy, and that you could see were socially moving away from you, while at the same time you had no one else to go to… it was hard. It was hard, and nobody understood.

And the funny thing was, it ended up that the people from Pesterchum that I still remember fondly to this day were the ones that I talked to neither frequently, or in the big channel I was always in. It was the few people that I talked to one-on-one that had an impact on me. I lost contact with most of them when they left Pesterchum with no other means of communication. It would have been sadder if it hadn’t been so god damn poetic. Just two people stumbling upon each other and sharing a brief but intense moment of genuine human connection, and then disappearing into the void of the world. It’s enough to make a man purchase a typewriter and a box of cigars. Or to join /r/homestuck.

I’d been using the subreddit for several years at that point, mainly to be a total asshole to everyone. I was known for commenting on bad fanart, which comprises approximately 100% of all fanart, with tirades that bordered on the constructive only so I could justify to myself that I was, in fact, aiding these poor souls that had dared to draw poor anatomy and be oblivious to the fact that they were a blight to all art. There was a lot of complaining about artists who made Dave’s eyes visible behind his glasses, which I assumed was because of a compulsion to put anime fucking eyes on everything regardless of how it explicitly defied characterization. And while I was hopefully entertaining by 2012 standards, the question remains: why was I acting like such a piece of shit? I think the Karkat-like shtick was a way to work out my teen, repressed, grey-hoodie-ly sort of emotions in a safe environment. I can only assume I wasn’t banned because the mod team was full of incompetent idiots. The only person who remains from that era is Makin, who we all know to be an incompetent idiot, because he ended up modding me.

In any case, I ended up in the sub’s IRC channel some time after waking myself up from my Pesterchum nightmare, and thankfully after calming my ludicrous shit down proper. It was, again, a very small group of people, and they were all nice enough, interesting enough, and Homestuck enough for my social needs. And while the whole thing was still ultimately a bunch of bullshit, unlike Pesterchum, we were all entirely aware from that fact, and that allowed us to cool down the engines whenever necessary, take a step back, and actually discuss how the fuck we’d gotten in such an idiotic argument about I’m going to say probably anime but actually was about interpersonal issues, because that’s literally what it always is in the end. I’d grown out of the early internet phase where I was still afraid on some level of chatting with strangers online. It was mainly characterized by the gut feeling that I was eventually going to press a wrong button and my computer would spontaneously combust. Or even worse, people would think I was an idiot. But secure in the knowledge that people knew I was an idiot, I had been somehow unshackled. And I had a lot of fun conversations with people I respected, and it was generally a nice time, and I’m happy that it happened.

In the end though, the same things started to happen. 2013 and 2014 were not particularly kind years to Homestuck (tricksters, teen drama, gigapause), and a lot of people started to lose interest (not me though, never me), and the chat began to reconfigure itself around me into something quite entirely different. This time around, the focus shifted mainly toward programming and obsessing over Linux setups. I could have stuck it out ‘till the end of the line this time around. But back in real spacetime, I was having the shittiest moments of my life. I ended up in some very dark, listless, maybe I’d say empty mindspaces. My brain was kind of like an attic nobody knew the house had, and the only thing in it was a crate full of human fingernail cuttings, and you got the feeling that the attic very intensely did not want you inside it, and whenever you tried to sleep in that house again you just knew that the attic was there, and you still had a year left on your lease somehow. I retreated from everything in my life, and that even included my online friends that I had because I was retreating from not having friends. It was a fucking mess. And so another part of my life just kind of stopped.

Most of 2015, I don’t even remember what I was doing. I mean, I usually don’t remember what I was doing, but I can usually place myself temporally through associating Homestuck updates with specific events in my life. I honestly think I just stared at the ceiling that whole year. Obviously I was still doing Homestuck shit, and moderating the subreddit, but I don’t even remember what Homestuck shit I was up to during that time, even though this whole year was a good one for the comic. I had simply left myself adrift, like a boat without an anchor and a drunk captain on a booze snooze. Ultimately, there was only one thing that could undo my zephyrous state: the big one. The end of Homestuck. We laugh now only because we have forgotten how much we wept then. Big, fat, juicy fucking tears, that were as salty as our souls, preceding slick trails of snot half as disgusting to watch as our arguments.

Actually I think the only reason I joined the subreddit discord server (in those days, ‘discord server’ was still grammatically subservient to ‘subreddit’) was because we were going to stream EOA6 and some stupid logistical issue had come up, because back then we knew what we were doing even less than usual. It ended up getting sorted (I just went back and checked, Makin’s internet had gone out at a hilariously bad time), but I realized already there was untapped potential. Act 7 brought an eruption of disappointment, but to me it was a beautiful eruption of activity. This volcanic crater was to become my own personal swimming pool. Over three years later, the lava has flowed and cooled into igneous rock… but if you’re not careful where you put your hands, you might still get burned.

Initially, I used to give Discord a lot of grief over being a crappy dolled-up IRC substitute that sacrificed some amount of function over form. While a lot of that still holds true, I now understand what the platform brings to the table that IRC cannot do, and it’s exactly the reason why I’ve had a longer career on HSD over the chatrooms that preceded it: the server structure. It’s actually extremely similar to Reddit’s subreddit structure that allows you to cordon off a slice of a large social platform and turn it into your own community. Crucially, this requires zero investment on your end to obtain a space that you control from top to bottom; while you could open a channel on many IRC servers, you could not ensure ultimate mastery unless you were the one to actually go to the length of setting up your own server, which was not a free action. Furthermore, a Discord server not only consists of exactly the channels you decide on, but there’s bundled together in a much tighter and clearer way.

This setup makes Discord essentially immune to the issues that drove me away from other chat communities. Since there were subsections of the community dedicated to different topics, I could stay where the conversation was relevant to me. And there was no danger of the well running dry, since users often drift from channel to channel, some leaving for other pastures while new or returning faces came to our corner of the server. As far as I’m concerned, the rest of HSD serves no function except to serve as adjacent spaces to retain the people coming and going from #mspa-literature— it might as well not exist. The overall effect is that I have a little rotating cast of characters to inflict my personal brand of conversational pain upon. It’s kind of like those soap operas that have been around for fifty years, which I can only assume is the end result of a twisted government project to sustain the life force of bored housewives and pushy grandparents and harness their energy for soul magics. None of the original cast members remain. In fact, if you try to dig up information on the show, you’ll surely find that several years’ worth of episodes are missing from the public record. And yet the collective consciousness somehow retains the entirety of that information. Never in one place, or in one piece, but if you ask enough crocheting grandmas, you would be able to construct the full radiance of ancient, uninspired stock plotlines. It’s perhaps an analogue to the very effort contained in this document: to coalesce the history of something idiotic and absurdly specific from a fractured mindspace into a gleaming monolith.

If you want to understand HSD’s history, you don’t really need to read this whole document, because I’ve got a secret TL;DR for you right here. It was pretty wild for about a year, year and a half maybe, until all the people that couldn’t stand Makin’s attitude either left or acted out and got banned. Essentially, a self-selecting social group of people. Now it’s a lot quieter, because no one will start shouting at you for saying something that doesn’t line up with their beliefs, and also because Homestuck has obviously died down as a general internet presence. But there’s still a healthy amount of people, and enough fuckery to keep it semi-interesting without being intolerable. Honestly, there’s not much else to say that would deepen your understanding. In fact, we should delete the rest of this document and replace it with this paragraph. Fuck, this part is going to be at the end, isn’t it? When it should really have been the first thing you read. You are now shaking your head over the time you lost on the rest of SPAT.

On a personal level, my feelings on HSD are… disappointingly mixed. Like asking for a vanilla-chocolate swirl, and getting something that is technically a swirl of white and brown ice cream. But when you put it in your mouth, you know. There’s something that’s not right. The stars, they have misaligned. You look up, but it’s a noon scorcher and you just blind yourself with the sun like an idiot. Hoping nobody saw you, and realizing your whatever-the-fuck-this-ice-cream-is is starting to melt, you just eat the damn thing. It’s what you wanted. Or at the very least, what you thought you wanted. It’s refreshing, but at the same time, it’s that feeling at the back of your mind. That those very same stars are now laughing at you, because as soon as you placed your order, your disappointment was written unto them, and all they had to do was watch your poor choice of refreshment drive you into a weird funk of a mood. You snap your head up at the sky again and get blinded AGAIN. Another choice is made in that instant. You are going to buy a fucking telescope, you think.

What I’m trying to say here is, I don’t think HSD has taken me where I wanted to go, socially. On one hand, that’s not exactly a fair expectation to burden any social mechanism with. It is what it is, and that’s to no one’s fault or merit. But on the other hand, you keep hearing about people inviting their whole MMO guild to their wedding and getting them horribly tacky groomsmen gifts to post on Reddit, and then they all go out back and take turns fucking each other’s characters or whatever it is you do in MMO guilds. I’ve dipped out of the community on several short occasions, because I was bored, or angry, or unsatisfied in some other way. But ultimately I think the feeling that I would be terribly sad if HSD were to come to a stop underpins my relationship with it. So instead of being a friend that will probably move away, it’s more like that cousin you hang out with at every family reunion because, what else are you going to do? Who else are you going to talk to at those things, your aunt Sharon? Fuck off, Sharon. No one cares about your vacation pictures.

That’s not enough to call the whole thing useless though. HSD has done a lot for me, and given me many great moments with many great people. There’s been a slew of new things I’ve learned through it, and a mountain of things I wish I’d never heard about. It’s put me in contact with many specific individuals that have greatly aided the cause of Doing Homestuck Shit. And even if I’m missing a lot of peeps out of the current roster, it continues to be, yes, a safe and comfortable space where I can put my feet up on the table and forget about stifling my various bodily noises. It’s the bar where everyone knows your name, but not because you’re a drunk, but because you just kind of like to sit in a specific table and look out the window every day. And when you decide to stop gazing and start carousing, you know that everyone’s going to put up with your shit.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, HSD has given me the time and the space to work through the fact of Homestuck, from a mental perspective. After such a long time living as a pulsating conduit for Homestuck’s unyielding energy flow, it kind of taught me how to live with the electricity turned off. Not so much because the story was going to end, but on some level I just felt like, story or no story, we would just continue to discuss Homestuck until the last dregs of energy blinked out of the sun (it might come as a surprise for you, but I really, really like Homestuck), and instead the server has managed to fully take me through to the other side. Kind of as to say, hey. It’s cool that you like Homestuck and all. That doesn’t have to stop being a thing that happens. But out here? Out here, you can live without it, if you needed to. You can step into a new world. Full of new things you can decide aren’t as good as Homestuck was. Full of new people you can bite your tongue instead of mentioning Homestuck to. And full of possibilities to ignore in favor of doing nothing all day. So, ultimately, and I say this wholeheartedly: HSD helped make me a better person.

As for the future, I don’t expect too much out of it. HSD doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere in the short-to-medium term. And I don’t seem like I’m going anywhere in that timeframe either. Perhaps I’ll end up moving on to whatever bullshit the next thing winds up being. Maybe I’ll just let it stop there, and start doing something else entirely. Maybe the cataclysm that finally destroys the server will destroy us all with it, which would be fun to watch at the very least. Most likely it will just wound itself down slowly over time. But that’s fine. These things, they aren’t meant to last forever. That’s just bullshit fed to us by tv shows trying to get renewed for five more seasons. The important part is that it lasts long enough so that we can be happy with what we got, instead of bitter of what was taken early. And barring some Homestuck miracle that completely defies my understanding of the universe, we already are past that point. But when you take it on a day-to-day basis, it turns out there’s nothing to worry about. Hell, nothing to write about, which makes this entire exercise retroactively inadvisable. So maybe clear your mind from the crushing melancholy of finite time. It’s not useful to anyone. Turn your attentions, I beg you, to the humble chat box. It’s empty, but full of potential. See? Someone’s talking about how they really liked something. But you know. You know it’s actually the stupidest fucking shit. Better go tell them before the topic changes. You know what? I’ll finish writing this later.

I have some other shit to talk about right now.

---

Olkiswerve

in my time in the fandom, I’ve seen a lot of social circles and friend groups come and go. I’d give anything to have a record of those earlier days, and be able to look back on all the time I spent online fondly. we’re lucky to have someone like drew, who undertook a colossal effort for our sake and for the sake of ‘internet historians’, whatever that means (and if you ever question his dedication, I advise you read his entry for the 19th of september 2017). I am proud to have pseudo’d for people who I may never see again - homestuck has always been about the fans for me, and the HSD reflects that pretty well. the server is a pretty cool guy who doesn’t afraid of anything and I hope it continues for a long time. rip #hangout. nothing more for today

---

qweq

First things first: thanks to Tmt for her awesome help with the proofreading!

This was initially a simple list of things that i witnessed and my thoughts about it at the time. With some links to pictures related to the topics, i tried to give it a small touch of comedy. By the end it turns into a “thank you” to this server. I don’t know if that is fitting to the journal or not, but it was quite the experience to write that.

It lacks dates estimates because i don’t know exactly when the events took place. Even with a rough estimate i could get the chain of events wrong, so better leave it as that. Detailed entries about all that are sure to be in SPAT, so you can check all of it out.

It’s also quite the mess, but hey, that’s me!

I can remember one of my first messages to this day, unfortunately it was in #altgen. The dedicated shitposting meme fest channel. It was the first place where I became a regular. At that time, the channel wasn’t… the best… The channel had a very specific feeling, something that either survived or was born from whatever happened before my arrival. It could be extremely toxic. It would demonize some people, bully and gatekeep who they didn’t see fit. I should make clear that these acts weren’t by all users of the channel, but people who would be considered old or regulars. Still i remained there mostly because i was interested in seeing funny stuff, and talking to some lads. It wasn’t long until some of the people who made the channel that way got banned. There was a small time during and after this event that the place was only drama and people being mad… For better or for worse it was quite easy for me to blend in. I would post memes, we would comment on some stupid stuff we found here and there, whatever it was, usually followed, if not always, by more chaotic shitposting.

It wasn’t long after my arrival that the Rapture happened. I woke up and saw many channels missing, and i thought my phone app was busted or something, but i quickly realized what was going on. It was pretty amusing to see all the chaos over a simple flushing on the mod team, Makin surely did a good job to make it as wacky as possible. Makes me wish i could have seen the Reckoning, the first time he did that. I was still a simple newbie on the server, and i knew no one who was picked for the roles, so i went on with my HSD life. However it did bring to my attention that Makin wasn’t your average user, or even server owner. He likes to make things interesting, in his own wacky way.

#mspa-lit came to my attention pretty early on, even though i didn’t talk there until much later. It did have a good share of problems that i can’t even point out, seeing how i would only look in there sporadically. It was intimidating, after all Makin would talk there almost the entire day. Makin, who kept being painted as mean and bad by a loud minority would scare me, as silly as that sounds. The channel is some sort of mod hangout place, not only that, it’s also home to topics that were too complex for me, so more to add on the intimidating aura. At this time #mspa-lit wasn’t in it’s best moments either. Just like #altgen, what i saw was apparently just a fraction of the problems it had. I remember seeing fights, people genuinely getting mad, leaving and banned. It was the drama blackhole of the server. Quoting something i read at the time, “#mspa-lit was a blight on the server”, and indeed it was.

I remember visiting other channels, mostly to check out what was there. #general was a wasteland, the messages would be mostly AradiaBot mentioning new users and saying welcome, the new users talking for 5 min before diving into another channel, and poor Nujaka talking with one or two other users. It makes me laugh to think he kept talking there for so long, for his dream to be real only one year later. #social, which later became known as #hangout, was a small point of interest for me too. It was pretty much a general chat to talk about real life stuff, take selfies, talk about food and anything that wasn’t too serious. It wasn’t until later that i went there and made friends. #homestuck and #hiveswap, both for the designated topics were a interesting place to watch, but i never had anything to add there. I was someone who just read homestuck, and not only that, at a time the had “ended” quite a while ago, so everything that there was to explore had already been explored. #serious is still a place that feels bittersweet for me. Its point is clear, it’s supposed to be the place where people will seriously discuss something that could be touchy, or that could hijack another channel out of its usual activity. Politics, venting, matters of urgency like hurricanes, earthquakes, and even server topics being great examples. All that is very interesting and i find it great to have a place like that, but i just… It’s not my cup of tea, best way to put that. #coding-tech was the last channel i would use from time to time, with nothing much to add, aside from the stupid questions i had about coding.

It took some time for me to drop #altgen. After everything that went on there, it had a hard shift. What before was toxic and displeasing turned into almost a second #hangout, but messier. Some people would come with a lot of personal talk that simply didn’t belong in a meme channel. It was worse when they got mad that their talk was being interrupted by 10 users sharing different versions of Markplier with Farquaad’s face deepfried to hell. It was a giant echo chamber. They would post matters that were more IRL than what the channel was for, many that would be even considered venting. It was known as hugbox, and it was terrible. The hugbox would drown the channel in sad topics and useless advice, and the people who wanted memes or a simple chat about something random would get shut down. I enjoyed the IRL talk we had there, i like to share things about my life, I even talked like that in #altgen. It was a mistake, and i realized that if I wanted to do that, i should just do it in #hangout. Not only would it be the right place, the impending hugbox wouldn’t exist since #hangout was moderated by a pseudo who kept a degree of order, something that simply isn’t found in a shitpost channel. In the end, #altgen came to a point where both sides were aggressive to each other, until it was shut down by the pseudo mods of the time, Deus and Dingus, with the final revamp of the channel by Drew. Since then, #altgen has been at its best. It has memes, people are usually posting the latest and shittiest edits that exist. It’s top content! With the occasional SACRIFICE by Drew, it stays alive as the random memey channel, as it should be. It was there that i grew as a user, where i made great friends, even if we don’t talk much anymore.

#hangout was a great place. We talked about many real life matters and slightly serious things, so long as it didn’t get out of control and people stayed calm. Olki, the pseudo at the time, would be very attentive and present. Every single person from there that i talked with made me grow a little. I could say that some changed my life somehow, and for the best. It was great to be a regular there. One day, however, it was brought up that #hangout would end, as it was simply a general chat that wasn’t situated in #general. In other words, it just made #general useless. Since that was the channel everyone went to first, it gave a bad impression of the server. The idea was that #general and #hangout would get merged, but in practice it meant that #hangout would be deleted (technically hidden, but deleted is more accurate to most users’ experience) and everyone would migrate to #general. It wouldn’t matter which channel got deleted, it was the influx of users and the clash that would be the issue. Instantly most of the #hangout regulars complained, as it was a community with a set identity, and a merge would break that. The main argument was that #hangout had some sort of filter which kept the channel quality up, which was true. The quality there was pretty high, and new users were not common, again it was a set identity and a tight knit community. In the end, the idea was put into action and #hangout got closed down and everyone fled to #general. The matter was heavily discussed for the first day, and then the next, and the next… For almost one month people would be asking what happened to #hangout, the mod team would explain what the deal was, and it would repeat daily. #general wasn’t at its best. Complaints were constant for the whole first month, all of them coming from #hangout regulars. Many of these regulars left, some went too far and got channel bans, some of them went crazy after it and got full bans, others just left, cooled down and came back. A minority kept cool from the beginning and merged quite easily, but after a while, many faded out when their other friends went inactive. Since then there are almost no old #hangout regulars in #general. After all that, #general became my new home channel. The activity there is high, the quality… not so much, but it’s bearable. It got slightly better with time.

#mspa-lit was once again brought to my attention, some months after the #hangout-#general merge. Some regulars from #hangout would be talking more in #mspa-lit, plus the fact that i saw the shill list and started reading one of recommendations made me go there and try engaging. It surprised me how #mspa-lit evolved during my time on the server. The fights became more rare, as had drama and heated argument. I took my time to look at it again, and change my mind about it. It was still intimidating but it wasn’t a monster, it was a channel with unique topics and dynamic. Aka whatever Makin wanted to be discussed whenever he was online, and a mod + old user general chat when he isn’t around. I did my best to squeeze myself in it, and i still don’t know if i managed to. What i know is that since then, #mspa-lit has been great. Whether discussing the shills, having a general chat with some old users and mods, or getting yelled at by Makin.

Around the same time, there was a server survey. It wasn’t the first survey ever, it was actually the second i saw. In both, Makin would leave a field for suggestions and you bet what happened. But this survey brought me something that I never expected. Small changes on the mod roles were made. One user, Spiral, was made a full mod, she was before that a pseudo mod for the Homestuck category. General was still not completely over the merge, so other pseudos and full mods were overseeing #general for a while, even if it wasn’t their obligation. Still Makin thought the old janitor role should be brought back to keep the channel clean and tidy. It was a mix of people asking to get the role, others voting, and people complaining about another person to oversee the channel, and how it would make moderation more volatile. In the end, some said my name. I was in general for a while and people did recognize me as a regular. But it wasn’t even the people saying my name that made me jump from my chair, it was when Makin listened to the people, and made it real.

Time went on, and soon came the new year. We had new people, up to the point where the server reached 15,000 users. We had a complete reread of homestuck with the community, going all the way to 4/13. We read again the thing that brought us together, some of us for the second time, others for the tenth time. Right after, we got the epilogue tease and, the following week, the full epilogue. We read it, as soon as it was released, and all of us started discussing it. And it made me think about all we had done together… The HSD covered the Troll Call, which made the whole server spam “NEW TROLL CALL” weekly when new trolls were released to the public. Later it covered the Friendsim, with a channel for discussion whenever a new DLC was released, quickly followed by art in the art channels. It investigated the “ARG”, all of us together looking for every little piece of information about our common interest was one of the wildest things i have witnessed. There have been great community streams, sometimes to listen to a new fan album, to commemorate 4/13, 6/12, or the server anniversary. April Fools was something that I never got to really experience, since it’s not a thing where i live, but god if allowing quirks and a RP channel wasn’t a great idea.

Being in the HSD was one of the best decisions i took in my life. Thanks guys.

---

Red

Hey there, it’s Red!

I think there’s only one really important thing for me to note, and it’s that when I joined Homestuck Discord, I genuinely believe I was a bad person.

Don’t get me wrong. HSD did not change that.

But as infamous as my server is for being a “splinter” of HSD, some of the people you have / will read about in SPAT have been there for my most formative years and continue to be my friends to this day because I met them on this server.

I got into Homestuck as a young kid, twelve whole-ass years old. Kid-me loved it with all my tiny heart because it was engaging, as well as something shiny and new I had never seen before. But now, it holds a special place in my heart because at its core it is a story about friendship. And when I joined Homestuck Discord in early 2017, I never assumed I had the whole “friends” thing cut out for me. I wasn’t very kind, genuine, or even pleasant to be around (and I’m sure as hell not always those in the present, either). I was bitter and jaded from a lot of pretty bad online experiences attempting to make some solid friends.

To this day I’m still working on being the best “me” I can be. But the people I met across these past two and a half years on this server and beyond helped shape me into someone I can and be proud of, and I’m forever grateful for them. I’m not going to name names, but if I ever called you a friend -- you’re included, too.

I’m not a sappy person, so this was weird to write.

But I think it’s important that whoever reads this knows that there’s always a place for you in this wacky world if you’re willing to work for it. And who knows, maybe HSD can be that place for you too.

Signing off,

Your favorite Splinter Bitch, Red

---

reti

The Willow

The willow keeps records in leaf, branch, and ring,

In fibers of trunk, the characters stored,

The stories take currents, they make true words sing.

It stands on great hill while lowly arms swing,

Presenting the foliage, the leaves dew-adorned.

The willow keeps records in leaf, branch, and ring.

The curious birds strike wood with a ping,

Dissecting soft bark with repetitive chord.

The stories take currents, they make true words sing.

The leaves dance through air flow, dispatch lines to spring,

Releasing the paragraphs, and though some go ignored,

The willow keeps records in leaf, branch, and ring.

While proud willow stands tall, for both common and king,

Roots run beneath, to the nutrient hoard.

The stories take currents, they make true words sing.

The stories are spread, more stories roots bring,

Defender of memories, shield and sword.

The willow keeps records in leaf, branch, and ring,

The stories take the currents, they make true words sing.

---

Sea Hitler

Man, where do I begin. I’ve been on the HSD for 3 years and maybe a couple of months now, and to say you’ve been at the same place for 3 years, yet you never lose focus or excitement of that place is a well overcame hardship.

I joined the HSD when I first installed discord, and to say I was a problem user was an understatement, I was the worst of the worst, an ALTGEN REGULAR. But after that “arc” of my life is now long over I became a general regular, meeting some of my best friends I’m still friends with today, Nikki, Neth, Angel, Red,Toast and Dingus to name a few.

Around the same time of becoming a general regular I started to speak more friendly with everyone in the channel, and become a part of it. Around this time I was asked to be a gen pseudo, and I happily accepted because I wanted to look over general and watch it grow as the server did. Maybe 3 months after that I was upgraded to a full moderator, and I still retain the spot after 2 reckonings, which I am so happy to have kept.

Spending my time on the HSD has increased my overall mood in real life and other places, and I’ve met some of my longest lasting friends because of the HSD, I wouldn’t be able to name all of them, but I can give some descriptions of the ones who’ve impacted me the most.

Sandy, dude. I know when I first joined the server I was a literal child and more than a handful to handle, but as I grew I became less and less pepega. You’ve given me some of the hardest laughs I’ve had on the server and I’m sure many other people can say that. I enjoy the time we play vidya and just chill out to talk. Looking forward to what comes next.

WoC telling me off, I’ll remember these words for the rest of my life.

Valkyrie, even though I’ve known you the shortest amount of time out of everyone, you have still made an impact in my life just as large as everyone else. The memories I’ve made with you have made me happier as a whole and I’m very glad because of it. Hopefully we continue to be very good friends, egirl.

Erie, I’ve known you since the day I joined and let me say it’s certainly been a ride with you. You’re without a doubt one of the most prominent gen members and you’re always there while I’m there, I remember the nights where it would be 4 am and it was only you and I in gen just talking about shit, and stuff like that really made me appreciate you.

Last but not least, Drew. Drew was there for me since the moment I got modded, telling me what to do at what times and giving directions in a way anyone could understand. Drew to me has been like a mentor on how to treat other people, and how to handle situations that you normally wouldn’t see every day. Then there's the times when we gather up everyone and play some group vidya together, memories like that will never be forgotten.

As a conclusion statement, this server means so much to me, and I wish to be apart of it for a very long time, I’m glad to say that the HSD has made an impact in my life, thanks.

- Cameron (shitlord)

---

Sein

5 minute rants

hsd is the only place where someone can add an extra "o" or two to "no" and everyone, including me, who had never explicitly been taught this, could immediately tell they were channelling the spirit of a short clip of legendary cinema "the fesh pince of blair", a video with 2 million views where an unusually elongated "no" plays. i remember this moment because this joke referenced content relatively rarely spoken about, and several people immediately jumped on it based on a one letter variation in a two letter word, which is a testament to the horrific memetic entanglement of people who have read the same tens of millions of words for fun.

-

hsd's shill culture is like being a hiking and nature enthusiast when you hike through an especially difficult and niche route, stop to use an outhouse, and find graffiti on the wall that says "now that our asses have touched the same toilet, we are brothers", except, instead of just being a weird reflection on the nature of ass sittery, under it there's a list of coordinates leading to who-knows-what, contained in even lesser known, eccentric wildernesses. you figure if some traveller who did the same trail you did went out of their way to tell you about these spots, well, they're probably good hikes, too, even if the overall message is unseemly, delivered through an actual outhouse, and a little bit culty. you start visiting them, go on some fantastic hikes, and one day find yourself carving coordinates into trees dozens of miles into the woods for exactly the kind of people who would wander that far out.

the outhouse is a metaphor for ending up in hsd or homestuck itself, reader's choice

---

Skyplayer

The words have been escaping me on how to properly express what HSD means to me. I originally wasn’t going to write in here. There just isn’t a way to articulate how much this place helped me if the full story is only subtly alluded to under the thick layer of generic praise and nostalgia. Not that HSD doesn’t deserve genuine praise and nostalgia, I’m just not good at such things coming naturally to me. So instead, I’ll give the super-short double-abridged version of how I got here.

From 2013 to 2015 I was known as Becomeimp. This made a lot of people very angry and was widely regarded as a bad move. When I started reading Homestuck in 2013. It saved my life. It made me realize who I was as a person. And naturally it became a bit of an obsession. I was also a dumb teen with no artistic skills. I had a fanventure, which was terrible. Things began after Andrew Hussie made a tweet with a joke about the username "Marlon B. Rando" being a good name for a twitter account. I was an asshole and in a moment of Vriska-ness felt like I needed to be the one to create the account and leave messages on every tweet Hussie ever made with the worst replies imaginable. All dumb jokes, nothing intended to be malicious. Around the same time I started "Hussietwitter", a tumblr blog that mirrored Hussie's tweets to tumblr, somehow believing that "spreading his jokes to more people" was some kind of act on par with being an actual content creator. This became a bit cyclical after about a year: Hussie made a tweet, I left a joke, uploaded it to tumblr, Hussie tweeted about how ridiculous it was that people were posting his tweets on tumblr, I left a joke. I was an annoying brat. Meanwhile I was becoming a bit too popular in the fandom. Far too many followers for an asshole teen who doesn't know how capable they are of hurting people.

This is the part more people know about.

As Becomeimp, I gathered some information related to the closure of the WP New York studio, and about Hiveswap and the devs in general. Most of it was just cited from a reddit thread, but there were a few things sprinkled in there that I can't believe I would ever post, some totally unrelated personal shit that I can't believe I even cared about, all bundled up in the writing style of an angsty 17 year old and shipped out to the 18,000 followers that Hussietwitter had amassed, then pinned on the subreddit without even being read by the mods. It's not the fault of the subreddit, or of anyone involved other than me. I fucked up. I've never regretted anything as much as I do that one post. But the entire year leading up to it was not anything I'm proud of.

Since then, I've done my best to amend things. I've become close friends with a couple people that I felt were really impacted by what I did. I've told the story to everyone I trust, I never wanted my "identity" to be a secret, it just wasn't something I broadcasted. Because I was scared and rightfully ashamed. It's been over 3 years now and I still think about everything that went down and how things could have gone if I didn’t do what I did.

If you think this is the part where I say how much better I’ve gotten, you’re only partly right. A long road to recovery started in 2016, a road that started with HSD. This community gave me an outlet to start over. Something slightly more closed off, slightly more niche, a tight-knit group of friends not afraid to call me out when I say something shitty, which is often. This community got me to branch out from Homestuck: to read a bunch of shills, to play some fkin sick video games. To join the Minecrafter servers and to attempt to play SS13 and Dwarf Fortress, to read Worm, to rant endlessly on rationality and AI and meta-fiction and philosophy. To make some friends for once.

I’m still not entirely… not entirely sure what word to use here. Normal? Sane? Unproblematic? I’m not up to par on what other communities are willing to put up with. I chose to finally write here because people are starting to dig up old shit and put it in front of me because they believe I would care. But I really don’t. I recognize I’m a work-in-progress.

Now this is getting more personal than I had planned so I’ll cut this short. I actually managed to fit in a little of the generic HSD praise there, so I hope you understand how much I love this place and this wild ride we’ve been on all these years, and I hope this gives you some context to my actions in SPAT.

---

spiral

Drewology

Three years.

That’s a long time in internet years. Time passes both slower and quicker online, old jokes persisting past new memes that fade fast. People stay for years or leave in minutes. For an online community, on a chat client, no less, to remain relatively stable and consistent for more than a few months- and continuing- is something of an achievement.

Achievements are usually awarded to a single person, or maybe two or three, on the grounds that they were spearheading the operation. However, this is also usually a crock of bullshit. Here, especially. Were you to try to award one person for keeping this community together, there wouldn’t be a singular name to pin down: Hussie, for making Homestuck? Makin, for making the subreddit? The users who joined? Those who actively participate in the channel every day all day? It’s a work of many.

All are important to it, and yet few singular people can be pinpointed as directly necessary. It’s a hive, living and breathing and tapping away at their keyboards. It is its own little buzzing niche in the cracks of the web, here for as long as those people continue to pour love into it, be it in the form of these SPAT contributions or as snarky remarks on the discord.

But Drew captured all of that.

This discord is significant to a fair amount of people, for varying reasons, and Drew has catalogued that here. However long this discord lasts after this message, this will remain an account of what was and provide some insight on what- hopefully- continued to be. The sheer effort he’s put in here is not something to be sneezed at.

(Three years, Drew.)

---

$trider

hey

some of you may know me by a shit ton of aliases but the one you probably know me best by is $TRIDER

i want to talk about what the HSD really means to me and all the great people ive met here

when i first joined the HSD i lurked in gen and decided to move to altgen, which is where i promptly got banned for spamming

now normally i wouldnt give a shit about this kind of thing but idk it felt wrong and i felt bad after i got banned

i moved back to gen and started to make friends

one friend i remember was Mr Yum

him and i were chronic shitposters in gen and often shit up the place a lot

fast forward more then a few months

i started using altgen like fucking crack cocaine i just couldnt get enough of it

my name started to become recognized as an altgen reg and i took a little pride in that

it was naive and childish

and this is a great example of what the HSD means to me

from that naive and childish behavior i grew, and along the way, i met plenty of friends and foes

the HSD is a place i will always cherish, its a place i learned plenty of lessons and realized things about myself i never truly understood before.

its a place where i can look back on and remember plenty of good times.

theres a lot of love and passion i feel for this server, its almost like a family to me.

i never really had a lot of that in my life and it feels really cool that i can come into the server and feel welcomed, and like im at home.

id like to thank everyone on the server for existing, and the mods for making the HSD such a special place.

---

tensei

Small collection of haikus

New user enters

a controversial remark

they fell for the bait

Sound of keys clacking

A finger errantly slips

Haha, a typo

A lively debate

" Hey guys, why are you talking?"

Uh, okay cookie

---

Teratosapphic

Three Years

to be accompanied by acoustic guitar

It's been a long, long time since we first met here

Under the banner of a shared passion

And it's been a fun ride

As we've all stemmed the tide

Of a community that seems to be done.

Ohh,

Three good years

And countless tears

From laughs and cries

And sarcastic jeers.

Ohh,

Three good years

and nearing four

But will you be here

In three years more?

We saw Christ come back as a rat

We saw a car flown into space

We saw a man try to paint us all as gaping assholes

And we turned around and laughed in his face.

Of course, I wasn't here from the start

Not many people can claim

To have seen it all

From then and back

It's really kind of a shame

Yet we still look back with fondness at all of our little oddities

And bizarrities

And contravicies

And idiosyncriocrities

It's like we all knew each other before we even met

It's something I don't think anyone will ever get

how…

Ohh,

Three good years

And countless tears

From laughs and cries

And sarcastic jeers.

Ohh,

Three good years

Just to be sure

Will you be here

In three years more?

Will you be here

In three years more?

Will you be here?

Please say you will!

Can't say I've ever met anyone

quite like our tight knit little corps.

Will you be here

In three years more?

---

TIPSY

Some tipsy reflections

(written while actually tipsy – do not try this at home)

I've got a funny experience with the Homestuck discord. When first joining, lots of people were intimidated because of the reputation I'd built for myself on Reddit/Tumblr for wanting to pick a fight over stuff I thought strongly about. But that fear quickly faded, and I saw the community as a refuge from more stressful small-group social encounters, until it has become the only place I socialize. Perhaps this demonstrates unhealthy behaviour on my part. I'll admit I dread the emotional dependency that is created in small groups. However I appreciate the laid-back atmosphere of the massive HSD, with all its channels and sub-communities. The place puts the creativity of the fandom into one space, where you might get teased for being yourself, but you're not going to get called out, bullied, or otherwise threatened. Worst case scenario you get banned for being highly inappropriate, or for shits and giggles. It's a “safe space,” in the way Tumblr (and especially Twitter) could never be MAKIN DONT READ.

By the same token it would be difficult to ignore the experiences of others. Some past faces see the HSD (or MSPA Lit) as hostile, offensive, and otherwise negative. Most of this surrounds Makin's attitude towards people he sees as overly sensitive. But you've heard enough of this story by now to get the picture – he thrives on entertainment, and sometimes he will act like an offensive douche for teh lulz, sometimes he will act reasonable. One thing I've never seen Makin Poring do is accept guilt for his actions. Then again, with some of the accusations levied his way, I'm not sure if he should. There's only so much shit you can throw at a person for being a bit of a bellend, and there's far more awful people out there, like manipulative 30 year olds who would launch callout campaigns at teenagers on Tumblr/Twitter because they said something to piss them off. That would easily be the greater evil, even if said teenager had bad opinions. Not going into the worse figures who we've seen Makin thoroughly erase from the HSD.

“Evil”, however, is not a word I would use to describe Drew. Nor is wacky-zany, despite his best attempts to fit the role.

Drew Linky is a complete dork. He's the Batman to Makin's Joker. He's got this insane ability to get interested in whatever you throw at him. He's a good man. If he ran the discord it might have been shut down some point years ago, reaching his limits with all the mods putting pressure on him. Or maybe it would still be alive? Maybe it would be smaller, but closer? Who knows. Who cares? It is what it is. Drew's never going to

If I were to defer to a part of Drew's narrative that I respected deeply, it would be his resilience in staying invested towards the community itself when the original material that allowed the community to bond together ended up decaying like milk in the sun. Homestuck isn't even good once you cut flashes out of the equation. Since when do people put effort into keeping groups alive when their core series gets set on fire by the creator? When you make sure that everyone around you is chill enough to enjoy the fireworks.

However, the HSD being as apathetic as it is leads to friction as per above. Drew has explained often enough his frustration at people being nasty to each other, Makin's bullcrap, the decay of our community following Act 7. Maybe that's why SPAT is coming to an end? He's ran this string to its logical conclusion, and like Andrew Hussie, he will leave you with a cliffhanger so your imagination can fill in the endless future. I hope whatever alien robots find this document in the future look at us and see the spirit of enjoying what must be a passing breeze in the universe's cogs. Also I hope they understand that we painted ourselves orange every day, sacrificing hooved animals fortnightly, in honour of the Horse Man. Also Terezi and Vriska are in love.

If SPAT is going to end, I want to contribute something genuine to it. And what gets more genuine than cartoons? To all the readers at home, here is Tipsy's cartoon shill list, which Drew can feel free to cut if he is weak:

1. Adventure Time – Massive show with 284 11-minute episodes. Up its own asshole. Favourite thing about this show is you should go into each episode with no expectations. Even the miniseries can go off into weird tangents that provide insight into a character. Or maybe they won't. This show spawned off a lot of children and grandchildren, but only Steven Universe kept its Cerebus Syndrome trait.

2. Duck Tales, woo,oo – Life is like an airplane, here in duck berg. Airplanes airplanes airplanes, here in duck berg. It's like like an airplane, oh god there's airplanes!

3. Over the Garden Wall - Saw this one as it was releasing live, back in 2014. Only 10 episodes long. Deserves to become a classic. Save it for Halloween though.

4. OK! KO – This show has decided to go every length NOT to take itself seriously, and has become endearing to me for it. The show plays with deeper themes but does not allow itself to get caught in Cerberus Syndrome, and is the polar opposite on the spectrum to Steven Universe.

5. Star vs the Forces of Evil – This show WAS hit by Cerberus Syndrome but not as hard as AT or SU. Or Homestuck. Fuck that comic. Anyway, I'm having a hard time describing what's appealing about the show. You will find it abrasive in the first season, but if you enjoy cartoons for being cartoons, you will put up with it. As the show goes on it focuses more on its poorly structured romantic drama, but the thing that kept me endeared was how it worked as a coming-of-age story for Star and Marco, how they grow from being stupid kids to being more emotionally mature than the adults around them.

6. Avatar the Last Airbender – So low down because I forgot to mention it earlier. You will enjoy this if you like cartoons for both the fun parts and the epic parts. A rigidly structured story with standalones that will have you rolling. VERY appealing to tweens, except for tweens who hate bald characters, like past Tipsy, so I missed out on this in favour of Dragonball Z and Teen Titans. No, neither of these will make the shill list, sadly.

7. Gravity Falls – Similar tone to Over the Garden Wall, so I wouldn't say that it's hit by Cerebus Syndrome, though season 2 plays up the character drama. Had a Homestuck-worthy update schedule, with all of season 1 airing quickly and season 2 being spread across 4 years. I don't enjoy it as much as the others on this list, but some see it as their forever show. Give it a try.

8. Samurai Jack – Enjoyed better in small doses, not in Minish's 24hr streams, so use a TV guide. When Samjack does good, it does good. Very atmospheric. Very goofy at other times. Had a final season on Adult Swim recently, with Super Saiyan Cerebus Syndrome. Your tongue isn't the only one twisting at that, because Jack develops a fondness for tying tongues with a psychologically broken teenager. Started off great. Shit second half. Series is otherwise a worthwhile classic.

9. Stets and the Crystal Gamz – Steven Universe is a mixed bag for me. Earnest, at least. I think you should watch it because you might like the parts I hate, and hate the parts I like. For me the goofier first three or so seasons were fantastic, formerly would have topped this list, but I loathe Seasons 4 and 5, save for a couple of fun oneshots. If you hate shows that take themselves too seriously stay very clear of everything after season 3; not even Adventure Time approaches SU's pretentiousness, and only Samjack outdoes it with edginess. This show is the Lucien Cramp to OK!KO's Wayne, both aimed at the same audience and trying to share life lessons, but SU overindulging while OK!KO has a laugh. Unfortunatley both shows are being treated like trash by Cartoon Network, so most of your watching will be archival. I doubt either have more than a season left before CN takes them behind the shed.

And that, as they say, is that. Wait no. Watch Mao Mao, Heroes of Pure Heart, because that's what we're watching right now. It's as if you can be here with us.

---

tmtmtl30

When I was first thinking about writing this submission, the channel was called #read-shills. I was going to refer to it as such, and weave in a witty retort about how people can’t accept what the channel is actually called. Then it was renamed to #cafe-mspa, so it’s probably best to refer to the channel by its Discord identification code, 184908151185866752. This identifier is far less likely to become irrelevant, at least until Makin decides to do away with the 5.48 million message backlog.

I don’t need to repeat message count statistics here -- Drew has that covered -- but it bears noting just how relevant 184908151185866752’s history is to the present day. The first 100 or so messages in the channel were sent by 8 users (9 if you include a now-removed bot), 2-3 of which (Putnam, Niklink, and MrCheeze) still remain notable presences in the channel today. That’s ignoring Makin, who I’m sure you’re at least superficially familiar with. It’s been 3 years (!) since the channel’s inception, but the cohesive channel culture seems to have stayed remarkably constant. I’m not sure how many channels on the server can say that.

My participation has been far narrower in both timeframe and message count. I joined the server on March 4th, 2018. After a brief conversation in #altgen (I can’t stand the place, personally), I migrated to 184908151185866752. I’ve remained there almost exclusively ever since: about 91% of my 135,000 messages have been sent there, and I don’t anticipate the balance changing significantly in any other channel’s favor. i type like this, effortlessly intermixing profanity with awkward sentence structure like a concussed poet ready to spew bullshit wherever she goes.

Despite the fact that I am submitting this entry to SPAT, I’ve never been an avid follower. It’s a little ironic, considering that my participation in 184908151185866752 is due in no small part to the piece. I only read the first few months, but something about the channel stuck with me, and it’s probably what convinced me to join. Ever since I started participating in earnest, though, it’s felt vaguely masturbatory to read SPAT thoroughly. Instead, it remains a monolithic account of 2 years worth of channel history, useful for crossreferencing and reviewing the actions of user5 but too intimidating to be fully consumed.

One scifi trope that’s always interested me is that of somebody being recreated using their digital imprint. Their posts are all collected and fed into some high-tech AI that synthesizes all of it and is able to imitate their online presence. OP might be long gone, but their footprint is left behind, and from that, they are -- in some sense -- born anew. I can’t say for certain how greatly 184908151185866752 has influenced me, or how much my current identity is based off of experiences I’ve had there. But without access to the channel’s logs, I think that a recreation of me, millions of years hence, wouldn’t be very accurate at all.

---

Toast

Hey, my name is Toast. I won’t bother talking about who I am or what I’ve been up to on HSD, because SPAT does a great job of recording notable events since Drew joined the server.

First of all, I’d like to thank YOU, reader, for finishing Drew’s journal and its chronicles of our varied online exploits (tinted as they may be by a bred-predating dirt-sifter’s perspective).

When I first joined the Homestuck/Hiveswap Discord, back when it was just a server for gathering people to play Overseer, it was my first experience chatting with people online in any capacity beyond the reserved spaces of PSN and Steam messages, which had always lacked a certain magic. The first time I logged into Discord and opened HSD, I was awed at how many people were talking at once. This was what I’d been looking for online— a real-time, group messaging service based around Homestuck, the comic I’d so recently caught up on.

Discord is a beautiful service, not just for its ease of use but how it’s brought so many wonderful and terrible people from every diverse and varied background that you could name together under whatever server’s banner they choose. We argue, we agree, we fight and ignore each other, shitpost and write essays, but everyone can agree that Discord and the Homestuck Discord have brought the lot of us together to talk together every day.

I don’t know what you’re going to take out of this, or if there’s even a “lesson” to be learned beyond that of watching a community shift and grow over time. Maybe it’s to cherish your friends, or to appreciate the faceless people that walk, talk, eat, breathe, and post online that we are all blessed to interact with. It could even be that we’re all loonies congregated in memory of a dead webcomic, and you can’t believe that you wasted all this time on some random guy’s journal on a few years of antics.

Whatever it is that you take away from SPAT, my message to you, and the last notes from everyone else, I hope it has an impact and this wasn’t an enormous waste of time. Hopefully it was an entertaining read, at the very least. (especially my parts!)

To those of you reading this in the future, if we’re still around, consider dropping by mspa-literature/read-shills and saying hi.

You won’t regret it— I haven’t yet.

Much love,

Toast#0965

---

tori

In a conversation I was having the other day, someone said, "Isn't Drew's journal basically his cringe collection?", and that, of course, changed my life.

There's something about the Homestuck Discord that's unique even among larger servers- for whatever reason, shit gets absolutely hog and wild out there. Long ago, this meant ridiculous but terrible and cursed drama. Eventually, that crap stopped happening, but the neutral and positive events are still something. Really, HSD is a land of "you don't get that shit anywhere else". It's the Florida of Discord servers or some shit. Is it just the result of it being a Homestuck community? Is it because Makin is an absolute motherfucker? It's probably both or something, I don't know. I just shitpost in the shills channel all day.

---

Trickster

WARNING: Copious amounts of text ahead.

If you asked me to come up with an analogy for the HSD, I'd immediately say we're all a bunch of apes trying as hard as we can to paint the walls before the roof collapses and we cease existing. Except the apes are living electric blips across the world, chaining combinations of transistor clacks and tings across mountains and seas, beating away at the plastic drum.

Most people have an innate desire to remember and be remembered. Through the development of civilization and even nearing its immature beginnings, our ancestors painted the cave walls with pictures of the great hunt, erected stone monuments and laid ceremonial roads, set the bases of the great pyramids remembering the lessons of the ancients, inclined obelisks carved with information, raised temples and decorated them with colorful murals, adorned tombstones for the deceased. With the advent of the metals, the transition of the ages, the taming of more and denser sources of energy, the age of electricity, so too grew our desire to keep that knowledge alive for the generations to come.

Nobody writing this document knows for certain how far into the future it will last. Hell, I even considered not submitting anything at all (which would’ve made several of you pretty happy), but I supposed a little rambling has never hurt anyone.

Anyways, continuing with the analogy, what Drew has done here over the tortuous expanse of this document is a clear indicator of our desire for posterity. However, some outsiders may not know that these behaviors are not new, and some have served as décor in the halls of history. The Buddhists have an oral tradition, or at least used to, of the vanishing of all of the prior teachings of their honorable figure. A cleansing of information, a movement towards chaos and misinformation, a precursor to a modern phrase “post-truth”, but without the bullshit politics thrown in.

Ignoring the religious subset for a moment, I would like to share this quote with you, and try to analyze it a little bit:

"As time goes on there will be irreligious kings and courtiers under irreligious governments. Then the people throughout the kingdom or countries will be irreligious.

The country will not prosper, there will be drought and other hardship with famine and scarcity of food. The devotees will gradually stop providing the four requirements to the monks (Sangha): robes, alms, support for the sick and dwelling places. The pious, not receiving the requirements, will not enter the order (Sangha), and the learned will not teach their knowledge to the novices. Learning will slowly disappear."

(Fragments of the Pali Canon, translated, Access to Insight (BCBS Edition), 30 July 2019)

(The dana-yuga is the time period being described in this quotation, specifically the Dhatu Parinirvana; the period of the Buddha’s dispensation and part of the cycles of coming and going away from the world, if taken in the literal sense it reflects the cyclical nature of Buddhahood, if taken analytically we can refer to this as the timespan between periods of enlightenment and the preservation of information, the natural state of entropy that lead to their end, and finally the restoration of the “faith”, the restoration of order.)

These are the worried exclamations of men that, like many others, have seen the impermanence of knowledge in the world. Naturally their civilization progressed, and finally with the advent of writing, they began to write down their accumulated knowledge in thin slices of bamboo, followed by parchment, etc.

This is not a history lesson. I believe it is important to realize the fact that even today, our modern medium for recording information does not propagate it "forever" into the future, and there is no permanence to our actions. Frankly I have taken a great respite in this notion during my time in the HSD, as I’ve learned to enjoy our time together more, even considering how bizarre, odd and obviously unimportant it is in the “grand scheme of things”, if there is even one of those out there.

Maybe all of my vacuous rambling will come off absurd if this document manages to survive the years, which I really wish it to, with my deepest hopes. Drew has poured an inhumane amount of effort and dedication to keeping this memoir going, even going to the length of hosting it in his own (albeit, shared) website for posterity. Many of the readers have surely also downloaded it to their solid state or conventional magnetic disk drives, and I will not be pedantic about the notion of time and how things will last long out into the future anymore, because I understand it is just a byproduct of well, being a biological machine.

SPAT is a work of art. Qualitatively the prose and the style of writing can be dismissed as historian stylized mumbling, but there is something subtle to knowing that a digital version of you, the notion of you, has been perceived and enjoyed by other people, that makes it somewhat of a timeless experience. Connection, weakening, reconnection, it’s almost neuronal.

Even more so because Drew himself, in his very last line, pleads for the mercy of time, the humble acknowledgement of the future dissolution of the community, of language, of digital expression. Perhaps the warning of the monks towards the disappearing of learning was not a call to continue spreading our different forms of knowledge, but a precautionary tale narrating the precursor to a modern dark age of information, a cognitive change in human perception.

Too many variables, too many negative on-looks for the future, I wish it only the best, truly. If humanity has already whisked through some of its hardest challenges (on the evolutionary sense, outcompeting their similar Neanderthals, developing a basic sense of group thinking, creating tools, taming the environment) maybe it will also speed through the remaining few, and we'll arrive at one of the fables heavens of the past. And on a personal sense, it will be one of our sadder yet less acknowledged challenges to wave each other goodbye someday, and to move on with our lives.

Internet communities are a rare phenomenon. I think they communicate to each of us on a deeper level than we'd like to admit, strumming a chord of relationship and connection around a shared prospect, shared interest. Like all other groups of people, this Homestuck discord has suffered its moments of friction, collide, and strife. Yet I tend to believe that, the moments that we have enjoyed surely made up for it. Even if after all we are just strangers connected through a common language, all separated by geography, learning through each other’s pocket universes.

But perhaps, that is not the case in all communities, maybe it was our luck of not having disbanded in such a long time span that brought things to be, to try and understand the human being across the other side of the screen, clawing away time in the silent classroom, the bogged restaurant, the lonely desk and chair.

The other human beings at the side of the digital roadway, the soulless connection that binds us all towards a common end, the devastating truth of entropy, our ways of dealing with fact and falsehood, our belief systems, our shared experience. I would have never guessed that I would ever write something in the memory of a place that once seemed like a diversion to complement my enjoyment of an obscure internet webcomic, which turned out into a net of interactions and fun that spanned philosophical and historic discussion, literary analysis, and wackiness.

Maybe this is the natural way of things, towards understanding and unity. Perhaps this is why we exist, to connect and oppose destruction, to try and back away the forces of chaos, the dragon in the cave. Some might argue that my constant pursuit of chaos has been for the worse, a contrarian towards the binding forces of social emotion. But I digress; at least I can appreciate the end of it all now.

I hope that the reader didn’t interpret this as overly dramatic, if anything it is a poor man's attempt at trying to condense nearly three years of experience into a couple of paragraphs. I decided to not go into profound descriptions of my enjoyment of the HSD and my background before joining it, mainly to keep some of the mystery to my character, but also because I believe that in the same way as through this mask of anonymity I’ve been allowed to enjoy a lot of time together with some exciting individuals, surely that the collective experience we’ve enjoyed and even hated at points can only be interpreted in the moment, for it is just transient, passing away, impermanent. It’s literally the friendships we’ve made along the way.

---

tripheus

"see you spat cowboy..."

---

valkyrie

HSD is a dumb little big thing

Hey there, I’m Valkyrie. It’s kind of weird for me to use punctuation and stuff? I never do when I’m like. Texting. Anyway. I’ll just start.

THE ERA OF ALTGEN I INHABITED

I first joined HSD like… a while ago. Not as long as other old regs, but I am a good 2 years strong on this server. I’m sad to say, I was an altgen reg. But I think we had maybe a different stigma back when I was a big reg. I made… actual friends. People I’d sign in to see everyday and check up on. We’d laugh and talk about the latest funny meme or even cheer each other up sometimes. The people I recall the most during this era are Stress, Cent, FurDominatrix, Dabby, WeatherReport, Qweq, and probably others I’m missing. I invented something extremely cursed that, thankfully, most members don’t recall today: Peegen, which is ridiculous in name and even more ridiculous in execution. It’s gross and it’s childish. But it was one of my marks on HSD; the community of this server. Fellow users have so many screenshots of me saying silly things. I know there’s this one screenshot of Dingus (back when he was altgen pseudo,) saying: “Why are you people like this” and below it was just me saying “torture my weewee”. Isn’t that stupid? But, I think what’s even more stupid is how a smile gets brought to my face and I feel genuinely happy when I see that dastardly, stupid screenshot or someone remembers “peegen” or someone even remembers who I am.

PSEUDO MOD

I think, back when I was a lowly altgen reg, that I never even thought I could be a pseudo mod. During the reckoning, I was in a discord call with Sea Hitler. I remember him telling me that it was nigh impossible for me to become a mod because I’m… me. (For the record, I totally agree but I had that hope in my heart.) I think I remember who first voted for me and started the chain. It was Dabby I’m pretty sure. (Dabby, if you’re reading this, screw you. I’m in hell!) At first, Makin said I was a altgen janitor. That was good enough for me. Then, he said I was going to be altgen pseudo?? That made me fucking double-take I’m sure. Anyway, the users came up with a silly little jingle. “Dingus overrated, deus outdated, valkyrie coronated.” that sounds INSANELY silly but I’ve come to look back on it and chuckle. Anyway, if you want my opinion on being a mod, it’s cool I guess. I made a shit ton of friends and I’m happy. But the users are sometimes annoying and make me sift through piles of crap. But for the record I’m (begrudgingly) happy to do so.

DUMB LITTLE BIG THING

This server is my dirty little secret I think. I don’t tell many people I’m in it, but it’s special to me. I guess HSD is just my favorite thing right now. It may not be like that in the future, but for now it’s a big part of my life and I enjoy it a lot. I’m gonna call some of you fuckers out by name, so be ready to be SPATified!

Wizard of Chaos: Dude, I hated you at first. But you know the story. All I’m gonna say is I’m glad I met you and you’re a great friend. Love you dude, you’ve helped me through so much.

Sea Hitler: I LOVE YOU EBOY!!!!! I remember we met by joking about having a “straight pride VRChat wedding”. I have a lot of favorite memories with you.

Dune/whatever your username is for today: You were the first real friend I made on HSD. For that, I think you might be a little epic bro… Haha, jokes aside, love ya brother. You’re hilarious and keep at DJing dude.

Bella: You hold my favorite HSD splinter. My favorite memory is playing club penguin with you and saying “roleplay” in a weird voice at 5am for 3 hours straight.

Reti: You play games with me, and you’re a great fuckin’ guy. Thanks for always talking to me and I’m so glad I met you!

Drew: We don’t really talk, but thank you for being such a great moderator. Thanks for SPAT. You deserve a drink dude. Seriously, cheers.

Anyway, I’m out! Thanks for reading my little piece of SPAT

~valkyrie, current pseudo of altgen

---

wadapan

one evening, as the end of the semester draws near, some friends and I light a fire on the beach. We drink, and we cook smores - the best smores I've ever tasted, in fact - and we shoot the shit. It's fun, but the night is tinged with melancholy. One of my friends will be returning to America, and there's a strong possibility that we'll never see him again. Another may be transferring to study in another country

truth be told, this particular group hasn't been sustainable for a long time. We argue frequently, over incredibly stupid things - more a clash of personalities than of ideologies. We never go anywhere or do anything. In that respect, this fire is special - and, for the first time in a while, the tension dissipates. When night falls and the embers finally burn out, we find ourselves staying up anyway - knowing that this might be the last time we get to do something together. It is, in a way

occasionally, people in #read-shills like to talk about their dreams. It's always dumb, weird stuff that would never happen in real life - "I dreamt that I was Vriska! I dreamt that we were all on a spaceship! I dreamt that Ever17 got removed from the shills list!" - seriously, just search "had a dream" in read-shills, there's over five hundred results. This shit's a gold mine. Makin hates dreamposting - "I'll allow it only because the chat is dead", he once said, only to state "I regret allowing it" immediately after seeing the dream in question. Usually, I'd agree with him; I've always found hearing about people's dreams to be a pretty uncomfortable experience, because there are only two kinds: the kind that's just stupid shit, and the kind that reveals way too much about the person dreaming

after my friends leave, I finally go to sleep, and - for the first time in a long time - I dream. In the dream, I'm back on the beach. The fire is bigger, and there are more people - but my friends aren't there. I realise that these people are all the faceless randos I've been talking to in #read-shills. As everyone talks, Drew stands off to one side - expositing, SPAT-style, about what's happening to Makin over the phone

the moment I realise what the dream is, I hate it. I hate what it says about me - that I somehow prefer these strangers to this group of friends. I wake up immediately. For a brief moment, I consider mentioning the dream in #read-shills. I don't, because I know that - if someone else posted the same dream - I'd hate reading about it. I haven't dreamt since

a couple of weeks later, Drew announces that SPAT will be drawing to a close. He mentions that he'd be interested in seeing people write about '"how the HSD impacted me" or some such / maybe not phrased so dorkish', and I remember the dream. I remember how nebulous it was, how the people were defined not by their faces or voices or their locations - just by their words, and who they were sharing them with

---

WHATISLOSTINTHEMINES

It took a long time for me to actually read Homestuck. I first tried it out sometime in 2012 to moderate disinterest, and sat on it for years until GAME OVER released in late 2014. That flash is what convinced me to give the comic another shot. I spent around a month or so just pouring through that shit, and hopped on /r/homestuck to discuss it more. I participated in RPGStuck (the tabletop system based on Homestuck with a whole side-community of its own) when it first started up, and I basically just bummed around within its Skype chat for most of 2015 and 2016. Eventually, I joined HSD sometime in early 2016 in order to discuss Homestuck after it recently returned from a lengthy hiatus. At first, I only really came on to talk about the new updates, but something about the place made me stick around. I’m not really sure what it was, maybe the atmosphere just amused me. After about a year and a half, I more or less cemented myself as a regular in mspalit (now read-shills). Then like a week back I got modded for some reason. It’s kind of weird! In any case, HSD has always been a nice place for me to relax, and it also allowed me the opportunity to check out a lot of stuff I doubt I ever would have had the chance to experience otherwise.

In particular, if it wasn’t for the HSD, I probably never would have tried to join the CANMT, and thus would never had the place to develop my skills as a musician. I’m glad that I got the opportunity to participate in its shitpost music hell, even if I feel its prime has long passed. While I do participate in contributing works occasionally, CANMT now feels like a shadow of what it once was. Granted, as the shadow of a force that was an absurd force of spewing out content, making 59 albums in the span of 3 years, it’s still pretty fucking active even with a fraction of its contributors. Even so, I think most of the drive for making fan music in the community has spread out between newer (and older) teams, so the sector of musicians is a lot less centralized than it used to be. Still, CANMT was a wonderful place while it had lasted, so I’m content. I’ve met a lot of good friends through it, and maybe some bad ones, but I doubt I’d be making music today without it.

This community has always been kind of a clusterfuck, at least for the time that I’ve been in it, but it’s been an enjoyable one by my metric. It’s kind of surreal that a lot of our horseshit is now recorded within SPAT, even if I’m not sure who’d be interested in leafing through it besides ourselves in our eternal quest for masturbation. Still, it’s nice to look at this whole journal as a way to remember the HSD, even if as of 2019 this place looks like it’ll still be kicking around for a while (god please don’t let this be an incredibly ironic sentence). On the whole, I’m happy I was part of the community here, for as strange and as crazy as it can get.

Oh, also you should read Prequel. It’s a pretty good fancomic of the fourth Elder Scrolls game. It’s probably not finished yet by the time you’re reading this but it’s still worth a read.

https://www.prequeladventure.com/

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Zentoyo

I don't actually care much about HSD in general, but read-shills, cafe-mpsa, mpsa-lit however you want to call it has a place in my heart and is an example of an internet community at its best.

I've seen it go to the lowest points of being almost twitch chat-y to the "most" relevant discourse of ethics and political stuff passing by all the stages in between; there is beauty in that.

And even if I've not changed my mind on a subject that many times during discourse, I've come to understand other points of view or at least I think I have. And that is what read-shills is all about or rather the part that draws me in (that and the shills but well get on to that l8r), that is a place of understanding rather than judging or at least it has enough understanding that its not drowned by the other stuff.

This is perfectly represented by the "what did they mean by this" meme where someone post a quote tweet or whatever which meaning is unclear or seemingly stupid followed by the aforementioned words,

Another example of this is, well, the overall tone of SPAT.

Plus, when is not like that at least most people are self aware enough or wacky enough to make conversations enjoyable as a participant or lurker and blah blah blah, lets get on to the RELEVANT STUFF: SHILLS.

To the average human shills can be defined by a dictionary and the internet, but here they take a deeper meaning. Shills, or rather shills lists are based on makin's shills list, a list of works he compiled on whatever criteria he had and other users have followed up on the initiative by doing the same with their own intent mine being shilling stuff that I myself like A LOT to find people who also like it A LOT so I can get more shills.

Other people made their own with they own reasoning behind it (to generate discourse, to give light to more obscure works, to make people give a chance to stuff they wouldnt otherwise) them all being compiled into a shill list of shill lists where even the joke lists are included. And i got to say, for someone who originally came to the internet to look for a place to consume stuff n talk about that stuff it brings me unspeakable joy. You guys are truly wonderful.

So yeah, send me your shills so I can judge them and your tastes and through them judge you as a human being! Praised be shill econony! God bless shill econony! Long live shill econony!

On a less positive note some people in mspa-lit like visual novels unironically, nothing is perfect huh?(delet e 17)

PD: read a manga called fire punch

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Wizard of Chaos

WHY USERS ARE THE ENEMY

If you’re looking at this at all, you’ve probably read a goodly chunk of Several People Are Typing (which has the charming acronym of SPAT), which is an ungodly work of literature on the most boring shit imaginable: moderating a Discord server. Five hundred thousand words on a bunch of monkeys in a chatroom. I’m not nearly insane enough to create such a thing, but my compatriot and fellow moderator Drew is. I am awestruck, baffled, and deeply disturbed at the effort that has gone into this thing. It’s as though someone told me they’d spent three years painting a house by repeatedly getting a mouthful of paint and licking it. I respect the effort, of course, but… why?

I’m Sandy, but by this point you know me as WoC or Wizard of Chaos. Everything Drew has said about me is exaggerated. I currently moderate under him with the specific areas of #gaming and #general, which are the two best channels, clearly. I’ve been demodded three times now, but it didn’t take. I draw cartoons, do some coding occasionally, and use firearms and other explosive devices more than is probably safe. My personality is like I got caught in a time rift from the internet of 2008. You probably already read quite a bit about me, but I’ll quote my favorite bit: “Naturally WoC's demeanor also puts him at odds with a significant number of people in the userbase; he is often pointed to as one of the most hard-to-get-along-with members of the team, specifically because he seems to derive pleasure from purposefully messing with people on occasion.” This isn’t entirely untrue.

Truthfully, my position here is more of a mystery to me than anyone else; I’ve only front-to-back read Homestuck once because I lost a bet (I’ve since read various sections, but only entirely completed it once). I joined the server right after the Gigapause ended, I believe, then stuck around for a few months. During the first major overhaul of the server, Makin was looking for a #gaming pseudo, and I think I was the only one who requested it, so I got the spot, and I’ve pretty much been there ever since. I’ve done my best to keep the channel as quality as possible. I think it’s worked; we have a decent post rate and quality arguments.

A powerfully fried image of the time Drew and I met up for pizza and gelato. I’m whichever one you think is prettier.

One of the areas where Drew and I differ, though, is our moderating style. I told him I’d write up an epilogue on why everything he does is wrong, and here it is. You see, Drew has the appalling tendency to treat users like they’re people.

I don’t make this mistake often; the consequences for doing so are dire. Drew’s style comes straight from the heart. He tries to solve every problem individually and does his absolute best to help each user through whatever situation they’re going through, and often advocates for giving people second, third, fourth, and fifth chances because the user in question has convinced him they are truly repentant. He’s got a lot of empathy going for him.

It’s crap. All of it. I respect the urge to help people in that way but my patience for that shit is extremely low. I’m not really in the business of giving people second chances at all; sometimes not even a first if the offense is particularly bad. They serve out their bans or just flat out get the boot permanently. I’m not unfair about this. People get a warning and then they’re done if they keep going. I do my absolute best to judge users entirely on their actions, with absolutely no extenuating circumstances.

That all makes me sound a bit callous, no? In reality, I think Drew’s approach ultimately leads to more hassle and more problems. What this leads users to believe is that Drew is the more pliable and approachable moderator, because that’s the image he gives off. That means that anytime they think they’re being treated unfairly, they go straight to him. Anytime they have a problem, or think the server’s going in a bad direction, or even just want to get their way, they go straight to him. This means Drew has to deal with quite a few manipulative users one-on-one, because they see him as the easiest target. It never takes, really - Drew isn’t an idiot, but it does lead to a long, extended headache where he and the mod team have to decide what to do about this guy. And, unfortunately, sometimes it works. I can think of multiple times Drew has been absolutely convinced that we needed to cut someone more slack, or give them a second chance, and a week or a month later they pull something unspeakable and we have to permanently ban them from the server. There was this guy called recursiveSlacker who has probably been talked about extensively that serves as an excellent example of this behavior.

My approach doesn’t deal with any of that shit, because I don’t treat them like friends. I am focused purely on their contribution to the server. If it’s garbage, they get a ban or a warning, and if it’s good, they get left alone and engaged with. I don’t have to deal with many private messages from shitters; usually it’s along the lines of “why did I get banned” where I have to explain to them why their actions were unacceptable. I have a bit of a reputation as a hardass for this; if I make threats it’s known on the server that I will follow through on them. Ultimately, though, I think it’s better for the server. People are less likely to rely on slack from moderators, and I don’t ever get targeted by manipulative users (I think it’s happened maybe once or twice, and both times I slapped them down pretty quickly and called for a global ban). I’m sure Drew has countless screencaps of manipulative DMs. Users like recursiveSlacker, twonks, Bisc, and Revlar are all indicative of problems that were allowed to sit and fester for far too long that had negative impact. recursiveSlacker in particular is still a sometimes headache. His approach fails disastrously when it does fail, and the community impact is dire.

It’s not all bad. Sometimes we got hilarious shit like this.

This predilection for respecting users as people also leads to inane shit like calling for votes or listening to popular opinion. We added the channel #hangout entirely based on a user poll, and it eventually got deleted because it was a total mistake that just sucked all conversation from the general chat - which was the front page of the server and extremely important for both attracting and retaining new users. If we allowed it, users would vote for a roleplay channel, which is something that has been instituted before and deleted nigh-instantly due to becoming ERP within a matter of seconds. Time and time again, what the people want is wrong, or even actively detrimental to the server community. Breaking up hugboxes, banning sprites in the art channel - all of these are things that were bitched about to great extent but ultimately were for the greater good. If a bunch of teens want to spew horny garbage about how they want to suck some toes, they can do that somewhere else, thanks.

This has led me to the conclusion that users are, in fact, the enemy. They are not your friends, they are not your allies. At rest they at hundreds of tons of snow, looming on a mountainside, and when angry, they become an avalanche that buries our mod team in a cloud of crap. To quote George Carlin: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are stupider than that.” We have 12,000 users at the moment, with no real end in sight - the number just keeps going up. By this logic, around six thousand people on that server are fuckin’ morons. And it’s just going to keep getting worse. We can only give the people what they want by explicitly ignoring polls, really. It’s almost like a parent telling their kids they have to eat their dinner instead of having candy all the time. By and large, what the people vote for is flat out wrong.

Even leaving aside the idea that half of all the people there are idiots, there’s just problems of scale to consider. With twelve thousand people, we absolutely cannot consider each and every one individually. There’s about fifteen total moderators for all of those people. It’s not doable. Most of them don’t talk, it’s true, but even then it’s skewed heavily on the side of the users (I think Drew’s estimate was like 2500 active ones a day at peak times). Even trying to is a complete waste of time and energy; the time dedicated to helping out a single user could have been better spent by making sure a channel isn’t entirely taken over by furry porn. Who knows what the hell we’re going to have to deal with?

At the time of writing, there has been another reckoning where everyone got de-modded and voted back into office. The new mod team is great, so far - they’re doing their jobs, they’re easy to work with, and they’ve been cracking down on problems that the old mod team was content to let fester. This could be taken as a counterpoint to my argument that voting is bad and the users are always wrong about what they want; however I assure you it isn’t. What actually happened for the voting process was that some actually well-known regular would suggest someone to be mod for a channel or in general or whatever and then convinced the rest of the users to spam their name after that. It was less a vote and more a tightly controlled mob that went in pretty much the exact direction it was told to. If we had actually let it go to a vote I’m sure the results would have been disastrous. What occurred was not a vote, or at least not a properly designed democratic vote. I’m pretty sure Makin knows this.

Even then, half the new mods were totally shocked at their appointment - which is exactly as it should be. Anyone who actually wants power should under no circumstances be allowed to have it. There were several crybabies who whined about not getting mod despite being really active users and accruing good boy points for months on end just in the hopes they would accrue the tiniest crumb of power. No. Look, let me explain it in a screencap:

Goddamn, what a chore.

This is a screenshot from our moderation log. We’re currently experiencing a whole shitload of bots joining the server and private messaging people with porn. This is what it looks like for about 1200 posts in a row (probably not actually that many, that’s just the total bot count). Is this fun or engaging in literally any way? Fuck no, it isn’t! It’s the moderating equivalent of ditch digging. We’re just banning bot account after bot account and everyone is chipping in to do the job. Nobody wanted to do this. You’d have to be fucking insane to want to do this. The only reason any of us are doing this is because we have to in order to make the server a better place. It’s utterly mindless tedium. That screenshot right there is exactly why nobody who wants to do this should under any circumstances be allowed to. That’s why votes are garbage, because they are in effect what the users want and the person being voting in is probably wanting to do it anyway. Ask yourself: Do you really want to sit in front of a computer for actual hours on end throwing out a bunch of accounts manually? I don’t. If you do want to, you shouldn’t be allowed to.

In summary: the users are always wrong, and treating them with empathy leads to terrible results more than it does good results. Whether or not someone is an objectively quality user is the only metric by which they should be judged, with no extenuating circumstances. While I admire Drew’s approach, ultimately I am convinced that it is the wrong one. I’ve probably exaggerated the extent to which I take this policy (“users aren’t people” is a hell of a phrase, isn’t it?), but the fundamentals are there, even if it’s coated in a fine glaze of irony. I don’t think that I could use any other sauce if I tried.

Wizard of Chaos out.

“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.

To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.

To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.”

-Douglas Adams, The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe

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1^st of April 2020 - April Fool²¹⁴’s Day

After my ascendance, we tried to tell people that we weren’t doing anything for April Fool’s day because everyone was too tired and busy for it. I don’t think we fooled anyone really, but it was worth a try. At the stroke of midnight we enacted our plan: bringing back the theme from last year when the Epilogues were released, we condensed everything in the server down to two categories: meat and candy. Users were forced into a single channel called #prologue where they would be forced to choose a role using the same kind of system we have for choosing color roles, where one clicks a reaction and is given the corresponding role. Once they chose meat or candy, prologue was removed from their sight and they were put into the appropriate channel category.

Meat was where more serious channels went, specifically the Interests category. Everyone in those channels was expected to dwell under the rule of an iron fist, and at the first sign of dissent they were removed. Additionally, Jman created a bot for the day that checked all of the messages sent in #meat and muted people for increasing intervals of time if they sent a non-unique message (for anyone familiar, these are /r9k/ rules). Channels in candy, including the Creative category and the newly created #roleplay, were full of frivolous bullshit that had very little real moderation. In theory at least, no one was allowed to see both categories, and would be forced to stick in their chosen “timeline” all day unless banned.

The second layer of this event happened when a user was banned from meat, candy, or both somehow: we had a “reveal channel” called #pumpkin, which was actually the repurposed April Fool’s channel from previous years. Anyone banned from either “timeline” was sent there, and could access the Homestuck and general channels without issue as well as viewing the channels within Meat and Candy without being able to speak in them. Partway through the day the final episode to Pesterquest released so we opened up that channel to everyone, which I felt lessened the overall event just a bit²¹⁵.

In the afternoon, a strange tradition formed where the meat category was ruled by Anervaria in the form of an authoritarian character from Homestuck, and eventually she formed the “Crocker Corps.” The candy side, in contrast, formed the Lalonde Revolution (whose symbol of “resistance” became a rose). Both sides fought for control of the #pumpkin channel. This became the culmination of the event, where meat, candy, AND pumpkin users ended up choosing one side or another. It was a totally unexpected development, and it was really interesting to see this organically play out as the day came to a close.

As it is the server carried on this way for almost the entire day, from midnight to 10 PM EST. There were some hiccups in the beginning due to Discord’s category settings being strange and not working as anticipated, but within fifteen minutes or so everything was set and working properly. The message was deleted so I can’t know for sure, but the last time I checked it we had 600 people who had chosen candy and 1,000 people who had chosen meat. The activity was absolutely incredible, with over 65,000 messages getting sent in the relevant channels throughout the day.

There were of course the usual bevy of complaints from people who found the event annoying, but for the most part it seemed as if everyone had a lot of fun, and that’s really all we can ask for. Overall I would consider this year a great success, and in some unanticipated ways. It’ll be very hard to do better next year.

Nothing more for today.

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8^th of April 2020

It’s been a while since I did a proper write up of any day in the server aside from April Fool’s. The motivation to write things has been dwindling hard between finishing up my graduate degree and maintaining the server as its admin, so I’ve been terrible at keeping notes over the last several weeks. Using what I remember, I’m going to use this entry to briefly write up some of the more noteworthy things that have happened or are currently happening.

First and foremost, it’s important to note that some switchups in the moderator team have happened. Almost all of the old members are there, except for Jman, who stepped down for personal reasons after April Fool’s Day--kind of his swansong, in a way. WoC, on the other hand, was elevated to the position of full mod due to his considerable tenure, being part of the mod team longer than literally anyone else, and for displaying great critical thinking and level headedness when he cares to. He and Mines were both my choices for interacting with the liaisons from the official team for Homestuck, although there’s nothing to report on that yet.

Relatedly, we added a bunch of new janitors to the team at the beginning of March: Neth and Erieolae joined Qweq to watch over #general, Vortrex is now looking after #altgen with Prime, a user named Shroom for #serious, Penumbra for the Homestuck category, and we welcomed back Tera as janitor for the art channels. Moonjail was also added as the janitor for #music since Cyrene stated they’ll be out of commission for a while, but Moon has been so good at their job--increasing activity and making sure it stays of high quality--that we elevated them to pseudo-mod about a week ago. I think everyone is okay or even happy with these changes, and we’ve seen a lot of good coming out of it.

There’s something I want to touch on: I mentioned the release of the final episode of Pesterquest in the April Fool’s entry: not to go into too much detail, but on the day it came out there was a brief back and forth between myself and a user named Furrylatula regarding its overall reception. They claimed that pretty much everywhere besides the Homestuck Discord, reception to it has been really positive; within the server, the reception seems to have been mixed bordering on poor. This observation is fine and I’m sure it’s mostly correct, but then they used it to say that the HSD is an echo chamber of negative opinions. I took umbrage to this specifically, because by their own word this place wouldn’t fit the description of an echo chamber since there are a lot of conflicting opinions about the piece of media in question.

This is one of the more consistently frustrating accusations against us that I’ve seen throughout the last three years, precisely because we as mods take steps to make sure we don’t amplify one message over another. To be sure, we don’t always succeed at that goal for various reasons, not least of which is because we hold our own personal opinions regardless of our policies. The suggestion that we’re an echo chamber because people here openly express different opinions from the suggested norm is both ironic and mildly offensive. If I’m allowed to use a hamfisted metaphor, I think it’s important to note an island of varied opinions--not even pure, unguided criticism--floating in an ocean of praise. To be fair I don’t actually believe that the reception is universally good as was suggested, but that could spur a very long debate and here I want to keep the topic as just an aside, really.

For mspa-lit in particular, after many months of talking about it, Makin finally got people to organize and we’re watching LOST from beginning to end. We watch three or four episodes every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and at this point we’re about a week or two away from completing it. I’m reminded heavily of the group stream I had with Tera, Putnam, Andrew, and others where we watched literally all of King of the Hill over the course of several weeks. I’ve been missing an environment like this, and I can see us wanting or needing to do it more often as we go into the future. It’s just too fun and nice being part of a group of people who consistently watches things together. We haven’t been discussing LOST very much outside of when we watch it, but that’s probably to be expected--there’s a lot of moving elements in it and it’s difficult to really tell where we’ll be in coming episodes, so there’s not a lot of discussion to be had out of vague theorizing. It might have been different if we had been watching it together as it came out, instead of as basically an archival experience. Regardless, it’s been massively enjoyable for the last couple of months.

On a general basis, the server has shown a sharp uptick in the number of people we’re gaining and the number of messages sent per day. We surmise that it’s due to the coronavirus pandemic²¹⁶--before things started to shut down in earnest and people were getting quarantined, we were seeing an average of 15,000 to 17,000 messages a day. After things started kicking off, it’s been closer to 23,000 to 25,000 per day, with some days spiking up over 30,000 for no real reason at all. It’s been kind of astonishing to witness, although I’m sure the addition of new janitors has helped at least a bit.

Some of that activity has of course touched on the stir craziness a few people have been feeling after being told to stay at home. For some reason, a particular discussion that sticks out in my mind was Yark describing the experience lockdown in their own country. They hail from South Africa, and they mentioned that the last time anything remotely like this happened, it was because of apartheid. I’m not especially sure why, but something about this kind of contextualized how unusual it must be for everyone around the world undergoing the same thing.

I hope that everyone in the server is managing to stay safe and healthy, although it’s chilling to think that statistically speaking at least a few people who are members of this server won’t survive this pandemic. For the most part though, I’m glad for the idea that a lot of the people here are using it as a way to keep in contact with others and talk during the shut-in. Perhaps people took it for granted mostly, but the internet has really changed how things work. Communities like this are really special, and I’m happy we’ve been able to keep it going despite everything²¹⁷.

Nothing more for today.

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13^th of April 2020 - 11^th Anniversary of Homestuck

I should describe the less pleasant things first and get them out of the way: Jman decided to take a break from the server for a few months, which he had already informed us about and stepped down from the mod team for. Skyplayer similarly left, due to feeling like there was an increasing gulf between her interests and beliefs and the rest of the chat. Jman is coming back eventually, so his departure is fine, but Skyplayer leaving stings a bit. Still, there had been more incidents where we had to tell her off for things that should have been common sense. I hope that whatever she does, she’s able to stay safe and be happy.

These things aside, this year was the first time I’ve handled the community stream all by myself, and if I’m allowed to say so, I believe I did a pretty good job. We streamed The NeverEnding Story and the special edition of Con Air, the latter of which is of course mandatory for the April 13th streams. I believe we’ve done The NeverEnding Story in a previous community stream, but long ago enough that I either wasn’t around for it or don’t remember. Either way, they were both a resounding success with over a hundred people viewing.

We had a major surprise for the day, with the release of a new official album. “Beyond Canon” is the first Homestuck 2 album, and it was honestly extremely exciting. When new albums come out, official or major fan releases, we also stream those using Twitch. I had never done this before, but Makin walked me through it a bit and I was able to get it set up before we had finished Con Air. Reception to the new album was overwhelmingly positive, as it had a lot of good themed music and a wide variety of genres, and it had an extensive array of composers from Homestuck’s history involved.

As is tradition we closed out with the Monifate Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff Moive. I’ve described this extensively in a previous entry, specifically the entry for the 13th of April last year. We had a surprising amount of people make it to the end of that, and I think I’ve made it a tradition to stream LuminantAegis’s 24 hour Homestuck music stream on Youtube to gently close out the night after that. At midnight I officially closed it by putting on Bowman’s Credit Score video on repeat until the next community stream.

As I said, overall today was a great success. It wasn’t anywhere near the scale of last year, which was the 10th anniversary, but considering we’ve been here for literally over a decade, I think this went very well. Hard to believe it’s already been a year since the Epilogues were first revealed to us; it was an incredibly turbulent time. Though official content is certainly not as interesting now as it was this time last year, here’s to hoping that this community continues to endure as time goes on.

Nothing more for today.

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24^th of April 2020

We finished watching through LOST last week. Although the end had a kind of mixed reception, I felt that same sense that I get at the end of any solid community stream, starting with the great King of the Hill stream I had a couple years ago with Tera, Putnam, Andrew, and a couple others. I’m really, earnestly going to miss the LOST streams. Each one we complete is one more show that’s cast into the communal fire, fuel to keep conversation going.

Makin is going to try and use this weekend to help us find out the next big stream show, though he’s been doing Community as a pre-stream everytime we did LOST. I don’t give a single solitary fuck about that show, except for Chevy Chase’s wonderful performance as a scumbag, but when they finish that I think he’s going to start pre-streaming with Avatar: the Last Airbender instead. I look forward to that greatly.

Less pleasantly, Moonjail’s first couple of weeks as a pseudo-mod here have been kind of turbulent, I’m afraid to say. A couple days ago there was an argument with Tensei about the coronavirus pandemic, specifically with regard to missteps in arguments where Moonjail’s position was misrepresented, and then I got upset and said that everyone present needed some scientific education because of people misinterpreting graphs. Moonjail appropriately took umbrage to this because of their extensive background in science, although to keep things short, I believe we all managed to come to an understanding with each other by the end of the night. Apologies were exchanged, people hugged and cried, et cetera.

Unfortunately, it happened again today in an official capacity: Moonjail was trying to mod their channel and wanted to tell people not to say the word “retard” in it, but then the user that was told off for it complained to WoC. WoC bitched at Moonjail which caused hard feelings to churn, and I had to step in to try and calm things down in the janitor chat. Understanding was reached shortly enough, but Moonjail said that this miscommunication and subsequent bitterness was strike two of three for them (the first strike was not the argument with Tensei, but rather Valkyrie getting upset over something in altgen concerning a shitty user who I personally told Moonjail to ban).

Although I think threatening to resign is a bit drastic of a response personally, on another level I can totally sympathize with that. We can’t run a perfectly tight ship, but we also should be better at preventing these kinds of internal conflicts. To that end, I hope we manage to avoid anything else like this, at least for a while. It’s been good having Moonjail on the team and I would hate to lose them.

In the grand scheme this is all kind of a petty altercation, and so I want to say that the only reason I bothered to include these details in this journal is so I could include this mock summarization that Tera wrote up in the janitor chat:

You’re all welcome.

I want to briefly describe a couple of users who have been hanging around in mspa-lit for a while now too. Barkley and Husky have both been active for some months now, and they’ve both been very good at fitting in since they first joined. Husky is less active than Barkley, but they both seem to already be fairly knowledgeable in the sorts of things we discuss, and share a good mix of calmness mixed with humor where it’s appropriate. I’ve noticed Barkley in particular providing a large number of quality additions to conversations; as it is, I’m sincerely glad that both of them are here and participating.

Relatedly, other people like Velikiy and Yark, from altgen and gen respectively, have been increasingly talking in here over a period of several months. I’m not sure how to estimate the size of our little group by now, but it’s a wonderfully diverse bunch of opinions and viewpoints here. Despite Tera’s joke summary up there, it does stand: I’ve reflected on the nature of humanity and the impermanence in our server and community, and all I can say is that it’s good.

Nothing more for today.

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29^th of April 2020

There’s been a substantial increase in activity this month. Some of that is expected--April Fool’s Day and especially the 13th, of course, are both associated with huge spikes in activity. This year has been different from the last two though, in that the rest of the month in general has also seen a greatly increased amount of activity. I’m sure this is due to a combination of factors, but the ones that come to mind most readily are a steady rise in the momentum of update culture²¹⁸, as well as some relaxed standards since I’ve been put in charge.

That latter point isn’t really a positive one, I really need to start hammering down on some of the less savory activity that’s been developing here. For all of the concern that people outside of our server had with Makin, he ran a very tight ship. It’s going to take a long time before I get to that level, if ever, where I’m totally fine with casually ridding this place of malfeasants. I doubt I’ll ever be as wacky zany about stuff either, but I think that part is fine; it’s a great personality trait for creating excitement or entertainment, but I’ve never felt it was the best way to run a community. Time will tell, I suppose.

Today and yesterday in particular were fairly active due to a Homestuck 2 update that proved to be extremely contentious, both within our community and in the fandom at large. I’ll briefly cover the details later, but as an overview there were at least two or three things in it that managed to variously offend people. Some people simply said, “it made me feel bad,” which was a common enough refrain when the Epilogues were released this time last year. This isn’t something that can be discussed to any real degree, so I usually skip over such complaints.

In contrast, there were a lot of comments pointing out specific things that they deemed bad, which was far better. I added my own opinion to these conversations and went on my merry way. When I checked back later though, I saw an increasing number of comments from people who did like the update, and subsequently were accusing everyone who didn’t like it of being whiny children, stuff like that.

In defense of these people, I also saw some comments going in the reverse direction, saying that anyone who liked the update was a fool. Obviously both of these sentiments are wrong, in a way that’s paradoxically inflammatory and boring. There are some subtleties to this that I wanted to point out, but I think I’ll avoid over-explaining this time. The greater point is that there was a lot of mudslinging back and forth over this update. This isn’t outside the norm for all Homestuck 2 updates, really, but it got into some particularly nasty territory this time.

Before I mentioned that I would briefly cover some details about the nature of the discourse, but the more I think about it the more I want to explain fully²¹⁹. This will undoubtedly be murky to people who aren’t familiar with Homestuck or even these events in particular, but hopefully it should shed some light on the issue regardless.

Some of the conflict over this update manifested in the form of comments made on Twitter by one of the official team members for Homestuck 2, who focused on a really specific complaint that isn’t too complicated to get into: namely, the question of whether or not flashes should be included in Homestuck 2. Their assertion was that creating flashes for Homestuck 2 isn’t viable because it would take too long, which would subsequently cause there to be a halt in the story while they made it. They also mentioned that Adobe Flash Player will no longer be supported after this year.

These things seem reasonable on the surface, but there’s a few reasons that it doesn’t really hold up. The most obvious one is that “flash” doesn’t really refer to the actual software that Hussie used to make animations; over time it’s become a colloquialism for any piece of animation, or even more loosely as any other pieces of media that aren’t just pictures and text. Realistically the team could use any software to make animations if they chose, it wouldn’t really matter.

Second is that flashes aren’t just flavor sprinkled in here and there to add stuff to the comic, although that was true plenty of times. Flashes were often used to bookend entire sections of the story, and to display major events of narrative progression. It would certainly take more time to create a flash than to simply draw panels and write text, but those sorts of delays are things that ardent fans of Homestuck have been used to for years. Further, the delay would be offset by a product that--if done right--would be far more appealing, engaging, and create more artistic diversity than just regular pictures and/or text²²⁰.

The particular thing that spurred this discourse was the first instance of any kind of real combat in Homestuck 2, which often enough was depicted with a flash animation in the original comic. This time, however, they didn’t have any visual depictions of this at all, animated or otherwise; it was solely text, which just smacks of laziness at this point. It came across to many of us as a way to weasel out of the hard part of making this webcomic. Indeed, at some point in the past, Hussie specifically mentioned that art is far harder to do than writing, and I’m sure creating visualizations of this battle would have constituted a large amount of work.

That having been said, I’m not sure why there are six writers attached to this project when one or two would probably get the job done just fine. I would go so far as to say that having so many writers is actively a detriment, because it leads to a larger variety of tones and styles that can conflict with each other, creating a work that’s more confusing for it. Since art seems to be the limiting factor in creating this comic, it makes way more sense to try and get as many artists involved as possible; contrasting art is far less of a problem than contrasting writing, and would actually be in line with the variable art styles found in the original comic.

Returning to the matter of complaints from an official team member, the overall point of my explanations is that deliberately choosing not to have any animations or anything else like that is kind of antithetical to Homestuck. A potential explanation for their decision that I saw someone describe on the subreddit is that the official team either doesn’t care enough to put in the effort or just doesn’t have the skill to make these things.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the case, because the reasons provided originally were nonsensical or irrelevant. As it is, the tweets were deleted (part of the reason I’m specifically omitting the name of the person who made them), which indicates to me that the official team isn’t even interested in discussing the possibility. This is sorely disappointing, but to be honest the question of flashes is arguably the least important thing that people were complaining about with regard to this latest update, it was probably just the most straightforward to try and respond to.

Instead, the very end of the update had a development which was so out of character for three key figures in the comic that it can only be described as ludicrous. I’m earnestly struggling to think of how much detail I should go into with this because it’s honestly mind boggling in its absurdity; I can’t be too sparing because then the depth of the issue will be lost, but if I use too much it’s going to appear completely insane to anyone who isn’t already intimately aware of these things.

I guess it can be condensed down into two things: the first and arguably less contentious one is that two of the characters had a secret child that they named “Yiffany,” a direct reference to “yiffing,” which is a term that refers to furries having sex. People less familiar with Homestuck will have to take me at my word that this sort of thing is so outside the realm of reasonability for these characters that it can only be described as ridiculous. A vast majority of the complaints on the subreddit and Discord server centered around this particular thing because of just how drastically it deviated from the expected behavior of the characters involved.

This is something that specifically matters to people who care about Homestuck as a story, and about the things within that story. Outside the importance of fictional consistency, people were also angry about this because of the implication that one of the characters canonically had their genitalia changed to a dog penis (do you see what I mean about not being sure how much detail I need to get into?).

This is important because the writers, I believe, were using it as a piece of trans representation, but there were some points of opposition to this idea: one that was more gentle was that it was too convoluted a thing if it was a 100% real development; it would make more sense for it to be an excuse for the character having been trans all along. More serious detractors suggest that the implication is by nature offensive to trans people. I don’t really understand the particulars of any of these stances, it’s merely what I’ve seen over the last two days²²¹.

As it is, I think this reveals something important about the nature of storytelling, or specifically a problem with what I see the creators are trying to do. Making a story that treats ideas of identity politics, diegetically or not, is going to attract controversy. If that’s the sole point of the work, that’s probably a completely expected result and as such it’s fine. Where this becomes a problem is when a story that didn’t originally focus on such issues makes it seep into how the fandom discusses the work. Something that I’ve seen proven true many, many times over the years is that conflicting ideologies in identity politics will invariably cause people to eat each other alive over precisely which idea or method of representation is the most correct one. That conversation is fine even if I want no part in it, but there’s a lot of back and forth between the creators of the comic and fans who aren’t pleased with the way this was all done²²².

This is pretty bothersome stuff. With other media that I’ve seen interactions between fans and the creators, the people making the work typically ignore stupid or inflammatory comments and then engage positively with others. If a lot of fans are unified in bringing up issues they see with the work, good content creators will at least respond to those people in earnest, and the best content creators actually take those complaints into consideration and try to fix it in the next installment of whatever they’re working on.

That’s not happening in this case. Instead, as with the laborious explanation above concerning flashes, the official team members are simply digging in their heels. Like I said, that’s fine to do if you’re just ignoring comments that are stupid or inflammatory. However, members for the official team tend to lash out at people instead of merely ignoring them. This makes them seem cruel and petty, and I’ve seen an increasing number of people who actively hate their work because of that kind of behavior. I don’t know what kind of measure they’re using to deem their work a success, but from every metric I can see it doesn’t go well when they do shit like this²²³.

It brings up a lot of questions about what exactly their intentions are with this story, such as what exactly they care about and how much they care. I’ll touch on this idea again later, but what exactly is their measure for success? It’s really puzzling: if they’re going for critical success they’re failing spectacularly, especially when they deliberately ignore the kinds of conventions that made Homestuck proper as successful as it was. If they’re going for commercial success then that’s pretty much a failure too, with Patreon subscriptions remaining pretty much around 2,100 people since they started six months ago.

The more they engage in petty squabbles with fandom members or insult their suggestions, the more people will be turned off from their work, and the worse it’ll do. At some point they’re going to have to face the reality that they can’t have their cake and eat it too; they can do what they want, but they won’t be able to escape criticism when they do certain things. Sometimes I worry that they’ll never approach a point where they start to acknowledge their own shortcomings or the critiques and suggestions of the fandom. If that’s the case, then Homestuck 2 is doomed to failure. I really hope that they can avoid this, but given what I’ve seen so far I’m not very optimistic.

I’ve spent way too much talking about this, and I want to return to something positive before moving onto the next couple of things I wanted to write about. I mentioned that a majority of the interactions between people who did or did not like this update were negative almost to the point of hostility. However, I personally had a nice interaction on the subreddit with our music-turned-Homestuck pseudo-mod Cyrene. She enjoyed the update and I did not, but instead of ripping into each other about it, we had a pretty lengthy discussion about the nature of art and how people respond to it.

That former idea I’ll describe a bit later, but with the latter she effectively framed things in terms of “absolute versus relative criticism.” In short, the idea is that criticism can be presented harshly and as an objective thing (absolute) or it can be presented as an opinion (relative). For the purposes of getting through to the person you’re criticizing, relative criticism is more effective because it’s less confrontational and brash. This makes sense, and often enough I think that’s a nicer way of dispensing suggestions about a given work²²⁴.

On the other hand, I described that absolute criticism is often just a shorthand for what would otherwise be offered in a relative way; phrasing criticism in a relative way requires exponentially more energy and patience as you expose yourself to more content and become more confident in your power of analysis. Absolute criticism that doesn’t actually deliver anything useful is twice as frustrating as relative criticism that is similarly useless. However, if the suggestion therein is genuine and useful, then it shouldn’t matter how it’s phrased. If the worst thing you can say about criticism is that it’s phrased rudely, then it’s still worth listening to.

Based on this, I disagreed with Cyrene on the premise of their argument. As I’ve come to trust her to do, she took this in good faith and we both brought the conversation to an end amicably. We got a decent look at each other’s mindsets about why we did or did not like the update, and were able to explain ourselves as fully as possible. I’m not particularly surprised given who I was speaking to, but it was pleasant nonetheless.

I’ve mentioned the former idea--the nature of art--a couple of times in this entry and promised an explanation. To that end, we discussed it extensively in the Discord server today. Very often in the past we’ve had arguments about whether or not art can be appraised objectively, which is an absolutely monstrous topic whenever it pops up. Today was probably the first time where I felt we came to some kind of consensus about that particular idea.

Misha has probably been one of the most firm proponents that art can be judged objectively, but former explanations of why have been kind of wanting. He expounded on it more fully today, suggesting that art as an innate expression of creativity is itself subjective. However, he also posited that art can and should be delineated through strict, assumed axioms of quality. These axioms will necessarily differ based on what exactly is being discussed and by who, but his insistence is that whatever definitions are in place provide a fundamental basis for discussing art with other people, or enables one to talk about art with a specific goal in mind (he claimed, too, that this thorough explanation has always been what he meant, but I certainly never got this specific meaning out of his previous arguments).

Magistrate, Mines, and a couple others all pointed out that an assumed axiom is necessarily arbitrary, and as such is only a “subjectively objective” standard. Misha and I have seen that rebuttal pushed before, but it rankles with us a lot: qualifying everything as “subjective” might be true to a certain extent, but that word tends to be thrown out too often in these kinds of conversations.

To explain this a little more, describing opinions as subjective is often a quick and cheap way for some people to try and equalize all opinions with each other, which is horrible for a couple of reasons. It muddies the waters significantly, which robs conversations of a lot of their constructive quality and makes them less worth having. It’s not a problem to say that art is subjective, but it’s a problem to say that all art is equally valid²²⁵ or good, and I feel that distinction is often lost or outright ignored.

As it is, this conversation did not end like others before it: we were able to reach something of a consensus in this way, which of course was really pleasant. Really, in keeping with what I said at the beginning of this entry, the channel was active to a superlative degree for the entire day. All of it reminded me of a couple years ago, when we used to have discussions like this on a nigh daily basis. I hate to turn into the stereotypical old fogie, but it was exciting and made me nostalgic for the past.

To end on a more unique note, I haven’t yet described something fun that WoC and Nat have done with Arquiusbot. Since I took the reins of the server, they created the command “D→ linky,” which takes a random message from my posting history up to the last time the bot was restarted and spits it out. The idea is very silly, but it’s easily one of the most popular functions the bot has now²²⁶.

Almost every day there’s been a little time where there’s a glut of people using the command for fun as a magic 8ball by asking it specific questions, or simply seeing what it'll spit out. MrNostalgic and others have pointed out multiple instances where the result of the command was eerily appropriate and thus funny. Case in point:

This is probably among the best so far, and as the bot gets more samples to work with I’m sure even better examples will pop up eventually. Obviously it’s random chance for a given message to pop out, but there’s already some jokes that the bot is secretly sentient because of all this. WoC and Nat have done an excellent job with maintaining this bot, and I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say I’m looking forward to seeing what else they do with it.

Nothing more for today.

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12^th of May 2020

There were some really specifically interesting interactions today in mspa-lit, although when I think about it, I’m not sure they were anything out of the ordinary. It’s worth noting that yesterday I finally finished a real life obligation that was extremely pressing and taking up a lot of my focus; it may be I’ve finally freed up enough attention that I can see what’s happening in the chat more clearly again. Regardless, I actually felt like writing my thoughts on it down instead of letting it go.

Andrew and Tensei occupy opposite ends of the conversational spectrum. Andrew is perpetually awkward, and his contributions to a given discussion are usually clumsy beyond reason. Tensei on the other hand always manages to contribute stuff that’s smooth, so to speak; he jokes and speaks casually of course, but when he submits anything substantial it’s almost always constructive, funny, or both²²⁷. He’s a savvy conversationalist and I’d go so far as to say that he runs circles around most other people in the chat, either through general experience or cleverness.

I feel like both of those chat personalities are important in maintaining a more interesting place to speak in. I guess the simplest explanation for it is that it’s the principle of juxtaposition; contrast between two dissimilar things makes both of them more enjoyable. At any given time I would be more than happy to speak with Tensei or Andrew, but having them both in the same discussion together somehow elevates whatever we’re talking about.

Perhaps some context would help add texture to what I’m trying to say. At some point Tensei brought up Dark Souls III and described it as “soulless.” Andrew agreed with him, remarking that it looks desaturated and reuses assets from a different game, or something to that effect. Tensei responded by saying “stop agreeing with me for the wrong reasons / it makes me look like an idiot by association / god you are the worst.”

I’m not sure why this stuck out to me as much as it did, but I think what cemented my observation was WoC chiming in: “i hate it when andrew agrees with me for this exact reason / its always the worst possible reason to agree.” To an outside observer I’m sure this appears excessively mean, but it’s actually well within the typical sort of banter of our group, especially when it comes to Andrew. I think I would be less okay with it except for the fact that Andrew himself recognizes this aspect of himself, and arguably indulges in it a bit: “I mean yeah I'm aware of it, all my most passionate opinions on things are on the things everyone else regard as arbitrary.”

Something about this interaction stuck itself into my mind and I couldn’t stop thinking about it for almost half an hour. I think it called to mind a conversation I had once back in the Sydlexia IRC channel, probably in 2012 or 2013. In that conversation I think I employed an obtuse metaphor where I compared personalities to spices or ingredients: people may enjoy a particular kind of flavor over others, but a blend of flavors leads to a more well-rounded dish and makes food more interesting²²⁸.

Individual people hold an array of personalities and viewpoints, and the right balance is needed in order for a group to become greater than the sum of its parts. If everyone involved in a chatroom naturally agreed on everything and believed in all the same things, it might feel validating at first but would grow boring and ultimately be unfulfilling. If no one agrees on anything, then there would be no reason for anyone to stick around.

Obviously, those are the two extremes in what’s usually a far more complex, multilayered arrangement. I variously agree and disagree on things with just about everyone in mspa-lit; Andrew and I share certain ideas, but as with Tensei and WoC tonight, often enough his reasoning makes no sense to me. Conversely, I genuinely appreciate Tensei’s contributions to the chat because he’s typically pretty insightful and inspires thought in people, although sometimes I disagree with what he has to say, or find it frustrating because I’m unsure how serious he’s being.

My overall point is that having a mix of these attributes contributes to the overall enjoyment of talking in places like mspa-lit. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it’s a critical ingredient of any chatroom that persists for any meaningful amount of time. If you don’t have the right combination of people/personality types, it’s almost certain that a given group will disintegrate in short order; this is why homogenous groups of kindred spirits (for example, SmolMuffin’s altgen exodus a couple years ago) never last long.

Mspa-lit and other places on the Homestuck Discord Server are extremely lucky in the sense that new people tend to find their way in and keep things fresh for everyone involved. Over time, that mutual enjoyment turns into genuine appreciation for each other, and leads to the establishment of the casual friendships that the server has seen so much of over the last four years. It’s nice to be reminded sometimes of the various reasons that can happen.

This doesn’t really have anything to do with tonight specifically, but I guess I should take this opportunity to mention that Gnawms ended his self-imposed exile. Actually, he may have thought he was actually banned, or he may have just thought he was unwelcome, I’m not particular sure which. Either way, it’s been a very interesting experience having him back in our fold, and one that I would say is extremely welcome.

Gnawms still has the same sense of humor from back when he and Tensei had the altercation that originally led to his departure, but it’s somewhat toned down. At the very least, there have been no complications when they talk at the same time from what I can see. Gnawms has this peculiar, ineffable quality in the way he speaks that makes me laugh incredibly hard when it catches me off guard. I’m not sure what other people think of his presence precisely, but I’m pretty glad that he’s returned.

Nothing more for today.

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13^th of May 2020

Sometimes I find myself wondering how many different kinds of people there are who talk online. I’ve already talked quite a bit about lurkers, for instance, who join but say nothing and simply watch the chat indefinitely. There are people who hop right into conversation without much of an issue. Others take a bit longer to get used to it, but warm up well enough when they spend some time trying to participate. I’m sure there are many other “types” of conversationalists for online discussions.

I encountered a type today that’s more rare, but is wholly unpleasant. I wouldn’t go so far as to call them attention hogs, but “bratty child” is certainly a descriptor that comes to mind. After a rousing sacrifice in altgen (two of them in a row, in fact) I decided to drop into #general to chat with people and see what was going on, as I tend not to do that enough. Immediately I noticed a fellow named Alix who was trying to elicit attention from people, and failing to do so in a subtle manner.

Normally this is the result of someone who has poor social skills, which is more than excusable. When I was younger and not really used to talking to other people, I made plenty of blunders and didn’t really know how to behave competently²²⁹. This is a problem everyone faces at one time or another, and more often than not it’s worth trying to teach them how to be better. Alix did not fit into this category, whining immediately when people stopped explicitly trying to include them in the conversation.

At first I asked what was going on and if there was anything I could do to help, and Alix said no. They tried to bring up a topic, but naturally conversation gravitated towards something else because the whims of the chat are largely unpredictable and uncontrollable. Alix took this as a personal insult and told everyone to fuck off, and claimed they were going to leave the server.

I feel like on any other day I would tolerate this and tell them to tone it down, but something about the sheer indignance with which Alix was saying this nonsense immediately ticked me off. I think it was the fact that they transparently felt entitled to special attention, I can’t handle that sort of thing. I immediately banned them, and normally I would have felt at least a mild pang of regret but in this instance there is no such reticence.

It’s good, even prudent, to try and take time to educate people who simply don’t know any better. People who act with clear malice or uncaring selfishness are much more difficult to handle, and I don’t think the responsibility necessarily falls on anyone to tolerate that sort of thing. I am grateful beyond words that the vast majority of people participating on this server are at least semi-reasonable. I wish that my takeaway from today was more positive, because aside from this one awful person, everything was great. I guess that speaks to the power of perception that one bad thing can stick out in my mind against all of the good.

But upon further thought, I really don’t want this to be the last thing I think of for today. I’ve been promising myself that I would get back to writing descriptions--even if brief--of newer faces that have left an impression on me. I’ve thought of a couple of people who deserve some mention, maybe more if I have the energy for it.

I mentioned Magistrate in a recent entry, although glancing back at my writing, I realize I’ve never explained who he is. Magistrate wrote one of the stories in Makin’s list of shills, specifically Modern Cannibals. He joined some time ago, I believe when he learned that his story was being discussed in mspa-lit, but he spoke very rarely. Recently he began participating far more often, and I’m not particularly sure why.

Magistrate is basically the only person in the chat that most of us would consider an “actual author,” by whatever arbitrary standard we may use to make that assessment. There are of course other people in the channel who write their own material, such as Cyrene with her Tales of Excitement! (itself worthy of brief description, as an aside: emulating the tone of serial films, the version I linked is actually a cleaner rewrite of what was originally an absurdly NSFW story that Cy shared sometime last year, or even before. She’s taken to shilling this late at night and has been somewhat dispirited at the lack of response to it, I’ve advised that she bring it up less often and at a different time of day to try and have more success²³⁰).

I’m not exactly sure why, but I feel as if Modern Cannibals sets Magistrate apart; I believe we all consider it a consummate work, where perhaps the rest of us are just getting a feeling for the practice. He seems to be rather unflappable, not participating during frenzies or otherwise spirited conversations, unless they happen to involve literature. Perhaps that’s why I place him above the rest of us in terms of writing; he seems to be genuinely knowledgeable about the process of writing and shares critique or thoughts on the topic that’s more adroit than what the rest of us typically have to offer.

Magistrate is currently reading through Worth the Candle, albeit extremely slowly: they began about a week or two ago and are only six chapters in, where the work itself is over 200 chapters long now. The beginning of the story is rough to the point that we typically end up frontloading newcomers with that information so they’re more likely to get through it to the better parts. Magistrate has been pretty fair in describing the shortcomings of the parts he’s read so far, while also giving it a fair shake. We’re all openly hoping that he comes to enjoy it and continues reading of his own volition, rather than to just satisfy us. Overall, his presence here has been rather interesting to see develop over the last month or so, and I’m curious to see how his participation changes or takes shape over time.

Misha has a friend named Mint, whom I met when we tried to establish a Warhammer Fantasy tabletop game some months ago. Unbeknownst to me, Mint actually joined the HSD sometime last year and had been participating infrequently since. In recent weeks though, she emerged from the woodwork and has been speaking quite often. Mint and Misha share some sensibilities and humor, although the former tends to be more measured when she offers her opinions or thoughts on a given topic.

I’ve also seen Mint cavorting around in #general more than Misha ever does, so I assume she does a better job socializing with strangers than we typically do. As it is, she’s also joined us for group streams, actively participating in watching Fringe (our chosen replacement for LOST, now that it’s over with) and possibly Community, though I’m not certain of the latter. Given her friendship with Misha it’s not exactly a surprise that she’s managed to fit into the place as well as she has, but it’s a nice development nonetheless.

As far as newer participants are concerned, Magistrate and Mint come to mind most readily, although I’ve mentioned two others recently (Husky and Barkley) and there are a bevy of others who pop in from time to time. There are some names that I explicitly recognize at this point (Bones, vR, Swish, Null, among others) but don’t yet have a solid grasp of who they are or what they’re like.

My mind has been skating over these details for the last several months, but tonight there’s something different; I feel like some of my old energy has returned, that which I used to have for interacting with people and becoming familiar with them. I hope I can keep that up, though it depends on the coming months and what happens in them, both personally and with respect to the HSD. I haven’t felt this engaged in a while, but I’m excited for the possibility that it’ll improve with time.

Nothing more for today.

---

25^th of May 2020

We beat Terraria together today. Misha and others were getting quite annoyed with us for spending so much time on it, but it was absolutely worthwhile. A solid week and then some of getting online and trying our best to make progress together brought back some of the feeling of playing with friends from older communities, ages ago. I’ve stopped doubting that the magic exists, but it’s always good to feel it again.

To celebrate the end of it, we also decided to have one last romp by going through the entire game on an easier difficulty with our top-level gear. It was about an hour or two of unmitigated fun, with us doing nonsensical bullshit the entire time. It was a victory lap, essentially; between that and playing the game through in the first place, I haven’t had quite so much fun in a while. It goes without saying, but I look forward to the next time we find something to play together.

Less pleasantly, today we discovered that MSPA is experiencing significant problems, in the form of assets breaking or being removed. The main URL still redirects to homestuck.com, but the new website has been utilizing a ton of assets that were in fact linked directly from the original website. Those assets are thus broken on both MSPA and homestuck.com now, which means that much of the comic has been rendered literally unreadable.

It was already a problem when some of the flash files weren’t functioning properly, being turned into subpar Youtube videos. Some of those flashes are games, and the videos that have been linked as “official mirrors” for those games are borderline offensive in how lazy and unthorough they are. Much of the comic is like this now, really, in the sense that a lack of care or organization has gradually broken it in worse and worse ways over time.

To be honest, the entire property seems to have fallen into an acute state of dysfunction. We’ve been due to receive news about Hiveswap: Act 2 for ages now but have gotten basically nothing besides whatever scrap we got over a year ago now (or was it two? I can’t even remember²³¹). The first act came out four years after the Kickstarter for Hiveswap ended, and we joked about it taking another four years to get the second. At this rate, it seems like it will actually be four years between the first and second acts, and I’m honestly afraid it’ll be even longer.

We got an official statement saying that Homestuck 2 will not receive any updates for June to “give the team a break,” if I’m not mistaken. I’ll immediately recognize that the team said the Patreon backers will not be charged for the month of June, which eliminates most of the criticism I would have had about this news. A different thing to look at though, is the implication that the team needs a break from producing Homestuck 2. Far be it from me to ignore that the world at large is experiencing a significant amount of turmoil right now, and I’m sure that the team could use some more time to themselves. On the other hand, it’s not like Homestuck 2 was experiencing very rapid or intense development in the first place.

When I say that the property is dysfunctional, I mean that the people in charge of it are exhibiting an extreme level of disorganization and don’t actually seem to care that much about making it good or successful. Most if not all of the official team have moved from Twitter to Mastodon, which is a sort of open-source version of Twitter. From what I can tell, it operates much in the same way that Twitter does, but it can be modified sort of in the way a Tumblr blog can, with CSS adjustments and even some functionality changes.

I think the casual explanation the team has offered for this switch is that Twitter as a platform is unethical (supports Naziism, I think someone said?), which generally speaking is a stance that I sympathize with greatly. However, the more cynical among us--myself included at this point--believe that they made the switch for more personally motivated reasons. Specifically, Twitter doesn’t allow users full control over who can see their content or who they can interact with, where Mastodon gives them the tools or ability to develop those restrictions. In short, we think that they’ve moved to Mastodon so they can avoid seeing people who criticise them or their work. Again, this is by far the more cynical interpretation of what’s going on, but given everything that’s already happened I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility. The fact that it’s possible to consider this at all in the context of content creators associating with their fans is outright depressing. For now, there’s not much more to be said about it besides that.

To speak of things more directly related to the server, we’ve encountered some pieces of culture in altgen recently that have really, really disturbed us. One of the mods--Moonjail or an altgen pseudo, I think--noticed a really rancid meme about grooming children or being a pedophile, and then after some investigation we found a few more of these from the past few days alone. Once the issue was brought to the rest of the team’s attention, we immediately banned the people who posted the content in question, and then set to task finding a way to get rid of this kind of thing for good.

To be honest, we had been encountering problems like this one so frequently with altgen lately that I opted for the more extreme option. Sometimes, altgen culture rots and it needs to be removed (manifesting as a couple of Altgen Exoduses across previous years). In the past we²³²’ve “destroyed” altgen for a period of a few minutes to as long as an hour a few times, but today we decided to remove it for a far longer, unspecified amount of time.

We framed this as a test, where altgenners would be forced to disperse into the rest of the server and thus “reset” altgen’s culture. This was met with a lot of dismay, including some heavy discontent from a few members of the mod team, but we mitigated malcontents by saying that altgen would definitely be brought back if they behaved appropriately while mingling with the rest of the server. We never intended to fully delete the channel anyway, but so far this appears to be working out. I’m hopeful that it’ll end well and we’ll be able to nip any further ill behavior in the bud.

Nothing more for today.

---

28^th of May 2020

The closure has gone better than I expected. To be sure, it is not perfect: the close has led to the slight dispersal of altgenners throughout the server, leading to some chafing where people want to shitpost during larger conversations. Those people have gotten shut down though, which is kind of the result I wanted. In the general channel though, it’s led to a much better mix of culture than I initially expected.

The interaction of people who weren’t used to dealing with each other led to an explosion of activity on the first day, but it’s gradually wearing off. That being said, altgenners have definitely been behaving really well, so I think we’ll bring the channel back on Friday, or perhaps after the weekend. WoC and Misha are both against the idea of reopening at all, saying that the eradication of altgen culture should be made complete and noting the emergent culture we’re seeing as a good thing. Spiral and Makin, on the other hand, are dead set against leaving it closed. Their opinions are basically inconsequential at this point though; reopening the channel is a foregone conclusion at this point.

This being put aside, I’d like to point out something about Arquiusbot. The linkybot command has become the subject of significant overuse in mspa-lit. I and many other members of the channel have grown kind of annoyed with how often people will spam it in off hours or even when there’s already a conversation going. As a result, I’ve started liberally shutting it off whenever it gets too spammy. This causes some grumbling, but all of us agree that it’s getting old really fast at this rate.

That having been said, its use has led to some bizarre and interesting exchanges. In only 15 minutes, a combination of appropriate and weird answers to questions posed to linkybot led to the formation of a “fungus-based religion” surrounding myself and SPAT. This was helmed primarily by Husky and Multivac, but others such as Tarty, Canis, and Barkley all participated. Special commendations are owed to Mint, who drew a sketch for the occasion.

I’ll never cease being amazed at how quickly something that’s stupid or worthless can be turned into an object of enjoyment at the hands of the people in the channel. I think it’s one of the greater strengths of internet culture in general, and to some extent especially the kind of people in mspa-lit; the ability to casually transform a mundane concept into something entertaining is invaluable, and even though the precise events taking place tonight were dumb, it’s still kind of cool to think about how effortlessly it all transpired.

Nothing more for today.

---

9^th of June 2020

Today featured an odd debacle: Sozzay, in short, attempted to cheat on her university homework by asking people to submit small pieces of writing for her to add to a portfolio. It was a creative writing project with low requirements, which led to people either not caring about her request or getting really upset with her. Misha and I were among those who didn’t care so much (before I fully understood the scope of what was being asked, I actually submitted one of my own pieces of writing for her to use). On the other hand, Tensei, Mines, WoC, and especially tipsy were extremely displeased.

The reaction from general chat members was just as spread out, but some of it was predictably super strange in nature. Multivac got dunked on super hard for offering up a piece of writing and extensively defending her request in the first place. Supporting her isn’t the weird part, to be sure, rather it was the fact that he got extremely upset when Sozzay said she would edit it slightly. Tensei summarized it as thus: “multivac gave her his scalie fanfiction / then she edited it²³³ / to be less scaly / and added some random sentences for no reason / and multivac was pissed / for destroying the artistic integrity of his creative work / in short it was fucking hilarious.” Multivac has always been viewed as an odd duck for his justifications and the way he phrases his arguments, but this instance was so out there that it can only be described as absurd.

The part that really got people was near the end of the altercation: at some point Sozzay said, “i dont need anymore [submissions] btw fmndmnf²³⁴ i gathered enough simps,” which really pissed off some people. Tensei lost no time at all in joining in, calling me a simp for contributing my writing, as well as anyone else who had. Despite whatever pushback came her way, Sozzay almost openly reveled in the ensuing chaos. It was just a strange event overall.

Somehow, though, this exact situation has never really popped up. It’s been an unspoken rule in the science-math and coding-tech channels that people shouldn’t ask to cheat on their assignments, but this event resulted in us actually codifying it to some degree. It’s still not written down anywhere, but WoC and Mines have gone so far as to say that they would purposefully mess with anyone who did so in order to get them in trouble.

Nothing more for today.

---

11^th of June 2020

There was a huge discussion today in mspa-lit about various incidents that the mod team has had to deal with. I believe this started with reference to the infamous Mike Blossom incident, a screenshot of which can be found in WoC’s entry on the user submission page. From there it blossomed (ha ha) into a larger conversation about other ridiculous interactions the mod team has had with malcontents or just users in general over the last so many years.

The actual details of older interactions are lost to time, either through choice because they were so shitty, or because no one thought to document them. It’s probably better that they’re forgotten, in the sense that it would almost certainly be viewed as parading weirdos around and mocking them openly. That’s precisely what it is, to be fair, but it’s better not to do that sort of thing (too much, at least).

Whatever the bigger picture looks like, in this discussion we shared some of the more memorable incidents from the last year or two. A few examples include one user who messaged me at random and said “hey drew linkuy / linky* / i am coming for ur kneecaps” (this happened literally six days ago), a couple of lengthy rants from people that have effectively been turned into copypastas, such as this:

Serendipitously, at the same time as this conversation, there was an ongoing altercation between Tera and a user banned just recently.

I probably shouldn’t overexplain that interaction, but the main details are as follows: the user was banned for racist memes and then made an argument to the effect that “no black people enjoy Homestuck so it’s not a problem.” This was about the point where Tera began sharing screenshots with the rest of the janitorial staff and mods, and it only got weirder from then on. Tera appropriately explained how and why the guy’s behavior and viewpoints had led to a ban, but the user refused to see any of that as a problem (“I don’t take no for an answer. I’m hard headed”).

We started sharing this conversation in chat at some point, with redactions to protect the identity of the banned user of course, and the absolute culmination of this was the banned user hitting on Tera, saying they found it attractive. At this point chat members lost their collective mind over the proceedings; we literally could not believe that this was taking place before our very eyes. In a way, this user exceeded Mike Blossom in entertainment value; where Blossom’s interaction with me was masterful in its vulgarity and conciseness, Tera’s altercation was a comedy of horror.

Stuff like this happens far more often than people give us credit for (at one point I remarked, “... you people doubt us when we say we put up with some weird shit / ... / i swear that half the stuff we have to deal with, people would be in disbelief”²³⁵). Honestly, we were able to provide so many anecdotes for the chat that I briefly toyed with the idea of creating a #tales-from-modchat channel, where the only posts would be staff publicly describing or sharing censored screenshots of fucked up encounters with users from the server.

Almost everyone thought this was a terrible idea though, reasoning that it would lead to attention-seeking behavior and be flagrant mockery of our userbase. I have to regretfully agree with both of those arguments, so it’s another idea in the bin alongside #courtroom. Occasionally sharing stories with people in chat serves the same purpose anyway, and is far less codified to boot; there’s no point in fixing what isn’t broken, as the adage goes.

Nothing more for today.

---

13^th of June 2020

There was a weirdly animated discussion in mod chat today based around a concept we had started talking about some time ago, but that I hadn’t given a concrete ruling on. Namely, it’s been taken as an undisputed law that cropped porn is forbidden ever since people in altgen started to abuse it ages ago. However, what constitutes as “cropped porn” has always been a fuzzy concept because of the fact that we kind of venerate memes like gachi and to a lesser extent Ricardo Milos.

I guess most of us don’t actually participate much in Ricardo-posting, that would mostly be WoC. As a brief aside, WoC frequently DMs me with whatever meme or gif that he finds interesting or funny at the time. For a period of some months, those memes consisted almost solely of Ricardo bait-and-switch gifs or music videos. Eventually I gave up trying to rationalize why he was sending me stuff, and at this point I think I’ve been Stockholm Syndrome’d into enjoying it. All of a sudden I wonder if WoC does this to anyone else, I should probably look into that at some point.

As it is, the conversation today focused around the use of gachi and Ricardo memes because those can variously be safe for public viewing or sexually explicit depending on how it’s framed and the context. The full body shot of Ricardo is NSFW, while just Ricardo’s face is decidedly not. By the same logic, Billy Herrington’s face by itself isn’t NSFW, but WoC’s prized “gachispank” emote, where you can literally see a naked guy slapping another guy’s ass repeatedly, is absolutely NSFW.

I thought that distinguishing between these two particular cases was a matter of common sense, but mod chat somehow proved me wrong. For almost three hours we ended up hashing out the ethics and ramifications of allowing people to post those memes and indeed cropped porn in general. I wasn’t even there for the first half of the conversation due to being busy with stuff in real life, and even so I was thoroughly exhausted by the end of it.

The conversation would have been okay, except that the same ground ended up getting retread multiple times. Misha and Tensei ended up directly debating each other and then--I think--accidentally arriving at the same position like three times. I’m actually kind of amazed at how circuitous the discussion ended up being, but by the end I was getting extremely annoyed by constant distractions and diversions or people not paying attention. Ifnar in particular tried to bring up stuff that had already been resolved (namely gachispank and the full view of Ricardo dancing) or teasing the participants of the discussion with messages that I couldn’t tell if they were sincere, devil’s advocate, or bait.

Eventually I gave up trying to take in everything, although I think most of the other mods present were ready to move on anyway. My stance boiled down to essentially “we can’t hardcode every single thing we want to turn into a rule, because if we accounted for every possible contingency or all of the minutiae of every situation, the rules list would be 100 pages long.” This is why rule 0 exists: the mods have final say and discretion about making judgments or determining exceptions to rules, based on common sense and reasoning (enter Ifnar: “‘Common sense and reasoning’ is always tainted with personal bias though.” He’s not even wrong, it’s just that it’s an intractable difficulty of trying to do our jobs and not make everyone miserable at the same time. I swear sometimes he says shit like this just to mess with me though, as evidenced by his later statement: “... bullshit minutiae are fun.”).

After the conversation was forcefully resolved, bewilderingly it turned towards a related idea known as the “cooking tiger,” a notorious furry fetish image of an anthropomorphic tiger cooking something (possibly crack) in a pot. This was brought up as an edge case where it was difficult to determine if it was banned per the wording of our rule on NSFW imagery, but I think it was clear to all of us that the intent and design of the image both constituted getting rid of it.

That by itself is not the reason I’m bothering to bring this up. Somehow, Misha and Dingus were convinced to try and selectively remove elements of the image such as the nipples or tongue to make it more SFW (I can’t believe I’m bothering to write this down. Maybe I should delete this entire entry, to be honest). I guess what I’m getting at is that the event was bizarre enough that I felt like writing it down. As it was happening, and especially now that I’m reflecting on it, it’s completely bewildering that we actually talk about things like this. It gives me this pronounced mix of vague shame and surreal amusement, but I guess that’s why most of us are here in the first place.

Speaking of vague shame and surreal amusement, later in the evening WoC (predictably it was him) brought up the hypothetical scenario of growing an entire tomato plant out of someone’s ass. Misha responded that the feces wouldn’t have enough nitrogen to sustain the plant, I explained that that’s not true (abundance isn’t the issue, it’s the form the nitrogen takes) and then the conversation blasted off from there.

Somehow we decided that the poop of a vegetarian would be more beneficial for growing plants, so we pinged Cyrene and asked for their help in setting up the experiment. Mines and Mint were both suitably horrified at the conversation taking place, but Barkley, Daniel, and Canis were all rather helpful in setting up the experimental methodology. Eventually we moved on to talking about how to economize this for space travel (WoC eventually termed the theoretical technology as a “colonocropy”), and then the final conclusion was that it would lead to sapient crops (as Misha put it, “ass cultivation leads to sentient plants / this is a mistake / what is your opinion on fruit-human relationships?”). I have no idea how we descended into madness so quickly, but this was easily the best conversation we’ve had in months.

Nothing more for today²³⁶.

---

23^rd of June 2020

This is going to be a garbage entry, because despite the fact that some unusual stuff has been happening lately, I don’t actually feel like writing about it very much. I neglected to mention that we didn’t have a stream for 6/12 this year, both because I forgot to set it up and because the world is conveniently in a state of turmoil between the COVID-19 pandemic and other things.

Kate also released a statement saying she’ll be stepping down from the Homestuck 2 team due to poor interaction with fans. I’m paraphrasing, of course; her actual wording included, “... I’m just not interested in humoring literal children’s tantrums any more.” This casual deflection of her own role in these tantrums should come as no surprise to literally anyone familiar with her behavior at this point. Regardless, we’re systematically monitoring the subreddit and Discord server for anyone who might try to blow discussions of it out of proportion. Very few if any of us were okay with Kate’s involvement but we’re still not going to tolerate threatening behavior or harassment.

I’ve got nothing else. Have a screenshot of a fun interaction I saw:

Nothing more for today.

---

27^th of June 2020

Some time ago, I was talking with Misha about a dumb idea I had some years back where I wanted to write a fanfic continuation for one of the only fan stories I’ve ever really appreciated, an ancient Zelda fanfic called Eloze (I can already hear Makin’s hazing coming). Misha happens to be one of the approximately ten people out there who still know about this story, so naturally I asked if he would vet my writing or offer any ideas he might have in order to make it better. He agreed, but in return he asked me to look into a visual novel called Higurashi: When They Cry.

I’m characteristically not a fan of visual novels. Though I can appreciate the quality of it, I found that Makin’s shill Ever17 was a huge bore, and in general I find them sort of frustratingly slow due to them placing more emphasis on details like the art and music, which means the actual reading part goes much less quickly than it would while reading a book²³⁷. Again, these are perfectly fine qualities all things considered, but it’s just not for me.

The points of me bringing this up are two-fold: I forgot to write down an anecdote that took place when I initially started reading Higurashi back in March. The visual novel is broken up into individual chapters capital C that you need to purchase separately, which confusingly are themselves composed of several smaller chapters. I completed the first chapter of the first Chapter relatively quickly. But, as anyone who’s talked with me for a while can vouch for, I’m not terribly observant, so I thought I was done with the first Chapter entirely.

I moved on to the second chapter and naturally was extremely confused about what was going on and why, which led to me posting screenshots and asking a lot of questions. Misha picked up on this and asked me where the first chapter ended; when I described to him what I saw, he called me a dumbass and told me what I had done. Naturally, much laughter at my expense followed.

I picked Higurashi back up yesterday and did the exact same thing. That’s not terribly important, though. The part in chapter two that I was reading about involved the protagonist and his cohorts playing cards or other tabletop games. For some reason this evoked an incredible desire in me to play card games with the rest of the people in mspa-lit, and so it was that we conceptualized HSD Game Night.

It’s still more of an idea than any sort of institutional effort, but I would consider the first night a success. A number of us participated in a game of Skribblio, which is a variant of Pictionary that can be played online. I can’t remember all of the participants at this point, but it at least included myself, Tera, Gnawms, Lobster, and MrNostalgic. It also included two people whose names I didn’t recognize, including one named “BingoBongo.” I’m sure it was a regular but these chucklefucks change their names or use alternative handles so often that I literally can’t keep track of it most of the time.

Regardless, Tera eventually emerged the winner. The initial discussion for game night was framed around something more like poker, which we all imminently agreed was less fun without any real stakes. Obviously no money will ever be involved in this process, given our staunch objection to including it in our activities or practices in general, but it’s a simple enough process to create a new role.

I took an out of date role--an old one dedicated to a “tour of Middle Earth” in Lord of the Rings Online that I participated in with Misha, Andrew, Dero, Tarty, Tera, Velikiy, and a couple others--and converted it into the title of “Game Night Champion.” To give it a little more oomph, each time we crown a new winner (optimally we’d be playing on a weekly basis), for the first few hours they’ll be listed above everyone else on the serverlist for people to witness their glory. Thus, Tera was honored for its victory in the inaugural HSD Game Night.

Future game nights are totally up in the air. I purchased a copy of Tabletop Simulator for myself, Tera, Andrew, and Canis, but there are still a lot of people who lack the game. If we do use it, we’ll probably limit it to every other week at most so that more people will have an opportunity to participate in game night. I’m sure that we won’t get overly crowded, but if so, then we might need to establish tournament style brackets. It’s exciting to consider, but we’ll just have to see where it goes.

Come to think about it we’ve already had a very successful night with Tabletop Simulator, actually: myself, Gnawms, Tera, Mines, Barry, and a newer user named B3es all played “Super Fight,” a humorous card game where two people draw random cards and then have to conceptualize superheroes from them. The object of the game is to convince the rest of the players as an audience which superhero would win. I won’t describe the game in full, especially because at points it became extremely crass, but there was one thing I thought I should touch on. At one point there was a tie, in which case each player draws a single new card to argue with. The first card was “a sharpshooter,” and the second was “Stephen Hawking.” I laughed so hard that I literally could not draw breath, and I’m pretty sure I almost vomited. That’s the sort of thing that I will never forget no matter how much time passes.

Moving on from this, though, today there was a discussion of the deep past that I’m not sure I’ve touched on before. Someone posted the video Makin Makes Bank again, which has been around since mid-2016 or so. The thumbnail for the video shows Makin and a group of other people, some of which are Ost, Tori, Dingus, Dickle, and Tensei, and the latter commented about how weird it is that such a thing came to exist: “i like how it is just an assortment of complete randos from the server most of which would never even dream of hanging out in mspa-lit / theyre only connected by the fact that sleepless happened to know them,” sleepless being the person who animated the video.

This launched yet another discussion about how the server has changed over the years, as well as the people in it. A few of the people in the video aren’t associated with us anymore, either due to various fallings out or because they simply stopped coming around. Tensei continues:

ancient hsd was wild and untamed / nsfw channel, way more polarization with people like voidfire and marsy / way spicier discourse as a result of that / … / i think there were fewer splinter servers so you would still have regulars that would unironically argue that hating on broccoli hair dave strider meant you were racist / … / also makin was known for getting into huge arguments / current discourse is like a pale imitation of the fights that were had in this channel

The lessening discourse is especially clear: nowadays people growed fatigued of arguing within mere minutes, or hours at most, whereas when I first started talking discourse could easily last for days at a time.

At times mspa-lit resembled nothing less than a maelstrom, and now it’s more of a harbor that experiences somewhat choppy water occasionally. As I’ve mentioned in previous entries, though, that’s probably for the best. The wilds are cut down and replaced by pasture, and civilization makes its way in. It’s good that we’ve grown more tempered in our habits, but sometimes it’s just hard not to miss those unbridled, ferocious conversations.

Nothing more for today.

---

3^rd of July 2020

Today I got drunk on vermouth and a bunch of us (Tera, Mines, B3es, Smeevs, Barry, and I believe one other) decided to play Texas Holdem in Tabletop Simulator, but a user named gnostaoticAnArchanAUtahemist (I’m not kidding, that’s their name) was streaming Roblox in the video game voice channel. Instead of kicking them out we decided to watch them for a while. All of the people participating in mspa-lit joined the gaming voicechat to watch and we became a sort of cheer squad for a bit, screaming for a certain outcome to happen and being excited or let down depending on what happened. I have no idea if that user noticed us, but if they did I hope that it made their night a little more fun.

Nothing more for today.

---

16^th of July 2020

The mod team agreed last week to break the silence we’ve been holding about the negotiations we had with Hussie back in February. Ironically we made that pact at first because we were genuinely worried about further tarnishing WP’s image in our community, even though that perception was already fairly low. As it is, WP outwardly seems like it’s imploding and we’re tired of holding our tongues, so we decided to start talking about it. I’ll also repeat the information here for historicity, and the full transcript has been posted in the Related Materials.

To reiterate the origin of the conflict: back in January a user named Phoebe was banned from the HSD for harassing other users and became disgruntled as a result; she manufactured evidence that there was harassment and sexual exploitation of children happening on the HSD; Kate picked it up and amplified it, accusing our community of harboring child abusers and being a child porn ring. After a few days of this, Hussie reached out to Makin and then me to see what if anything could deescalate matters and resolve the situation.

As an aside, Hussie also brought up other issues such as the development of homestuck.net as a fan archive. The negotiations admittedly started on an extremely rocky basis because Makin wanted to be overly defensive; when presented with this, Hussie said that he had no problem with homestuck.net but that he would turn to “more heavy-handed” methods of persuasion or pressure if no agreement was made. When asked for clarification Hussie did not provide any. Makin and I spooked ourselves into thinking this could involve a lawsuit, and alongside the fact that this was the creator of something we both hold dear, that’s probably why we decided to enter the discussion in earnest.

Over the course of negotiations, we presented evidence that Phoebe’s intent was to falsify evidence and stir up animosity. Once we gave Hussie this information, he understood and agreed that such is what happened. Despite it being clear that the accusations against us were false, the three of us agreed that the only reason matters had escalated so badly was because of a lack of trust between the officials and the mod team; as a result of this, it was decided that Makin should hand the community over to someone else, which became me.

Makin was understandably hesitant to step down from his role as owner after spending a literal decade on managing and growing it up from nothing, but after extensive discussion there was one last provision: we wanted a statement saying that we had not committed any wrongdoing or anything illegal. There were two parts to this, where I wrote up something that Hussie signed off on, and Kate was also going to release her own statement. After reviewing her contribution, Makin and I immediately decided that it was unprofessional and insulting (it was literally titled “narwhal bacon website statement” or some such irritating nonsense). Her post was essentially the kind of vile, political doublespeak thing that kind-of-not-really said we weren’t at fault, but also managed to frame us as a guilty party anyway. We were actually expecting an apology for the part she had played in ratcheting the tension up so hard, so this response was kind of a slap in the face.

After we described our dissatisfaction with Kate’s statement, Hussie talked to her and said she agreed not to speak about the subreddit or HSD again. I mentioned this in the comments of the post describing me taking control over the community, which made Kate angry and she posted her statement anyway. This ran the risk of severely jeopardizing literally all of the proceedings that came before it, and I described that I felt obligated to return the community to Makin if he asked, given that this was against the spirit of what we were trying to accomplish.

Makin didn’t ask for the community back despite this violation, and afterwards the mod team as a whole decided to pen a “formal complaint” about Kate due to her wildly vindictive behavior, not just against us but against fandom members as a whole. Hussie responded to this by demanding a census of our mod team, specifically what all of our genders were. We were extremely upset by this because it was a complete distraction from what should have mattered (Kate’s behavior and character) and towards a matter of optics or performative gender politics. It was already unreasonable for this alone, but it was also extremely unprofessional as an invasion of our privacy²³⁸. We voiced our complaints (rather vociferously, I’ll say) and Hussie responded by accusing us all of being hyperbolic, and then saying Makin and I had been obfuscating the negotiations and “stonewalling” him, when in reality we had been doing our absolute best to provide as much information as we could whenever he asked for it. He also said that he wanted me to replace most of the mods on the team at the discretion of the liaison, at which point I made up my mind that I wouldn’t cooperate with any such requests.

I and most of the mods were actually ready to completely sever ties with WP officials at that point from sheer disgust, but WoC served as the voice of reason and convinced us to actually proceed with the liaison group. However, those efforts died almost immediately with barely any communication to speak of²³⁹. I spoke in private (also called out appropriately as venting) to Gnawms and Tera about this, and only those two people. At the beginning of things we were eager to work with Hussie to make the situation better, but in retrospect it feels absurd that we bothered bringing anything to the table at all, considering we were the ones being maligned with slander and accusations of felonious activity.

Part of the provisions we set forth was that we would be allowed to speak freely about what happened and what was being said in our discussions, which Hussie explicitly agreed to. Fast forward to today, and to all appearances WP is basically in shambles already. We decided it doesn’t matter whether we keep this information secret anymore because the official team already did as much damage to themselves as they possibly could, and we believe that transparency where possible is the correct way to proceed. Thus, we decided to describe the situation openly to everyone who was present.

I’ll stress that we purposefully did not make a huge announcement post about it; rather, our goal was just to be able to talk about it casually, though we did have the full transcripts if anyone asked. Naturally people seized on the information anyway and an enormous discussion was started. We were quite sure that members of our community would be irrevocably put off of WP or anyone from the official team based on what happened, and we weren’t exactly wrong.

One exception was Skyplayer, who recently came back and has been quick to comment on anything that even obliquely references the official team or works in question. She stalwartly defended WP and Kate’s actions specifically throughout this discussion, in ways that were increasingly befuddling to us as the night went on. This is more than vaguely understandable, because Kate and Sky have grown close after the former offered a degree of support and comfort for Sky during very difficult times.

To be sure, I don’t want to paint Kate as some kind of expressly evil person with no redeeming qualities: a thought I’ve had often in the past half a year is that Kate’s predominant qualities are multifaceted. She’s creative, determined, and certainly resourceful, but then she is also opportunistic, vindictive, and idealistic to a fault. Her bad qualities do not erase her good qualities and vice versa. It’s just that the damage she’s done with her influence over Homestuck as a property and as one of its creators is not possible to ignore. She accused an entire community out of hand as a den of pedophiles and child molestors based on evidence that was later explicitly proven to be false, and then offered no apology for the chaos that ensued as a result of her actions.

While I understand Sky’s urge to defend her, it’s not really justifiable. Yet we spent the better part of an hour or two treading rhetorical circles on why Hussie, Kate, or WP might have done or said something or other. Another incident that we described tonight was something the mod team discovered some months ago, which is that Kate tried to wrest control of the server and subreddit by contacting Discord and Reddit admins directly. If I’m not mistaken this was actually before Phoebe stirring the pot; regardless of this, Sky still defended her actions and even tried to say such things were valid efforts.

Sky then made the astonishing argument that “content creators should have total control over communities surrounding their works,” which was so shocking that I physically didn’t know how to respond for a few minutes. That idea is totally antithetical to how we operate, and it’s kind of laughable that it was even brought to the table. I stated a couple times that I would literally rather delete the HSD than allow anyone on the official team even the smallest scrap of real power or control over it; at this point I have zero faith in basically anyone on the official team to interact with the fanbase in a positive, constructive manner, and giving them control over it would almost certainly be the final nail in the coffin for their property.

This led to another topic of consideration, specifically that I feel the official team has unreasonable expectations or ideas of what it means to run a community of this size. To my knowledge none of them have ever run a community like this, so that’s not a particularly surprising idea, but there was a specific discussion I had with Kate that gave me this impression.

At one point she contacted me asking about transphobic comments on the server, and I pointed out that once we know they’re there, we delete them and ban the person responsible. She then pointed out other instances that weren’t deleted, and I explained that we as a team are operating on a volunteer basis in our free time. We often rely on user reports to catch instances of rulebreaking because we can’t keep an eye on the place 24/7. She responded to this by saying that the comments remaining up made the server problematic anyway.

This might make sense on the surface, but there’s a fundamental problem with that kind of assertion: we don’t tolerate such comments whenever we see them, it’s a matter of being able to track everything effectively; in a server with 17,000+ people, you physically cannot keep an eye on everything that’s happening at all times, even if we were to greatly expand our team. Despite this explanation, Kate insisted that the fact such comments existed meant that we were aiding and abetting transphobic people, and that our server was unsafe for trans people to exist in.

This was extremely confusing and frustrating, but I’ve since come to the realization that she (and others who have approached me about this) are working under the assumption that the server attracts such individuals to it and makes them feel welcome to post such things. As anyone who has actually run a community would be able to tell you, that’s not how it works: random people from the internet find their way to your community through whatever means, and then they begin interacting with existing users in whatever way they deem fit. Some of the people who find their way to you will be fine, and some of them will be awful.

All of this is to say that transphobic comments on our server are incidental, and not really an effect of any kind of structural elements or culture²⁴⁰. What Kate and other people were claiming is that the mere presence of transphobic comments in turn made us transphobic holistically, which is plainly ridiculous. What they want from us is basically to keep such comments from ever being posted in the first place. This is not only unreasonable, in any place that has more than a few dozen people it’s physically impossible.

Skyplayer brought up the possibility of manually vetting people, describing that the Pgenpodcast server has a single channel people can see before they’re checked by a mod and allowed into the rest of the server. There are three enormous problems with this: first, it’s only viable in exceedingly small spaces; second, it rapidly turns the space in question into an echochamber; and finally, Barkley mentioned that it doesn’t eliminate the possibility of people who seem fine on the surface but are just hiding more sinister motivations or simply go nuts at a later time.

Speaking of going nuts, as a brief aside I want to bring up an incident brought before the mod team concerning optimistDuelist before he stopped working as a writer for Homestuck 2. He was interacting with a user that we had banned for compiling a “Hiveswap hitlist” (the user later claimed this was a joke, but it doesn’t really matter because it was explicitly against our rules) who then caused oD to have what was essentially a mental breakdown. Here’s the condensed version of what he said:

… if I had the choice / If I had the power / To pull a single trigger and snap you and making [sic] and tensei and all of 4chan and every vicious mean asshole who’s ever made shit up… / … / I’d do it right the fuck now and it’d feel like the worlds best orgasm / … / You’re all vicious callous shitstains and you can feel totally confident passing this on as a screencap...

For obvious reasons this was extremely disturbing and I personally brought it up to Aysha as a kind of welfare check to make sure everything was going to be alright. oD left the official team recently for unspecified reasons as far as I know.

We also didn’t say anything about this publicly because it was clearly coming from a really emotionally devastated place, and to be completely honest I still don’t fully hold it against oD; he’s had to tolerate a lot of shit as time goes by²⁴¹. I bring it up more to illustrate that things behind the scenes can get batshit crazy sometimes, and also to reinforce the point that people can sometimes just lose their shit and suddenly stop being “okay.” Even if we were to somehow vet all 17,000 people on the HSD and all 61,000 people on the subreddit and make sure they were okay (the idea of doing all of this is absurd to the point of hilarity), there is nothing stopping any of them from just lying about it or undergoing some kind of personal turmoil that causes them to fucking snap and do something outrageous or harmful to other people.

All of this is to say that manual vetting is not an effective method for handling communities of this size, or at all really. Sky’s next assertion was that large, centralized fan communities shouldn’t exist or some such, and that moving to Fediverse-like communities such as Mastodon was a good way to decentralize them and yada yada²⁴². I’m going to be honest, at a certain point I ducked out of the conversation because I was so tired and dispirited that I just lost the willpower to continue.

I’m going to close out this entry by reiterating another thing I’ve said before. I’ve been an ardent fan of Homestuck for 8 years, and have probably never associated with something this heavily in the rest of my life. Dealing with Hussie and the rest of the official team was so agitating that I’ve become completely jaded towards the idea that anything they do could have a positive impact on the property or the people who enjoy it. Dealing with the slander against us and the subsequent fallout was enough to make me actively doubt that any of this has been worth it, and I’ve found myself occasionally wondering why I bother.

This is particularly frustrating because I already know the answer to that question: I genuinely love and appreciate this community and the people in it. The fact that dealing with all of this dramatic garbage was enough to make me forget that appreciation for even a split second is insulting and infuriating. In no other community I’ve ever seen--except with stuff like Yandev, which is the furthest thing you want to be compared to--has the content creator or creators been actively hostile with their fans and then indignant when those fans complain about it. But as I said, that’s okay, because I’m not here for the property or the team behind it anymore, I’m here for the community. They’re the only thing that’s worthwhile about Homestuck now, and at this rate I don’t expect that to change. I’ll keep doing all of this for them, and them alone if that’s how it needs to be²⁴³.

Nothing more for today²⁴⁴.

---

19^th of August 2020

The last several weeks have continued with relatively little fare. Homestuck 2 finally did update again on, I believe, the 4th of this month. It was discussed for a day or two but quickly faded from collective consciousness as the updates usually do. Still, it’s good to see that the official team actually did come back instead of simply giving up while they were already on hiatus. Hopefully they will continue to persevere.

The lack of news on Hiveswap, while completely expected, is continuously depressing. At this point we firmly believe that betting on Hiveswap’s completion is lunacy. There is always that chance it’ll undergo more development as time goes by, but given the fact that it’s been eight years since the Kickstarter for it went down, I’m more amazed that there’s anyone left who still manages to care at all. I’m not sure if I know another project that has been mishandled quite as badly as this one; at this point it is practically legendary, in the way that Icarus features in Greek mythology for flying too close to the sun and then crashing into the fucking ocean. You should have listened to your father, you little shit.

Why didn’t you listen to him about the wax?

Proceeding to the server itself, we’ve had some users rotating in and out of lit, with a couple in particular coming to mind. For a period of many weeks, a user named B3es was part of our sphere and participated in a number of activities with us, including a couple of game nights. After a while of this he left though, describing that he did not feel like he fit in with the personalities of the rest of the channel well enough.

B3es came across as rather rigid in some respects, often responding to a situation in a completely sincere manner no matter the occasion. He also seemed to get agitated often enough that it was cause for some concern. I discussed the matter with him once or twice to make sure he was doing okay; I should probably have taken the fact that I felt obligated to ask him about it at all as a sign that something was amiss.

Whatever the details, B3es left a matter of weeks ago. It was exciting, as it always is, to watch him interact with other members of the channel and develop a presence for himself, but I suppose the stress of it just grew to be too much. I can hardly blame him for not putting up with it, as I’m sure it is horribly exhausting for anyone who does not actively enjoy the nature of our discussions.

A more recent addition is a casually chatty fellow named HarpyHour, who is a denizen of #general and #homestuck far more than lit. For reasons that are easy enough to understand, they regard this channel as something of an oddity. They haven’t talked very much in here, but they seem to interact directly with more generalized elements of the channel rather than any individual parts; many times now I’ve seen them comment on the strangeness of a larger conversation or the way that people talk to each other here. That kind of attentiveness is something that I enjoy greatly in people, especially when it actually manages to come up in conversation. Harpy has not participated here terribly much, but I hope they will find themselves compelled to come back and can carve out a space for themselves.

It’s always exciting having new people in the mix; two others who come to mind but who I have not yet learned enough about include a rather amiable personality by the name of CARCICLARBTOR, who pops into the channel infrequently to discuss specific ideas or topics as suits them.

As an aside, I’m noticing this behavior has become heavily predominant: rather than most participants being intimately familiar with most aspects of the channel’s holistic culture, it is a number of people who are connected to each other across a variety of topics and loosely associate with each other based on that.

Returning to CARCIC, one of these things I’ve noticed popping up is Blaseball. It’s a kind of fake sport that relies on fan engagement to add depth and interest to the activity, much in the same manner as Marble League. There are a few people who are heavily invested in either of these things (Reti and METY both seem to enjoy Marble League greatly; CARCIC, Canis, Husky, Wadapan, Reti, Gitaxian, and a number of others have all gotten into Blaseball), and as soon as one of the ideas comes up, the people who enjoy it come out of the woodwork to discuss it until another topic crops up and they fade back, assuming none of them care for the new conversation.

Of course, it’s almost certain that this has been happening ever since day one of this server’s existence, but lately the pattern of behavior has been far more recognizable for some reason. I wonder if this is a temporary change or if it’s a concrete shift in how people participate here.

Another person I’d like to mention is The Ennemy, who seems to have taken to the channel culture with some gusto. Worth the Candle is undoubtedly the premier shill on the list right now, with strong hopes for finishing and higher overall quality than Worm, which was the top dog for quite some time. WtC also happens to be the second longest work on the list at over 1.35 million words as of chapter 212, making it absolutely daunting for most people to even begin.

The Ennemy finished Worth the Candle in a matter of days, and though they found it less engaging as it went on, the fact that they stuck with it and blasted through the work so quickly has stood them out considerably from the crowd. Other than this activity they’re quite enigmatic to me, although every interaction I’ve had with them personally has been quite pleasant. I’m looking forward to seeing how they might integrate with the channel over time--I hope that this is the case, anyway.

Another user has started talking here who originally hung out in #general and didn’t associate with the mspa-lit crowd too much: furrylatula has been around for as long as I can remember and for reasons I can’t remember (probably suggested that we’re too snooty at one point or another) he largely avoided our channel in the past. With the release of the email correspondence between us and Hussie, he’s taken to hanging out and talking here far more often.

Lat (or latch, as Tera calls him) is rather vocal and fierce about his opinions, and Sometimes this is a boon: it’s more engaging to speak with someone who is actually really passionate or vehement about what they want to say, whereas most people in lit at this point are laid-back and mostly casually invested in what they talk about. I think the latter is a consequence of becoming more familiar with each other and trying to appeal to people who are older or more mature than other places, and by-and-large it’s infinitely preferable for obvious reasons. However, there is a certain flair that comes with being younger and overly spirited that seems to kick things into gear for everyone else too.

Other times, lat can be kind of a pain in the ass. I’ve noticed several times--and he’s even admitted once or twice himself--that on the stuff he’s arguing about, he’ll actually just be pulling shit out of his ass and not actually understand the concepts in play. This is by far his worst tendency. I can forgive people being overly excited or too passionate about something, considering who we are and what we do on a daily basis, but arguing confidently from a place of ignorance is gross and to be explicitly discouraged. That aside, though, having lat hang around in mspa-lit has been interesting. I’m not sure if he’ll stick around in the end, but if he does, I’ll enjoy seeing how he changes as time goes by.

As for people popping back in, Skyplayer rejoined the server a couple of days ago. After the most recent altercation I kind of figured she was gone for good²⁴⁵, so her reappearance is rather curious. She still vociferously defends the official team of Homestuck 2 as the people who create content for us to consume. Her arguments often appear illogical to me, but I’m willing to put up with that as long as civility can be maintained; it’s a good thing to have people around who are willing to defend an unusual or unpopular position, but it would be better if there was adequate reasoning behind it.

That’s where the devil lies, though: the main difference between her and everyone else seems to be that while most people here are more typically just discussing things to try and approach a better understanding together (in theory, if not necessarily in practice), most of Sky’s contributions to a given discussion seem more like proselytizing--or worse, spam--than any real attempt to interface with the other people in the discussion. This isn’t helped by a tendency to inject overtly sexual comments in inappropriate contexts (I’ve already had to warn her once for this), and unapologetically shilling for certain ideologies or groups and seeming not to care about actually engaging with other members of the chat when those ideas or people are challenged.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that she’s kind of a fucking simp, but it’s not like that’s a crime. It’s just something that’s kind of weird, and annoying at most.

In addition to, or perhaps because of, Skyplayer’s return, the chat has been engaging in some rather heated discussion about Homestuck 2. I do feel like pointing out that we have largely not talked about Homestuck 2 outside of the update in the last few weeks. No doubt it crops up from time to time, but there’s not much to say that we haven’t said already at this point.

In spite of this, Sky’s presence managed to rejuvenate some old topics that I thought had been totally hashed out, which led to a rather animated debate about the relationship between content creators and the fandom that pops up around their works. I’ve already described the opposing sides of this particular topic and have no wish to do so again; suffice to say that we have many negative things to say about the approach Homestuck 2’s team takes in dealing with their audience.

Less important than the debate itself was the larger conversation, especially the people involved. At some point Cyrene came in and, apropos of nothing, started talking about a snack she was trying to locate, I believe Takis. She said that she could not find a particular variety she wanted, and hb took a second to remark on the nature of the snack (“theyre more like cheetos”). Tori took this moment to jump in (all sic:“takis re chips what the fuck / TAKIS RE LITERALLY JUST TORTILLA CHIPS BUT CURLED / WHAT ARE YO UON ABOUT”), and suddenly the room was awash in three or four different conversations.

Far from being stressful, it was surprisingly fun and even cozy in a way. I’m always pleased when the channel is active, and it’s neat to see the dynamics between various people arise in real time. I wish I had been able to internalize these patterns so I could record them more faithfully, but it’s more of a “you need to see it to understand” sort of phenomenon. Spontaneous, energetic, messy conversations will always be one of the most frustrating and wonderful parts of talking here.

Which reminds me: near the end of June, Carlarc made a meme based off of the iceberg template that was sufficiently detailed and got pinned. Tera took it upon itself to exhaustively check through as many of the references within it as possible and wrote a breakdown of it entitled “Depthing the Iceberg,” which I’ve added to the Related Materials. For anyone who is reading this and cares or feels like they’re missing some sort of cultural context, it’s definitely worth checking out.

Nothing more for today.

---

10^th of September 2020

Last night Nat was watching Furrylatula play a new hot topic game called Among Us. Apparently Lat was making a lot of mistakes and Nat started to make fun of him to a degree that struck at least a few people in the chat as excessive. This intensified until Cyrene stepped in and banned Nat from lit for the day. The action itself I agreed with based on Nat’s behavior, though later debate suggested it was actually fine somehow, but since Cy and Nat are both pseudo-mods it presented some problems.

WoC chided her in modchat, saying that as agreed at least a couple of times in the past, actions should not be unilaterally decided against mods of the same hierarchical level. Cy responded to this in a childish manner, saying that “if Nat is so smart” she should have recognized a warning that Cy had given. WoC took extremely poorly to this, to a degree that I would honestly consider an overreaction. That having been said, I agreed with him that something needed to be done about the backsass, which reflected ill on Cy’s actions²⁴⁶.

The next day, for the first time I convened the “Illuminati Council” to initiate a round table discussion about whether or not both Cy and Nat’s actions were acceptable. To her credit, Cy recognized that the initial action and her flippant response to WoC were unacceptable, but at that point the damage was already done. After an extensive discussion about the nature of the offense and previous problems, it was decided that she will be given a two and a half month demotion (to expire on Thanksgiving).

Nat’s punishment was essentially just a slap on the wrist, telling her once more to be less caustic towards other people in chat. I’m specifically irritated at how Nat has essentially harassed or bullied people in the past and nothing serious was done, but given that she’s toned way down and done stuff like this extremely infrequently as of late, I don’t exactly feel murderous about it. Especially given the explanation that Lat and Nat have some semblance of rapport and that it’s not just baseless, insensate harassment, there’s honestly not much that I can do about it. It would be far different if someone actually came up to me or another mod independently and asked us to do something about it, but that hasn’t happened in a very long time, over a year at least.

Nonetheless, recounting Nat and Cy’s previous offenses indicated something to me: it was high time to create some way of keeping track of fuck ups that the mod team makes, as a way to better dispense punitive judgments and remind us not to repeat those fuck ups. I ended up making a rap sheet for the mod team to keep better track of these things, accessible by the mod team but only editable by me. Hopefully this will preclude any further debates, extensive or not, and make it easier to eliminate problems in the future.

Nothing more for today.

---

11^th of September 2020

The weekend Misfits stream ended weeks ago, and Makin had been taking a break from streaming shows for a while. However, today he put up a poll for the next show to stream, including the options for Babylon 5, Farscape, and a show not included in the list before called Person of Interest. The strawpoll was up for most of the morning and, purportedly, Babylon 5 was in the lead for a while.

At one point Farscape ended up surpassing it, and Makin chose that moment to end the poll, making Farscape the winner. This made Misha extremely upset--he was personally looking forward to Babylon 5 and had invited some friends to watch it with us--because this essentially meant that Makin’s poll was pointless theater. I was mostly ambivalent about the choices (with the exception of Person of Interest, which I have no desire to see at all) but I was also upset by this performative nonsense²⁴⁷.

However, Misha continued to rage about this unabated for almost two hours. The full extent of his anguish was a lot to behold, making a number of us kind of uncomfortable. B3es--who recently came back to us, I’m pleased to say--was constantly trying to placate him and bring him down from his furious plateau. Nothing seemed to work, however; he only settled down once he got it all out of his system, which seems to be how it happens most of the time anyway.

Misha explained he was disappointed because his friend would be watching Babylon 5 without him if we waited. Normally this would be less of an issue, but he mentioned that the coronavirus pandemic had already been adversely affecting his social habits. This stream was something that he had really been looking forward to as Babylon 5 is one of his favorite shows and he had already missed a watchthrough of it with his friends some time ago.

We’ve all been hit by the pandemic in some way or another. Given the severe bungling of the response to it, Americans in particular have been feeling pretty depressed over it, but other countries are starting to witness a resurgence too. I’m very thankful that we can at least chat with each other in mspa-lit, which for me personally is just as fulfilling as always. It’s still hard to have to tiptoe around real life engagements though; in that, I’m sure most of us here understand.

Nothing more for today.

---

19^th of September 2020

As a brief prelude to this entry, I feel obligated to say: I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve gotten into a rut with writing SPAT. It feels that I can hardly muster up the energy to do it anymore, for various personal reasons more than anything. But, today was too fun not to say something. Come to think about it, last night was pretty fun too.

I’ve commented long ago in these entries that one of the best aspects of online communities like this, and especially this channel, is the ability to cycle quickly through one fierce conversation after another. Last night it began rather amicably: yesterday was the start of the Jewish new year, and thusly Multivac declared a happy Rosh Hashanah to everyone in chat. I asked for details on the sacred nature of these days in the Jewish faith, which Multivac and a few others who follow the faith were more than happy to describe.

This then took a turn into discussing various religious practices, and naturally the topic of circumcision was brought up. Lat barged into the conversation with the claim that “[describing circumcision as a religious practice is] an anti semitic conspiracy theory.” This immediately set off an uproar over people debating not only whether that statement was farcical, which it is, but whether or not circumcision is actually medically worthwhile, or if it’s even ethically allowable.

More important than the topic--a bit out of reach for the more squeamish in chat, of course--was the conversation itself, which had that rare, frenzied progression I prize so much in mspa-lit out of the many, many internet communities I’ve looked at over the years. It truly felt like something of a return to form, and despite the headache of juggling people’s variously inflammatory statements or correcting blatant misinformation, it was truly very fun.

The conversation wound down shortly, though, especially with Gnawms interjecting at some point. He sardonically pointed out the hypocrisy of the punishments he’s received over the years for talking about furry stuff (a key point concerning him: it’s not the furry stuff so much as it is when he posts sexually charged, or “horny” stuff. He’s fond of pushing the envelope when it comes to such things, and there’s a significant debate revolving around whether furry topics are innately horny or not). Goodness knows that enough members of our staff and userbase are furries, it might be time to extend some trust and assume they won’t immediately ruin discussions on the subject. I considered that fair play, and promised that as long as the discussion did not turn towards horniness, furry stuff would be allowed as a conversational topic²⁴⁸.

At that point Furrylatula stepped in (as he pointed out: it’s in the name) and spearheaded discussion about the construction of a fursuit. Though I don’t know how many, if any, of the other chat members were furries, what followed was actually a pretty informative conversation. It was a tad weird perhaps, but certainly not harmful in any respect. B3es, Spiral, Gnawms, Zentoyo, and even I all talked with him a bit about it while Misha, MrNostalgic, and Interrobang shitposted heavily in the background.

This discussion petered out as the night went on, naturally, but it seems that the conversational atmosphere did not go away the next day. Things started off quickly with the topic of the Bering Strait, and specifically what it was comprised of. I don’t remember how we got onto that particular topic, but Misha came in very brazenly, very sure that the strait was an ice sheet that came and went each year with the seasons. Having been educated specifically in this thing when I was in college, I immediately called him out for spewing a lot of hot bullshit.

Rather than backing off he actually doubled down, so I started sharing evidence that it was actually dried land from lowered water levels, caused by increased amounts of glaciation in the Ice Ages. Bafflingly, Misha kept ignoring this and asking me if I had basic reading comprehension. I became enormously pissed off until I realized he was baiting me, and not even baiting me particularly well either (it worked though, which is credit both to him and to my imbecility). The spirit of the chat was very high even from early on due to this confrontation, and it only escalated from there.

Later in the day, I brought up something from the mod chat last week where Cy was explaining the nature of the word “truscum” to the rest of us on the team. There were at least five of us who had literally no clue what the word actually meant, and Cy had to use two other terms before we were actually able to understand the concept at hand (I’ll refrain from explaining here because it’s overly complicated, unrelated, and especially because I don’t feel like it). I brought this up in order to explain how I felt about people participating in the gender politics sphere; that is to say, I feel like people within the sphere tend to forget that people outside of it generally know close to nothing about the evolution of LGBT rhetoric and philosophy, which often develops very quickly as time goes by and tends to leave outsiders behind.

Naturally this turned towards the discussion of hormonal therapy, and whether or not doctors prescribe hormonal treatment properly or if people should even be allowed to self-medicate with over the counter medicines for gender dysphoria. Misha was going to explain why he didn’t feel that way, but Lat said to him, “shut the fuck up misha you have zero idea what youre talking about,” and things instantaneously took off.

I expected a heavily protracted debate with many hurt feelings on both side of the issues, but something happened: Misha and Lat both got caught up on their arguments. They started moving away from discussing the issue at hand and instead addressed logical fallacies and the like. Lat specifically accused Misha of using a strawman argument against him, and something miraculous happened: Misha grew indignant and the conversation shifted again, to the point that they were simply debating what the definition of a strawman is.

This is such a simple thing from a wider perspective: arguments shift and can be warped as they progress, but the actual length of time it took for this to happen was less than ten minutes. It’s been a while since an earnest meta-debate broke out, but it is exceedingly rare to witness the 2x meta-debate combo unfold before you, in such a rapid fashion.

This alone was very entertaining, but then there was a particular turn in the conversation. Lat brought up Kate calling members of the fandom “pigshit” for various reasons, so I decided to join in on the fun by mimicking this and saying “@homestuckfans pigshit.” I checked to make sure that it wouldn’t ping anyone, but then to my immense chagrin it auto-changed to some random user who joined years ago called “homestuck” who has never once spoken here (their name was changed to pickleOnlooker during the April Fool’s Prank of 2019 and was never changed back, proof positive that they never look here).

The chat was already frenzied from the meta-meta-debate, but that mis-ping pushed it into a fever pitch. It’s been a while since I’ve seen so many messages flood the screen so quickly, in such a jovial fashion: Nat, Carlarc, Krato, Andrew, and Mint all dogpiled me for my transgression. At some point Tera posted the bwong bwong twang image WoC is so fond of and said, “this is peak fucking lit,” which I could hardly disagree with. It felt like the manic days of 2017 all over again, even if only for a wonderful half hour.

Nothing more for today.

---

21^st of September 2020

Right off the bat I want to declare that we did indeed celebrate the 21^st night of September. We celebrated it multiple times in fact; when someone comes in with information they think is new but someone else posted first, we typically tell them they’re “late” and thus should be ashamed (somewhat sordid, but this happened a few times with the announcement of Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsburg’s death, for example). Departing from that custom, Earth, Wind, and Fire’s song was welcomed with great joviality literally every single time it was shared. It was a good day for that alone.

With that out of the way, though, I’d like to highlight something that has slowly been creeping up on us ever since Makin’s Patreon closed. He allowed people to buy custom roles for one dollar a month, so I subscribed ages ago and got “Wiener Meister” since “wiener” is practically my favorite word. After his Patreon closed though, I just kind of kept it and didn’t say anything. It felt wrong to go back to the lighter, standard role we have that’s closest to my preferred color. Dingus is similarly guilty of this.

Unfortunately, over the last however long it’s been, we’ve accumulated some meme and vanity roles in our list that’s causing some bloat. I’m also responsible for the Altgenner of the Decade role, and VirtuNat covertly created a role called “Dutch” for Tensei (for which he was thankful upon discovering it) in his country’s signature color. There’s also this weird role for some altgenners called “MOGGERS” that I’m unsure of why it was created, but is given to them upon making a specific kind of content if I’m understand correctly.

After Nat made “Dutch,” I wanted to extend the benefit of custom color roles to all of the mod staff since I have one and all of our pseudo-mods and janitors essentially have custom colors due to their staff roles. I brought it up in mod chat saying I wanted to “abandon pretenses” on staff vanity roles, meaning that it’d be nice if all the mods got custom colors too. Instead, Ifnar commented: “Yes, I agree, we need to get rid of those.”

Some heated debate in the mod chat later, I changed my mind and am now deleting all of the unnecessary custom roles.

However, it didn’t feel right getting rid of Altgenner of the Decade because I specifically wanted to keep it around as a badge of honor for anyone who participated in the last sacrifice. Tonight, in order to have it go out with a bang so that no one could feel upset about it, I initiated the first sacrifice in who knows how long.

It started off slow, as all of the server and even altgen have been kind of quiet for the last few days, but it quickly snowballed into thousands of messages over something like an hour. It was a pretty standard fare sacrifice, but it turned to chanting of “Bread!” and the associated emoji, which is something to do with Shitler. I decided to use that to my advantage though, and after finishing the sacrifice I declared that the Altgenner of the Decade role would be retired, but everyone who participated in the last last sacrifice would get the role and it would be changed to Bread.

I still want to commemorate the participants somehow, so alongside the people who obtained Altgenner of the Decade I’ll just list them all here in alphabetical order:

amara, Anervaria, Arabia Megibo, Benny, Bep (not that bep, I hope), buttertable, clamchives, Cyrene, Dingus, eggohito, Faeby, Ghor, hatsune miku, hauntedpainter, Husky, Lamp, Konami Kode, Mildly Adequate Snoiper, PlatinumGamerBob, Prime, RAAR, Shroom, thebadnut, Valkyrie, Vortrex, wubby, and Zupah (who gracefully provided as much of a screenshot of the Bread Sacrifice as they possibly could), and anyone else who may have lost the role or didn’t get it in the first place by accident.

I thank these people from the bottom of my heart for joining me in a really, really dumb tradition which probably shortened our lifespans because of just how moronic it was. I’ll do it again another time I’m sure.

Nothing more for today.

---

27^th of September 2020

The chat has been wild tonight, talking about all manner of fetid nonsense. It started with Misha talking about how he can sometimes understand the phrase “Western degeneracy” as it relates to glorification of crassness and sexual imagery as symbols of the liberation of women. Specifically, he understands it with reference to the fact that institutions such as the greater porn industry are often actually oppressive and harmful to the women it employs. From there, ironically, it devolved into a hodgepodge of nonsense that’s been guided largely by whatever we find funniest at that precise moment and nothing else.

There are many details to this and I’m not sure how many of them to put here. Probably the most important one in terms of how much it affected us, was Misha describing “the family spaghetti.” To wit, he says that he knows what his mother ate on the night that he was conceived, because his father tells him every single time the dish is prepared. That’s weird to some degree, but it would otherwise be fine. On the other hand, he chose to say it like this:

Everyone in the chat took this in a slightly different manner but for some reason it immediately made us dissolve into a fit of hysteria (Misha clarifying: “I just meant when he cooks the family spaghetti / he always says / it's what they had / … / oh WAIT / I DID NOT IMPLY SHE ATE DICK / OH MY GOD / WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU”, with Moonjail rebutting: “no misha it's just weird that you know what your mom had for dinner before your dad laid pipe”).

All of the participants completely lost it, and we kept losing it with the mention of specific details. All of the different aspects of it are individually less pertinent to why I wrote any of this, as opposed to the general tone and form of the discussion. The reason I’ve bothered to say any of this to begin with is that it related to thoughts I’ve continuously had about the inevitable direction the server must go in: what will happen when Homestuck ceases to be relevant at all, even beyond the meager scrap of relevance it can barely claim to have now?

Ostensibly, we are bound together by our common appreciation for an internet property that is rotting from the inside out, but what happens to us when that property dies and withers away so thoroughly that it can never be resuscitated? Who will stick around, if anyone²⁴⁹? Will there be some sense of camaraderie, as with people who have all experienced something together, or will we simply disperse at the end of it all?

Nothing is forever, I guess²⁵⁰, and I’ve worried enough about the inevitable loss of our community as time goes by. It’s just that nights²⁵¹ like these are hard to enjoy despite how great they are, for the simple fact they remind me of our collective impermanence. I wish it was easier to dismiss the anxiety and hold on to that sense of mono no aware Tensei described, “the pathos of things²⁵².” Even the worst aspects of having been part of this community fade away in the memory of all the good times, and with all of the greater conversations we’ve had.

I want to have some faith that people will have enjoyed themselves enough to care and stick around afterwards. I didn’t think about these things in my previous internet communities, but I’ve spent so much more time and energy on this one. I guess all I can continue to do is hope that we’ll stick around as long as possible, relevant or not; goodness knows I’ll miss everyone once the time comes.

Nothing more for today.

---

11^thof October 2020 - Makin’s Return and The Huskening

A couple nights ago, WoC approached me in direct messages and voiced some concerns I was also holding, but was unconsciously trying to ignore. In short, he described that the server was falling into severe stagnation: it was becoming gradually less fun to talk, because we had covered a lot of the same ground and weren’t doing many things to keep server energy up. Specifically, I wasn’t doing anything to keep momentum going.

I was irritated at first, but his words were incontrovertible. It’s impossible to ignore that I had low motivation, especially after what led us to this scenario in the first place--Makin stepping down might have been more tolerable, if the events around it hadn’t been such an utter farce. After talking with WoC about it for a bit, we mutually agreed that it was time to make a change for the better.

Thus, I asked Makin to come back as the server owner. For posterity, my exact words were: “alright, i lose / my method of control and letting things play out is not working / take the server back and raise hell, we need reckonings and wacky zany nonsense / I'M SETTING YOU FREE AND THROWING AWAY THE KEY.” And so, he came back.

After the transfer was completed, Makin posted another community thread giving a brief summary of what was going on. For the most part it seems that his announcement was taken with great praise: the vast majority of comments seem to be rather supportive, which is encouraging to see. There are a few specifically commending Makin and I for handling the negotiations with Hussie in the manner we did, which are quite vindicating.

As an aside, there is one major detractor, a frenetic fellow by the handle of /u/legendsofold. They’ve posted about three dozen times in the announcement thread, going on about how they feel the mod team is doing this because we felt slighted and wanted to get back at the official team or some such nonsense. I worry that they’re going to raise hell about this for weeks or months to come, for which we’ll probably end up banning them. There are a few other dissenting opinions to be sure, but it’s only one or two messages per account. I’m not sure what to do with this user in particular besides let them whinge to their heart’s content.

As it is, Makin immediately set about detailing changes and events that would be forthcoming, giving a brief outline. He released a community survey yesterday, and as he’s done in the past he read all of the results today, variously praising or making fun of suggestions as he saw fit. A brief shout out to the result that Makin called “the funniest survey post I have gotten in my fucking life,” written: “i appreciate the 'old school internet' attitude of makin, there should also maybe be a 'zoomer' consultant for events or ideas?...” Makin instantly pinged FurryLatula and Tera as his designated zoomer consultants before moving on.

The survey results and the way Makin treated them feels like an immediate return to his old flair; some of us were secretly worried that he might not have the same energy or pizzaz that he did before he stepped down initially, but our concerns have quickly proven baseless. Even just in these first couple of days, spirits feel higher than they have in a while, and we already have so much to look forward to.

For instance, Makin is bringing back the Patreon. All of the old accoutrements²⁵³ will be brought back, including custom Patron channels and roles, as well as the completely vestigial #vip channel. We’ll be trying to purchase ad space on MSPaint Fan Adventures like we did before, if it can be afforded. He also announced something completely new.

For multi-month patrons, there’ll be custom mugs and t-shirts available with the emblem of our lord and savior Fat Husky, as well as a design yet to be decided on. The idea of community merchandise has always been a complete joke, but in a way it feels like this was an inevitability. It has the potential to be hilarious and actually pretty fun. At the very least, I’m absolutely getting one of the fat husky mugs.

I’m kind of stunned how quickly he pulled all of this out, and it’s precisely this kind of thing that motivated me to take the leap and ask for him to come back. These actions are going to be massively controversial for some, to be sure, but for those of who don’t mind so much, it does a lot to keep things fresh and interesting. As far as this community is concerned, that’s the main thing we’re concerned about now.

As if that wasn’t enough, this morning he enacted the fourth Reckoning, which took all of us completely by surprise--even me. He had said he wasn’t doing them anymore, but I’m not sure why we decided to believe him about this particular thing. He utilized fat husky’s image a lot this time, so I’ve dubbed this event The Huskening.

The mod team has been shaken up harder in the past, but this is definitely more eventful than The Gnomening back in 2019. The actual process was fairly rote and familiar at this point, but we ended up completely losing Dingus, Tensei, Cyrene, Wadapan, Qweq, Erieolae, and Tyr. Shitler and Valkyrie weren’t online when The Huskening was in progress, so it’s not clear if they’ll be removed later since they weren’t listed in the accepted mods earlier today. Completely new members of the team consist of B3es, Harpy, Homer, Sein, and we welcome back Tori. For the complete list of changes, please reference the relevant sections in Appendix D and the current status of the server.

In all, it’s been a very exciting day. There are additional plans such as making it so that people can opt in to get pinged about Homestuck 2 updates, instead of the entire server getting pinged. There are also loose plans for music, art, games, and other asset contests, an “HSD Sings” idea, a set of rereads of various fanventures such as Karkat Goes to a Convention (which will be coordinated with 1011686).

Further down the road there might be a charity event (an idea I put forth and was working on before the malaise set in hardcore), next year’s April Fool’s event must be worked out, and there could be fun serverwide events like a Taskmaster challenge, where people who lose get ban punishments. To be sure, not everyone will be pleased with these things, but for those of us who actually appreciate this community for what it is, and enjoy being in it, this is going to be a wonderful return to form. I invite disaster upon myself with this--probably in the form of potential retaliation from official team members, in some way--but currently I feel free to say that this is most likely the best outcome for us. It’s good to have things back on track.

Nothing more for today.

---

23^rd of October 2020

Makin has made good on his return, working to resuscitate the various game servers we enjoyed when the Patreon was first active. Today the first of those servers went back up: we ended up playing Team Fortress 2 for a matter of some hours, and it became very clear over that time frame that some of the group are simply far, far better at the game than others. People like Makin, Misha, and Dingus who have played the game for years were basically unassailable²⁵⁴, while the rest of us were pretty much dead wood.

The idea, as a matter of record, is to host servers in a different way than before. Over the years, once a game has gone up it simply stays up all the time until people collectively grow tired of it and stop playing. However, we’ve gradually envisioned a scenario that’s less costly and will hopefully keep people interested: keeping the games up only as long as a majority of people are interested in playing them on a given day, and then rotating games each weekend so that we don’t grow as tired of them as quickly. For instance, this weekend it’s Team Fortress 2, then next weekend it might be SCP: Secret Laboratory, and the weekend after it could be Space Station 13. This system sounds like a lot more work so it’s hard to imagine how long it’ll last, but it should be a good way to curtail the boredom that comes with over-exposure.

A pleasant coincidence coinciding with this is the return of a few oldies: Toast, who now goes by Kosh, decided to drop by, and then we were mysteriously visited by Nights. Somewhat ominously, we also received an appeal from User5 to come back as the six month waiting period had expired. The mod team was initially split somewhat on whether to let him back, myself on the side of refusing him entry, but eventually we relented and undid his ban in the spirit of letting bygones be bygones.

In all, the reappearance of these people combined with having a game to play together has led to a distinct feeling of revelry, for tonight at least. Though the server has been active enough lately, there is still a small sense of some malaise. It may just be me, but even though we talk often it feels like many of the conversations are retreading old ground. I can’t help but feel that there’s been a dearth of new material, though that sense has no doubt been exacerbated by the pandemic messing with a lot of production schedules and reducing the amount of new content that we have access to. Hopefully this will change, sooner rather than later.

Nothing more for today.

25^th of October 2020

It’s time for the annual 10/25 community stream. Appropriately we did The Thing, Troll 2, and Color of Space. Though the audience was not quite as energetic as previous streams (with the exception of Troll 2, which held up to its legacy as a veritable meme fountain), it was still a very successful day. Niklink created the poster and Moonjail hosted the videos, meaning my work was essentially reduced to nothing. With Makin back in the fold too, he basically rehosted the videos and performed the stream management as he’s done in the past, so everything went without a hitch. In all, it’s hard not to pleased with the occasion; it’s always satisfying when a community event takes off and is conducted properly.

A number of things happened today, some of which I won’t be commenting on but are detailed in the original post of this thread on Reddit that Makin made. Most important: we got news of Hiveswap: Act 2’s release as well, supposedly coming out this November. The general reaction appears to be mixed: whilst most are excited about the possibility, there’s also a lot of reservation. Some people express doubt that it’ll be any good, given the thorough clusterfuck that has been Homestuck 2’s writing so far, and some further doubt that it’ll even be released at the appointed time at all (remember that Act 2 was originally announced in January of 2018, with an advertised release date sometime that spring). We will have to see how things play out.

Bambosh also finally completed work on the long-awaited Unofficial Homestuck Collection, which is an unbelievably huge project he’s dedicated the last several months towards. It’s a custom browser that serves as an effective archive of Homestuck and a bunch of related work, protecting it from the degradation of Adobe Flash or any other kind of problems that may arise in the future. Within an hour of release, Bambosh is already being contacted by a journalist on Twitter about it. I can’t help but imagine that he’s probably being overwhelmed by all of the sudden attention, and I’m worried about the inevitable contingent of people who will disagree with the spirit and/or execution of his archive, but in general it seems it’s being taken very well.

In all, an extremely good 10/25. Nothing more for today.

---

27^th of October 2020

More in line with the stuff I used to write, I’d like to focus on an extremely specific case I saw in the server today. There was a user who, for anonymity’s sake, I will refer to as Hickory.

Hickory joined the server about a month ago but hadn’t talked much since then. Today, however, they suddenly showed back up in chat and began having in an exceedingly strange manner. They were completely awkward to the point of generating physical discomfort--for myself at least, if not others in chat too. The tone and language they were using simply did not fit in, and when I took the time to spell out what was expected and accepted in mspa-lit, they seemed simply not to understand or take in that knowledge. It was fairly bewildering, and I’m not really sure why they were unable or unwilling to participate in a more socially adjusted manner. The most obvious possibility is that they’re underaged, as we have encountered such situations with people under the age of 13, but this case is just particularly bad in a way that I’m not sure being older would solve.

The reason I bring this up here is to challenge an idea that we have loosely discussed in the past: as far as internet chats are concerned, there is a large divide between people who think that everyone should be included, and people who don’t. Being 100% inclusive is an ideal, but one that I think only works if everyone involved is already intelligent, sensible, and socially well-adjusted. Otherwise, you run into this situation with Hickory.

Thus, what I’m trying to say is that I don’t think this principle really works. The conversation has come up with some increasing frequency in mspa-lit, and we end up coming to a similar conclusion each time: while it would be nice and preferable to operate on that ideal of “everyone should be included,” it might just be that not everyone can effectively be included. This can be for multiple reasons, ranging from people who simply can’t be trusted to participate in a given space properly to people who hold ideologies or philosophical positions that are distinctly unacceptable to the general consensus (an extreme example that I think most will have a hard time arguing against: tolerating someone who is openly and brazenly a Nazi. Cue Makin commentating “GODWIN’S LAW STRIKES AGAIN”).

All of this is to say that my ideas on gatekeeping have gradually shifted over time. Gatekeeping, formally defined as “the activity of controlling, and usually limiting, general access to something,” is something that I used to rail against quite vehemently, as I enjoy the idea that there is a space for everyone on the internet, if not in real life. However, over time it has become evident to me that, while there should be at least one space for each person, not every space has to be available for every person. Frequently enough, most spaces are simply unavailable to the great majority of people for a combination of various reasons.

It seems clear to me now that a community based on no gatekeeping whatsoever will also necessarily rely on a lack of standards or norms in order to keep inclusivity up. The natural conclusion of this, however, is the inability to actually form a community, due to being unable to consolidate some kind of common identity. In any space where a recognizable culture has formed, there will always be an in-group versus an out-group. This relationship doesn’t necessarily need to be adversarial, it is simply a description of the fact that there are people who understand and participate in a group as opposed to those who do not.

Further, once that community is established, gatekeeping prevents newcomers from coming in and trying to drastically change the environment (or more ideally, it simply adds a couple of stopgaps so that “good” changes can be allowed to take place while “bad” changes are discarded). In thinking about this I’ve been reminded of the Eternal September, where in years prior to public internet the newcomers were always eventually settled down and educated in proper internet etiquette, though no doubt with some new ideas of their own. The eternal goal of any community, then, is to prevent their own Eternal September from happening, where they experience a complete and total dismantling of their space.

I suppose this makes me a structuralist, but I think it’s easy to agree that what comes after the destruction of a complex system isn’t always better, and frequently enough is actually worse. To bring it all around then, a user like Hickory--as unfortunate as it may be--simply does not operate in this space appropriately, and a person who is unable to coexist will eventually be ousted by either their own confusion and irritation or by the rest of the group. Indeed, not long after it became clear that they were not meshing with us very well, Hickory simply left.

Nothing more for today²⁵⁵.

---

1^st of November 2020

The Homestuck 2 team has made an “Official Homestuck” server. There is a large amount of confusion and uncertainty over why they did this, as there is no official announcement from them on the matter. Indeed, the only reason we know about it is because the Fellow Travelers Discord Server posted a link to it, and that is the only place where the server’s existence has been announced.

From this it’s clear to us that the Official Homestuck server was announced too early for team’s liking. As such we’ve decided not to announce their server on the HSD or subreddit until they appear ready, or maybe not at all. It’s going to depend on the exact circumstances; with something this odd and unprecedented, it pays not to act precipitously.

We’re not sure what they plan on doing with the server, but this is actually an idea I’ve brought up a few times before, both in this document and in casual conversation. It’s clear that the official team desires more control over their fans, but the only way they can actually achieve that is by creating their own space and managing it directly. This is a good opportunity for them to try and establish a space where they can exert more of their influence directly and build up a relationship with fans that isn’t hellscape Twitter, and I’m very curious to see what’s done with it.

EDIT: I see no relevant place to put this in later entries so I’ve decided to speak with the wisdom of experience from about two months later. The Homestuck 2 team has apparently done jack shit with the new server. Shortly after it was created and things settled down, it was revealed that they had no intention of actually overseeing it themselves (which makes sense, given that they already want to limit the amount of time spent dealing with the fandom) and appointed a number of randoms to be their mod team.

Coincidentally, one of our own mods, Penumbra, was accepted on their mod team too. I was worried that this could potentially lead to a conflict of interest, but Penumbra was adamant that they would be able to perform their duties here and there without any interference either way. We saw no reason to disagree with this unless it became a visible problem, so I guess Penumbra just checks on both servers when they can. This has led to them talking less, I assume having less time to do so, but the arrangement has not been bad so far.

That having been said, apparently the new server is inactive to the point of almost being dead. I may be misremembering but I believe they used to be a lot more open/free about what content was posted there, but over time have accrued more rules that just makes them resemble our server’s system, but with substantially less activity. There was a span of a week at the beginning of December where they had a total message count of 700, and for the same time period we had about 150,000 messages.

Upon discussing this, someone in chat snarkily chimed in saying “you won, Hussie lost, are you proud of yourself now?” And the answer is no; honestly stuff like this is just kind of irritating. It’s not that hard to put in a modicum of effort and respect to grow your base. Having a significant bulk of your fandom in a space that has to govern itself completely because the official content creators can’t be assed is not really preferable²⁵⁶. Then again, I should stipulate that this only works when the people in charge of the property can be trusted to be reasonable and respectful people. Perhaps this is the best situation we could get given the circumstances, but that doesn’t really make me feel better.

Nothing more for today.

---

5^th of November 2020

The chat has naturally been consumed by the American general election, which is proceeding rather strangely. Without going into too much detail: political divides have grown so much that people are openly accusing members of the opposing party of engaging in conspiracies and trying to steal the election from each other. The actual speed with which it’s proceeding indicates that it’ll take a few days to know who is actually the winner. This makes it ripe for talking about, and it’s actually quite interesting to see the clash of opinions between Americans and non-Americans, and people who take it seriously versus those who do not.

Over the year, Misha has made a number of bets with individuals that Donald Trump would win the election, betting up to a hundred dollars with certain individuals. I personally bet against that outcome with him to the tune of $10. In all, Misha has a few hundred dollars riding on the incumbent’s victory. Alongside this there are a few subsidiary bets and some jokes, such as Qweq saying that she bets 48.15 million Brazilian dollars on Trump losing, or Spider betting 50 cents on the ruble that Trump will lose.

Interestingly there were also bets as to what might happen after the election, regardless of winner. FurryLatula is utterly convinced that “civil war” will break out in January, which they have formally defined as at least 150 people in open engagement against the US military (including the National Guard). He has made a bet with Misha that this will happen, and if it does he wins $50. Cy has also made a promise to donate $6.66 to a charity of “mspa-lit’s choice” if Biden wins, which will be interesting if it happens.

As to the election itself, there has been a weird pseudo-tradition developing. In the process, each state is classified by party based on how it voted in the previous election. For instance, if a state voted for a Republican in the last presidential election, it will be classed as a Republican state. That state then voting for the opposite party in the new election is known as “flipping” the state.

This coincides with a particular meme that has sprung out of larger deluge of ape-themed memes. Probably due to the immense frustration and exhaustion with life in 2020, these memes espouse rejecting humanity and society and returning to life as simple animals, like other great apes such as the chimpanzee, gorilla, or orangutan.

One of these memes in particular is known as “Monkey Flip” and Misha has posted it every single time a state flips to the opposite party. This was a minor thing at first, but somehow it has grown to the point that every time an important or notable state is projected to flip, everyone in chat will start chanting for Monkey Flip. Misha waits until the official projection comes in, and the soonest second he sees it he posts the video and everyone in chat loses their minds. It has added a great deal of levity to a process that has otherwise been somewhat harrowing and nerve wracking, at least for those of us who care.

Nothing more for today.

---

29^th of November 2020 - Hiveswap: Act 2 Released

A long-awaited day, Hiveswap: Act 2 was finally given a proper release date a matter of days ago and then just today it properly came out. The reception has been interesting and varies highly depending on a plethora of factors. Interestingly, there is no clear divide based on what corner of the internet a given person inhabits, contrasting heavily with previous releases.

Even my own personal review of the game is somewhat mixed, which is at least better than the bored negative perception I’ve had of a lot of this year’s content so far. Despite everything I’m going to try and describe it in as unbiased terms as possible, and convey what I’ve seen other people say about Act 2 so far. It’s tough to try and consolidate everything because, as I said, reception is basically all over the place.

The visuals and music are both good; as far as art is concerned I feel I’ve offered that exact opinion every single time new Homestuck adjacent content comes out. For all of their flaws, What Pumpkin has no problem whatsoever sourcing good artists to work on their projects (though this might be changing, as Xamag--the person I know to be responsible for the art direction in Homestuck 2--recently stopped working on the project, and for the first time the most recent update was lambasted quite heavily for a drop in artistic quality).

The actual gameplay is very, very slightly better than the first act in some respects, and worse in others. Those who are more fond of classic adventure games than I am have described that there are barely any actual puzzles to speak of, which are a rather critical feature of the genre²⁵⁷. There is some item collecting and figuring out what to do with them, but overall it lacks the sort of depth that people were hoping for in this vein.

To zoom in one thing, there’s a large section of the mid- to late-game that emulates the Phoenix Wright series, which people who are more familiar with the franchise has told me is not a very good rendition. I enjoyed it well enough but it definitely lingers far past what an homage should be, and there are certain aspects of it that are entirely confusing; I admit this latter point may be due more to unfamiliarity on my part than poor conveyance on the game’s part, someone with more experience would be able to describe it more fully.

Something else I want to comment on specifically, is that there are parts of the game where content is very clearly and obviously missing. There are a couple of sections where the game almost directly tells you to your face “you travel for a while and arrive at your destination,” with a jarring shift in surroundings or locale. Further, there are two characters whose presence is sorely missed, and who data miners quickly confirmed were going to be included, as there are still lines in the code that governed their sections. It’s largely suspected that they were cut out due to time constraints (in an already extremely, significantly delayed game).

Even stranger than these things is the way that the team has handled various features post-release, with one prominent example coming to the fore: there’s a mini-game at one point, a simple rhythm game where you can use your keys or the mouse cursor, which was fully functional upon release (if awkwardly implemented; the assigned keys were not very ergonomically placed, which would have been a fairly simple fix). In the first post-release update to Act 2, this mini-game was completely removed.

When people started questioning this, the official team cited that it was removed because it was difficult for people with motor-control or sensitivity issues to complete. This is fair and considerate of the official team, if something of a knee-jerk, but in a game that’s already heavily diminished from what it ostensibly should have been, the removal of even more content rankled with fans quite a bit. An immediate alternative was suggested--not just by us, but by people on Twitter and other places--where instead of removing the mini-game, the developers could have just installed a “skip” button.

With the wisdom that has been graced unto me by waiting a stupid amount of time to write this, I can tell you the developer’s response to this advice: at first they offered the excuse that simply removing the mini-game was quicker than adding a skip option, and because it was Thanksgiving weekend the developers didn’t want to dedicate more time than necessary to the project. A fair rebuttal indeed, but I want to point out that I’m writing this in the morning hours of the morning of the 22^nd of December, and the mini-game is still gone without a trace.

With the time of writing revealed, it might be more understandable why, instead of sounding cautiously optimistic, I am simply bitter. Unfortunately Hiveswap: Act 2 has proven to be yet another example of the official team not dedicating enough attention or effort to something that sorely needs it. It’s kind of absurd, too, when one considers just how long we’ve waited for this to come out. It’s understandable in the sense that the official team was shaken up to the point of recognizability (yet again, this is the second time it’s happened I’m aware of), but even with that in consideration the amount of time they had to work on this does not reflect in what we got.

I’m not exaggerating to say that there are fan releases made with less people and resources in less time that look a lot better than this. With each and every single piece of the franchise we get that this happens with, I’m forced to assume that there is a profound and chronic problem with the management thereof. I’m not sure if it’s a question of experience or dedication or both, but whatever the case Homestuck is suffering from a death of a thousand cuts, and those cuts are steadily getting deeper as time goes by.

Members of the fandom are starting to wake up to this and other examples of the property being mishandled, such as Homestuck 2 updates not going anywhere narratively or one of the myriad other issues. Even such individuals I’ve seen that have thus far ruthlessly defended What Pumpkin’s actions are starting to turn against them, which is frankly alarming to me. I’m not sure how long the fandom can withstand this, and I’m growing worried that our ability to try and care about this property will just evaporate completely at this rate.

Nothing more for today.

---

20^th of December 2020

Two days ago we experienced a complete surprise: Andrew Hussie created a new youtube channel called Hussielive that said a new project of his would be announced in 48 hours. The project was said to be inherently unrelated to Homestuck, essentially a new creative property with which he could start anew. Today, as a community we watched that announcement live.

Makin quickly turned it into an event, with the usual fare: plenty of historical memes to play on Cytube in the hours preceding, with a movie to boot. The youtube account icon for Hussielive is a picture of him in his clownsona (yes, this is a real thing, and said clownsona’s name is “dclussie.” Make of this what you will), and so Makin decided we would watch Big Money Hustlas, a favorite movie of ours by none other than Insane Clown Posse.

The prestream was already fairly active, at its height reaching 150 watchers, but the actual announcement was shocking: per a screenshot that Linkslittlefriend shared, the highest number of viewers approached 500. This is pleasing, because even if people have less to talk about with the property it seems there are still plenty of people hanging around who are actively looking forward to new content.

The announcement video described that the new work will be a visual novel written and illustrated by Hussie, and indeed the visual style appears true to much of what the community has come to expect from Homestuck proper. The work is as yet untitled, but the trailer shows off several (unnamed) characters. It’s hard to tell what it’s about, and there is no set date for release other than “soon,” a dreadful word that has plagued us for years at this point.

This all being said and done, the community at large’s response seems to be “cautiously optimistic” or even “looking forward to it,” as per a hugely informal poll Makin conducted somewhat briefly. Reception in mspa-lit in particular was more divided, with a lot of people such as Qweq, vR, DrCrayon, Dingus, Tarty, Problem Sleuth, and others being ambivalent or simply confused. Misha and Tensei, people whose opinions I respect greatly and tend to coincide somewhat often, were rather divided: as per Misha, “well that was idiotic / off to kill myself,” whereas Tensei remarked, “im hype for this / dunno what yall are talking about.” Others such as Tay, Niklink, and Cello all shat furiously on the art at various points, which admittedly is rather rough even from what we’ve come to expect out of modern Homestuck content, though Nik did cap his summary as such: “i honestly thought it would just be a video of hussie prancing about in clown makeup / this is fine.” At the end of the day, that’s the bare minimum we can take away from the event.

The reception on the subreddit seems to be a tad more mixed, but excitement can be found there as well. Hussie starting a completely new story has been something that we have asked for increasingly often, especially lately; Homestuck as a concept and universe feels so tired that people are basically begging for it to be finished with.

I’m sure this would be different if the new content coming out for it was actually good, but the overwhelming consensus of most post-Epilogues content is that it just sucks. To be sure, your mileage may vary depending on where you look exactly, but that’s definitely how we’ve felt about it. Regardless of all that, though, the appearance of completely new, fresh content might just be what it takes to resuscitate Hussie’s fanbase. I hope that whatever this new story is manages to breathe some much needed life into the fandom as a whole.

With that all out of the way, I do also want to describe something that is pretty exciting in terms of preserving history: a fellow on the subreddit named /u/Sanctferum updated their "Homestuck Sound Test,” which acts as a reserve for Homestuck music that isn’t officially available. Though I haven’t used it myself, this is a pretty invaluable repository. It’s always pleasing to see members of the fandom maintaining stuff like this, and it’s kind of mindboggling to consider what we might have lost by this point without the work of such individuals.

Nothing more for today²⁵⁸.

---

24^th of December 2020

A specific thing I wanted to describe today: there was a discussion between tmtmtl and Misha about a streamer named Dreamwastaken, who has garnered some controversy lately due to--and I’m paraphrasing here, so I might not be completely accurate--breaking a Minecraft speedrun world record, but with a string of luck so improbable that he was almost certainly cheating.

The precise nature of the conversation was a disagreement on the statistics of just how likely it was that Dream had cheated: there was a research paper written by someone the streamer hired to analyze the exact probability of how lucky he had gotten in his world record run and a smattering of immediate previous attempts. The initial estimate that some random on the internet gave was that the chances were one in 7.1 trillion or thereabouts, which would have been beyond the pale in any reasonable person’s mind. The research paper, while statistically significantly better, does little to assuage doubts: the newfound number was roughly one in 100 million (and since this was the result of a personally hired professional, it’s actually somewhat damning in some people’s eyes).

The disagreement, then, was on whether this new estimate of one in 100 million served as any kind of vindication for the streamer or no. Misha, who admittedly has some experience in the realm of speedrunning (a pedigree which he laboriously professed to throughout the course of the argument), claimed that in speedrunning the stated chances are actually somewhat common (i.e. there are a lot of tricks or techniques that rely on events with that low of a chance of happening), so it doesn’t serve as definitive evidence that Dream cheated. Tmtm, conversely, described that the stated chance is still so low, the equivalent of winning the lottery so many times or some other comparison, that all other details became irrelevant and the chance that it was cheating is actually very high.

My own horse in this race is that Misha’s argument is kind of nonsense, because the types of events he’s describing are not inherently luck-based if they can be improved through practice and skill, while Dream’s circumstances are luck-based and so he is probably cheating. That having been said, I don’t actually care all that much about this. I was mostly curious about the dynamic of tmtm and Misha arguing with each other.

In the past, I’ve both witnessed and personally experienced discussing things with both of them numerous times. They are both extremely intensive arguers, to the point that it seems they are simply inexhaustible. Indeed, a number of discussions I have with them tend to end simply because I’m tired and give up. Thus, watching both of them go at it for a while was not unlike an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. It seemed as if their argument would go on without end, although after a while I stepped in and yelled at them to stop. Goodness knows that they would probably still be fighting about it if I hadn’t.

Nothing more for today.

---

31^st of December 2020 - End of Year Contributions

I’ve decided to include whatever user contributions people felt like supplying to celebrate the end of the year, and to add a little more heart and soul to this document. It won’t be as long or structured as the original user contributions were, however; all writing will simply be included in this entry. Enjoy!

Andrew

I come kick gum an chew ass an all ouda gum

Anervaria

I have physically aged more while being forced to moderate #general than I have the past twenty-one years of my life.

Bolas

Having Makin step down and return in the same year was a completely unexpected rollercoaster! I think compared to previous years, this has maybe had a new height of interesting drama, with chaotic results for the fandom as a whole. Also, please continually ping me to remind me to work on HSD the Gathering. :fathusky:

Cello

Woah, how the fuck did I end up here? Anyways.

2020's been an interesting year, innit? Lots of games, lots of music and media comin' out and the Homestuck fandom is somehow still kicking and getting new "post-canon" stuff. You know, surprising things. Sadly most of them were dampened by this thing called COVID, you might have heard of it and/or come into close contact with it, but it's alright, everyone has at some point this year. Now why in the fuck would some random ass South American be telling you about all of this? I dunno, Drew told everyone they could submit a thing and fuck it, that's why I'm here (and I'm also gonna extremely shill random stuff).

First off, HADES, fourth game by Supergiant Games and a roguelike, a fuckin' good one at that by the way. I could say more but the best way to go in is blind, so if you're interested, it's currently 19.99 USA freedoms, and it's worth every cent. Oh and the soundtrack is fucking amazing wHICH LEADS ME TO: K.G., album by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. Is the name stupid for some? Probably. Is the music equally stupid? No it's fucking banging that's what it's doing, and you better start firing up Spotify and listening to this microtonal disco shit or you're a dead motherfucker. Finally, this is not from 2020 but it's so good I don't care, and neither do you because honestly, what else came out this year, Cyberpunk 2077? Eh who cares about that one. Anyways. Listen to Twin Fantasy (Face to Face) by Car Seat Headrest, and yes, this is an indie album made by a gay furry. Do I care? Well I can't hear you calling me a furry over the Famous Prophets (Stars).

(oh and also go read my chart reviews at the music channel they're good i promise please my family's starving i nee)

Cynist

There’s a series of documents, if you'd be so egregiously bold to label them such, that date back to early July of ‘17. Try as I may for whatever reason it seems I aquire a headache rather quickly. It tells a long story. One I am not so familiar with.

But Ive been in this place for almost exactly 4 (four) years now. Its written that my first message ever sent was as and upon 12/17/2016. As it stands, its half past half an hour into the day after christmas and I cant help but reflect on my experiences as an outsider looking in.

Theres this odd sense of familiar in lit, really there is. For whatever reason I find myself fitting in here while I know not a single person. It feels like with every other day that passes I gain a little bit more of a grasp on personalities of frequenters of the domain and I cant help but be hopeful that maybe I too, will stain this place in my own way.

Though I cant recall when, I still hold.. a thin, yet firm recollection of my first interactions in lit.

As far as I can see, looking back on discord provided chat-logs, the Lit I first made the mistake of opening my once adolescent trap in is no longer. I have a distinct memory of when I first choose to aquatint myself with the structure of the server to make sure I had a decent understanding of chat-channel purposes.

I'm not naturally an artistic type. Not much of one for character creation- but I do know my strong suits. Shitpost- an art that is that of the reverse refined. The stripping down of what is commonly known as art till you have raw components and then muddle them into a slurry of fuckall useless garbage; and literature.

Naturally I was drawn to Lit.

What bugged me however, is how little I really understood the provided channel description of Lit. It just didnt make sense to me. No doubt, it mentioned "general literature chat" and things of the sort. But with my lackluster understanding, and not much occurring in the chat- maybe at best half a conversation I shot what shot I would not forget having taken for several years to come.

I'd posted something or other, not terribly large but no doubt semi-chat cumbersome which for whatever reason simultaneously summoned at least 3 if not 5 denizens of this infernal hole to ream me a new one. It felt like I was standing under a cloud that rained exclusively 155mm Howitzer shells.

"What the fuck is that?" "What the fuck is this?" "What the fuck am I lookin at rn?"

"Who is this kid?"

"What is this shit?" "Youre in the wrong channel."

I admit.

I near shit myself.

I had no clue what was happening but I had made a grave mistake. Ever still I pressed forward asking for assitence in the endeavor of wordcrafting. I claimed ignorance. I sighted the channel description, I did everything I could possibly do to subvert the fact that I was clearly in the wrong place. Some people begrudgingly agreed that this was in fact the closest thing the server had to a literature revolving channel.

This however, quickly devolved- as most things in lit tend to. "This is why we should've kept the writing channel" to which was met by another's comment "For what? shit like this?" The only thought on my mind after this near half hour interaction: "Fuck..." I was wholly lost and confused.

It wasnt until about one year ago, maybe a year and a half, that I really realized what Lit was.

and then, yes, about a year ago, I made my first documented interactions in lit.

A second attempt. Another go at it. To find real help, in a community of people who might aid me in elevating my writing. It went well, thanks to a one Canis. Another story, for another time.

Lit as a whole?

its strange. So many people, so terribly unique, connected by no common denominators. Instead these little bridges spawned in between individuals. A series of archipelagos with their own souls drawn together by connections and interests and so forth. Yeah... I'd say its heart warming. What odds me out however is how when I walk into lit at the end- or start of a day, and hear them talking about something I thought flew under the common radar, or I mention something, its treated like common knowledge. I've nearly been made out to be an idiot for not knowing whats common knowledge and whats not in lit because ive come to realize that these are my people in some fucked up way.

How the fuck was I to know that everyone in lit has seen Fesh Pince of Blair? Let alone Connor Lavery's work?

I had this interaction, once, with someone.

Where we broke down music for one another. They spoke of jazz, the old kind, the kind that established everything. Ken Burns, Miles Davis, so on. It was a whole new world to me, yet I felt like this door had been opened to me. I felt compelled to give back so I offered what music I feel most comfortable in, of the Ca. desert's stoner-rock scene, and while they know the mainline names, which was so much more than I expect, I pray to god I'd opened that door wider with names theyve never heard that day.

Its interactions like that. Thats what I reflect on.

I reflect on my lack of knowledge of this place, but how I have a god given gift to see eye to eye with people who at times can seem so aloof and self educated. I'd maybe go far enough to say I'm flattered by this. I hope that, in time I am comfortably equal with these people. I have respect for them, their traditions, their ways. Perhaps I make them up, and am the only one to see it as I do, but theres charm to it. I hope in time, I am recognized as one of them. I hope that in time, I am part of tradition too.

Dero

hey there pretty mama

Eightball - New User’s Perspective on the HSD

The first time that I joined, I was only in the server for maybe 15 minutes. I asked about Homestuck^2, got an answer, and left. No one was talking in any channels while I was there, so my impression was that the server was pretty dead. That made sense to me seeing as how Homestuck ended 4 years ago. When I joined again, I spent more time looking around the server. One of the first channels that I saw was titled #shilling, one of the admins shilled their patreon in their username, and the first channel that anyone spoke in while I was there talked about shills in the description of the channel. This made my second impression of the server that it only served to shill patreons and other things. Eventually, as I spent more time in the server, I saw how the server was still alive and going, that it had more to it than shills, and that it had a lot of history and structure. I was impressed by those things, and I expect that the structure and large community of the HSD will keep it going for a while. The server also led me to several pieces of media that I am glad that I found. I ended up really enjoying several things shilled to me such as 17776. I would have missed out on the existence of it and other works like fanventures if I hadn't come to the server.

Husky

2020 was an interesting year for both outside the server and inside the server, you already have heard every little crumb of detail about the outside world since people had nothing to do but keep their ears glued to their TV's, phones and computers tuned into the news, so lets talk about the not so little land of the HSD, which has reached a whopping 18k members, or well really my experience with it. I have been a regular in two channels for a while both being eastern media and lit (changes name often) , and have seen a small yet important growth of regulars and Mishas weeb streams have actually outnumbered the main stream by makin at some point, the Kamen rider build stream finale averaged around 20 to 30 people (all guessing from memory) while star trek had 15 to 20, which is odd! On the topic of streams, there was a lot of them, kamen rider build, kamen rider gaim, code geass, many, many gundam movies and OVAs and most recently, fate zero, so I hope to see a growth in regulars and stream members. As for Lit, well, I am sure someone might cover it in another entry, but I will say a few things. I have, along side other big channels such as altgen and general, have seen a small increase in gatekeeping, wether lurkers begin to talk and someone says "lurk harder" and regulars in altgen gatekeeping new members to leave, thats all I'll say. So to finish off this entry, if you are lurking, don't, come talk to me, or other members, try to add to the topic, and come to Misha's streams, I think he enjoys having more members in his stream than Makins. (Entry note, if Drew doesnt put my name when this is in SPAT, its Husky#3934, come talk to me in eastern media or lit with a meme or question, I enjoy toku and TTRPGs)

Makin

If you think about it my entire year was exactly like that part of the bible where jesus christ dies due to slander and is resurrected when it's all revealed to be a bunch of bull shit, and then all of christ's conversations with the romans get released due to a yes-disclosure-agreement. This further reinforces my ties to religious figures and increases the cult power of the HSD by about a thousandfold. I hope to continue to build on my evil tainted powers of fan manipulation and manage to get them all to hate Problem Sleuth by 2023 (having Death be good is pretty deathist smh).

Misha

I can't believe I survived the entirety of 2020 and we still never streamed babylon 5

Qweq

The year was plenty eventful. Between the early drama, the downfall of HS^2’s quality, HS ACT2 and the New Hussie Thing? Oh my Goooooooood! Regardless, my participation in the HSD was extremely reduced, I believe most people have noticed. It’s picking up again now, shit got solved IRL, damn online classes are over for me, I've been in the mood for talking to friends again, and the HSD has been a nice and better place with each passing day. Ay yall are awesome!

Rundown of “official” 2020 HS content by me: HS^2 is slowly and surely just getting more boring, not outright bad right now, but incredibly uninteresting for the most part. I’m following it for the sake of maybe getting to hear some new music tracks, but even that seems to be a slim chance. The meat side of the story couldn’t be more far removed from the word “Fun”, as it’s a meta jerkoff session most of the time. Candy is less bad, still weird here and there with some of the decisions the characters take, but I can take it, specially if I pay attention only to the new cast of characters, they are fun; HS Act 2 was as much surprising to me as to anyone else. Gotta admit that it was clearly superior to Act 1, for one, and it rekindled my interest in the Trolls and the Alternia side of Homestuck. Sort of saddened about songs being reused here and there but we got plenty of original stuff so that’s fine. Fun game, INCREDIBLY IT GOT REPLAY VALUE WOW THEY FIGURED IT OUT!; Now for the new hussie project thingy… god I got no words to express my utter lack of acknowledgement, it doesn’t even seem bad, or good? In my honest opinion it was like watching the trailer for a movie that had “from the same writer/director from X” as its main selling point, and said writer/director is someone I just don’t care about. Hussie for me? Don’t care, don’t wanna see, don’t wanna interact with. If the thing is nice, cool, I will praise the work, if it’s not I will talk shit for 3 days then back to normal. Can’t have him living rent free in my mind as kids say nowadays.

!! SHILL ALERT !!

Rundown of other 2020 HS stuff: Shoutouts to Bambosh for The Unofficial Homestuck Collection, amazing work, go check it out, keeping HS alive when the damn authors couldn’t fucking do it; also shoutouts to Cole and Mojavehippie for writing two fan adventures that could actually hook me and get me into that scene, “Karkat goes to a convention” and “Stonestuck”, amazing works in my opinion.

That’s it folks, i didn’t know what to write and it wasn’t my plan to get way too personal, or get too hate-y about the early Hussie/HSD drama. Now go read the next entry, I guarantee it will be some sort of meme.

Rocky

I am pretty sure that I have been a user of this server for at least two years. I'm not really sure what I'm doing here. Overall, my experience with the server has been positive, and I'm glad that it's a place that exists on the internet.

Saeko

I really dont have much to say, I just wanna show up in them credits, but I suppose this in itself consists of what I want to say ? Anyway Ill just talk about this year instead of going into further unfunny meta stuff, hopefully this will picture me in a better light than my previous SPAT mentions.

So, 2020 was... A year, to say the least, and quite an unusual one. People joke about how [current year] suck all the time but I think we can all agree this one was objectively bad. Still, I must say it was quite enjoyable for my associal ass. I got to be a whole lot more active in the hsd, shilled and got shilled a bunch of cool stuff, and Misha finally started streaming some good animes, so clearly things arent so grim. Makin's big return and the reckoning was another highlight (Fucked up how I almost got voted for gaming pseudo), and while they unfortunately kinda slowed down, the few game nights were enjoyable. Finally, the year ended with the announcement of Hussies' new project, as the previous entry should point out. Im pretty neutral on the project itself, but this might bring some cool and new people to the discord, who knows. Hopefully next year will be interesting.

Tensei

I saw Drew Linky at a camping supplies store in rural Missouri yesterday. I told him how cool it was to meet him in person, but I didn’t want to be a douche and bother him and ask him for spat updates or anything.

He said, “Oh, like you’re doing now?”

I was taken aback, and all I could say was “Huh?” but he kept cutting me off and going “huh? huh? huh?” and closing his hand shut in front of my face. I walked away and continued with my shopping, and I heard him chuckle as I walked off. When I came to pay for my stuff up front I saw him trying to walk out the doors with like fifteen fly fishing bobbers, two baguettes and one of those cork hat things in his hands without paying.

The girl at the counter was very nice about it and professional, and was like “Sir, you need to pay for those first.” At first he kept pretending to be e-mailing hussie and not hear her, but eventually turned back around and brought them to the counter.

When she took one of the bobbers and started scanning it multiple times, he stopped her and told her to scan them each individually “to prevent any makin infetterence,” and then turned around and winked at me. I don’t even think that’s a word. After she scanned each bobber and put them in a bag and started to say the price, he kept interrupting her by being a biologist really loudly.

The Ennemy

Hail Linky! What a year! Must one take pleasure in pain to enjoy it?

Muses stay silent in awe of it, fearing the cruelty of the Fates could yet

turn and repeat itself. None could have known that this year would be marred so

deeply, irreparably, cursed to make Homestuck's name true to life. Closed doors,

store-fronts masking our fear of friends dying alone in a dirty bed-

-starved sickhouse. Sing now! Youth is upon you! Fight against these chains!

Fearful you must be that yours is the youth that this year shall eat, lest you

Love all the fellows lodged deep in your warm heart. Hero! Take joy,

Yule-tide rings bells exquisite, wise and unshakeable, cursing

Clotho, spindler of destiny, guilty of casting this ailment

onto us. Ours is the year that comes, twenty-one. Sleep soundly, Lord Linky,

nothing can be as bad (save for a war with nukes, or a surprise attack

levied against a state, casting a whole region, such as the Middle East,

into a whole 'nother decade of caliphates), and our land, now four

years of age, Homestuck Discord, hasn't had better times, rising

fast across all metrics, gaining new users each time that our new lord

(technically old master, who's regained his old reins) posts an ad. Hold firm!

Aye, withstand these cruel tides, stronger are you than them²⁵⁹!

Also Hussie announced a new project looks like.

Tipsy

2020 has been a weird year all round, especially for me in the HS fandom. Many regulars have just stopped showing up. Many fan projects have been moving at an achingly slow pace, or been cancelled. Even CANMT have rebranded.

Back when we first went into lockdown, I volunteered to moderate the #Homestuck channels. I thought that overseeing fans enthusiastically talk about classpecting would counter the negativity that had been weighing down on me over HS2. Unfortunately the chats had a tendency to circlejerk over low quality discussion, but after some changes and some strict moderation, things improved drastically. Two other pseudos were recruited for the channels too, and I'm not ashamed to say Harpy has really been doing the heavy lifting as of late. He's a great mod.

One of the reasons he's been left to the heavy lifting, and I have almost disappeared from the HSD, is because of events that transpired in November.

See, within the span of a week, Adventure Time and Homestuck both had new content. Adventure Time aired its super gay epilogue special called "Obsidian" which features two awesome ladies having an awesomely open relationship. My first fandom, my first ship, my first foray into LGBT matters finally getting the closure and development it needed. I was so happy! For the first time in so long I was genuinely happy to discuss a world I was into, one that is invitingly addictive and complex like Homestuck. The fandom size is much smaller, though, which is the main drawback...

And.... it made me reflect how hollow I had been feeling about Homestuck all this time. Back when [S] Terezi: Remem8er came out, I felt such a rush of catharsis! So happy my theories had been realised, my favourite character getting the dialogue and flash she needed desperately. I entered my creative renaissance and published over a hundred comics during the omegapause, being a very active fan despite the lack of content.

But over time, the bad ending, post canon content, and actions of WP soured this for me. Terezi's character never healed or had meaningful development following the flash. Crew members became aggressive to fans. They started getting paid $12,000 a month to produce a few garbage panels.

Riding my high from Adventure Time: Obsidian, I was happy and ready to give Hiveswap act 2 a chance. It had been worked on by many of the delightful people who made act 1, and served as their final legacy before they were made redundant. The least I could do was honour their work. And I was feeling positive, playing the first half of the act on stream. The characters were memorable, even though it was obvious many shortcuts had been taken. I was, for a few hours, finally excited to talk about Homestuck again.

Unfortunately, that excitement didn't last - I found out there were no credits. All the crew members who had worked so hard on act 1 and been made redundant had their names removed without any consultation. The excuse WP gave for this showed their true colours - they claimed they were worried about "harrassment from fans". This was nothing less than a manipulative tactic to turn the fandom against itself so it couldn't keep criticising WhatPumpkin effectively. It worked.

Though the credits were added back in, half assedly, I was revolted enough by WP's behaviour that I vowed to be done with Homestuck. I deleted Hiveswap from my computer, incomplete.

It is a bit satisfying to see the patreon continue to lose followers after their failed attempt to blackmail fans with the reduction of updates. Maybe the patrons are finally realising that theyre just paying for more shit in their shit sandwich.

Anyway, still riding the AT high, devastated by Hiveswap, I couldn't bear to participate in HS discussions anymore²⁶⁰. When Hussie announced his new project, I watched the trailer but I have absolutely no interest.

The regulars are all still here talking about various interests. It has been great to connect with B3ees in particular about art and creation. However, I think the days of a strong persistent Homestuck fandom are gone. It will become increasingly difficult for any Homestuck projects or events to take off the ground.

This isn't inherently bad. Everything comes to an end eventually.

Tmtmtl30

weird year

Wizard of Chaos

Happy New Year!

---

2021

January 3^rd

There was yet another absurdly heated discussion today involving Misha, but the recipient was Potato this time around. Somehow, though, the discussion was even more ridiculous than last time (apparently the chances of one in 100 million were of any one person in the entire world having that much luck over the course of an entire year, which is honestly an extremely obtuse way of stating the odds): apparently, the two managed to get into it over whetstones and what exactly they are used for.

In fairness, Misha was doing his usual thing where he starts to mock his conversational opponent in a very open and blatant way: “SHAPRPENING / HONING / ROD / … / whetstones are also capable of both sharpening and honing / you have been DUNKED / DEBUNKED / TROLLED / OWNED.” For those who are used to such barbs it’s less of a problem, but I don’t think Potato took kindly to it:

To cut a long story short, it was essentially a semantic argument as to what “honing” means: Potato’s position was that “honing” is not appropriate as a descriptor for what whetstones do, because honing only means reshaping without taking material off of the knife, while a whetstone by nature is sharpening by grinding metal off of the blade. Unfortunately we operate off of misused words that gradually come to be accepted for what they are anyway, so Potato has less ground to stand on here than they otherwise might enjoy.

Despite this confrontation, in which the participants both seemed quite riled up, out of nowhere they started speaking normally on the topic again. I thought this was odd but Reti was actually the first to comment on it: “Is nobody gonna talk about how misha and potato were about to kill each other until suddenly they just stopped arguing / I've never seen a faster turnaround” (Niklink: “im just happy theyre not shouting at me anymore”), but it was lost as people began discussing Charles II of Spain, and whether he might be a better ruler than people give him credit for, considering he was “basically rotting alive” and probably shouldn’t have survived past infancy from the sheer force of his inbreeding.

But I must move on. At some point yesterday, Gnawms had been temp-banned from mspa-lit for, as he describes it, “talking about music.” The mod notes explain that he had been told to move on and simply wouldn’t, which is more than in-line with warnings or bans we’ve given before. After being unbanned today, Gnawms occasionally brought it up which is also in-line with previous bans he’s received.

I finally lost my patience and basically told him to shut the fuck up about it. Ever since his initial altercations back when Tensei was still a mod, he seems to have developed a sense of persecution. I’m not sure how much of it is sincere and how much he plays it up, but he definitely complains disproportionately to how much he’s actually reprimanded. His counterpoint was that WoC brapposts on the daily and doesn’t get punished for it. WoC responded by saying “sniff,” and I banned him for the rest of the evening. These are the antics that I willingly expose myself to on an everyday basis.

For Gnawms specifically though: he has also complained, albeit jokingly, about not being mentioned in this document for a while. Well, here you go Gnawms: this is your final reference ever. Relish in it, for your name will not go down in the annals of pointless and obscure internet history as a figure of valiance, but rather of ignominy. Your name will forever be associated with decrepitude, steeped with shame.

To you I say: truly, this is your reward.

With that finished, however, the conversation turned once more. FurryLatula was describing more of his variously bizarre takes (as an aside, I’ll list a few gems: “all art is theft,” sincerely advocating for a death campaign against all landlords, “age of majority should be tied to working age by law,”), which garnered some dunking by MrNostalgic and Spiral. Nostalgic in particular drew a comparison to an old, old discussion from the channel: back on June 15^th of 2017, Carlarc posted a link to a “Rationality Quiz,” which assigned you a personality rating based on your responses. The reason this is noteworthy, aside from being funny based on the concept alone, is that there was a question concerning how much you would pay to rent a machine that does a “neutral task” in 30 seconds which would ordinarily take you an hour.

The original incarnation of this discussion took place before most of our current residents even talked here, and those who were around back then were even more willing to engage in cutthroat debate. could only be described as a firestorm that somehow lasted days. Every time we thought we were finally done, something reignited the fight; there was endless refutation and disagreement on what the premise of the question even meant.

I would go into more detail, but I believe I’ve described the argument before. As for nowadays, Spiral mused that, “the rationality quiz was definitely not the longest but it was one of the worst.” I managed to find the original link and posted it in chat, but our participants now have far more restraint (or less inclination to fight, one might say) and it didn’t come to much.

Perhaps this is for the best: I’ve seen the sentiment more than once in just the last few months that, while less active, we are far, far more stable than we used to be. It’s hard not to see the value in that, though I still do miss the occasional frenzy. Today’s whetstone discussion was a small taste of that, and it’s always rather enjoyable in small amounts, but I suppose it’s good not to overindulge in discourse.

Nothing more for today.

---

19^th of February 2020

A multitude of things have happened since I last wrote, which I’ll do my best to give their due description: the first and second chapters of Psycholonials have been released so far, to quite mixed reception. It would be too much detail to describe why reception is mixed, so suffice to say that Hussie has not responded well to what criticism exists so far.

This is actually relevant to other news: at one point Homestuck 2 was put on hiatus until after February, then until after April, and then finally it was put on hold indefinitely. A news post clarified that Homestuck 2’s Patreon has officially been closed and the comic will not undergo further serial updates. Instead, it will be worked on and released all in one big batch²⁶¹.

Hussie’s reasoning for this involved many things, but one in particular that rankled with us was the claim that the creators had been experiencing criticism and abuse ever since the project’s initial release in late 2019. The specific reason this bothered us is, I believe, the implication that most or all of the negativity surrounding Homestuck 2 was abusive. A few fellows on the subreddit pointed out that Hussie is skating over all of the constructive criticism or even positive feedback in favor of focusing on the overtly negative and especially the outright harmful, but I don’t believe anyone is surprised by this anymore.

Contrasting with official news, events within the HSD itself have continued without interruption for a while and we find ourselves in a period of relative stability. Makin’s weekend streams have garnered a decent following, with them finishing up Futurama and Star Trek: The Original Series and soon to begin Arrested Development and Breaking Bad. Misha has been streaming various shows for #eastern-media on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with the most recent being a parody of the Super Sentai franchise called “Unofficial Sentai Akibaranger.”

HarpyHour has just recently stepped up to the plate and decided to host a “Let’s Read” for the Homestuck category of channels: he conducted a poll and the crowd settled on The Tapestry, a fanventure grounded heavily in sci-fi. It’s good to see such things keeping discussion going, especially seeing as official content will probably enter a rut after Psycholonials is finished in late April. If there’s anything official or otherwise that I’ve forgotten to comment on, I’m sure Makin can fill in the gaps²⁶².

This all aside, I want to comment on a fun thing that’s popped up within the last month or so: there’s a user named Emma Shethey who, much to the delight of Carlarc and a few others in chat, has been posting a large number of pictures of fat caracals, which they adoringly call “floppas” due to their peculiar manner of flopping their long ears. A departure from our more usual idol, Fat Husky, the caracals have nonetheless been admired so much that Ifnar added an emoji celebrating them²⁶³, appropriately dubbed FatFloppa. Let it never be said that we are bigoted towards obese animals, canine or otherwise.

Nothing more for today.

---

23^rd of February 2020

HarpyHour was recently promoted to full mod due to continuously excellent work as a pseudo, as well as showing some impressive initiative by bothering to start the aforementioned group read through of The Tapestry. Previously, Harpy’s domain was constrained to the Homestuck category of channels, and so based on this promotion I decided to visit the one channel (#homestuck2-hiveswap was archived due to the apparent lack of developments we will receive about either property) to do a more extensive look around than I usually bother with.

The culture of #homestuck shifts around far more than mspa-lit’s does, to the point that it’s hard to say that it has any sort of solidly identifiable structure. This may have to do with the fact that it is a much slower place, having on average 1,000 or less messages per day, and often enough less than 500 (while positively glacial to me, one user named TheFoun complained that this was still too fast for their tastes) . This is to be expected due to the far more refined focus of the channel, especially since the object of that focus has been completely static for years now.

The most I can do with this brief glimpse is point out a few people who stand out to me: I noticed Starkuss participating, who I thought kept to #general only. There was a particularly irascible fellow named Clander who was constantly telling Harpy and others to eat shit or saying things that didn’t quite make sense, but this seemed to be completely accepted behavior by everyone else in the chat.

Though I know nothing of their personality, I noticed someone named apocryphalCharlatan who I’ve seen speaking in #music on a nigh daily basis--I point this out because it’s easy to forget the cross-pollination that can happen in channels outside of lit. There’s a great amount of crossover here with #gaming and especially channels like #general and #altgen, and of course mspa-lit.

Speaking of, there were a few people I’ve noticed speaking in lit increasingly, such as eightball, a fellow named keithmoon, Goodcat612, Topaz, Dureseye, and Emma Shethey. I noticed the presence of Jamie (a long time lit user whom I’ve apparently never mentioned in this document, despite their well-deserved place in it) and the mention of other people such as FurryLatula. He appeared to be absent today, but apparently Lat’s takes are the butt of many jokes among the group that inhabits #homestuck. In this, it seems that his manner is consistent with mspa-lit.

As a whole, there are some peculiar similarities between the people frequenting #homestuck and mspa-lit. Obviously there are a lot of similar people involved, which enhances the feeling, but I noticed that they tended to get off of the topic of Homestuck and discuss whatever suited their fancy. It is important to distinguish that they were much better actually getting back on topic, and were pretty averse to derails as far as I could tell. They were also less abrasive at a glance; their dynamic seemed decidedly polite, mostly interrupted by Clander’s nonsense or someone trying to bring up an unrelated discussion.

Emma, who I described in the previous entry, was talking rather animatedly in the channel. Ironically, my presence initiated a discussion of this document, and tangentially to how people feel about mspa-lit as a channel and culture. Mainly, Emma mentioned that she doesn’t feel that she counts as a regular in mspa-lit.

I’ve seen this sentiment oft repeated among various people in the channel, and as the days go by I have to say I don’t feel like it’s a very constructive way to examine one’s participation. Worrying about being a regular leads to awkward interactions and behavior (though usually only in extreme cases, such as obsession). I pointed out to Emma that her contributions have directly yielded to the creation of an emote and fundamental subset to Fat Husky, through Fat Floppa. Given our lord and savior’s stature, this is assuredly no small feat; Emma’s fear is undeserved, as it surely is for most other people who might worry about how often they participate. Typically, if they bother caring in the first place, they try enough for it to matter.

Nothing more for today.

---

27^th of February 2020 - HSD’s Fifth Anniversary

I distinctly recall, at some point early in this document, writing about where we might all be in five years. Sadly, not everyone who was around back then is still here. The landscape of our community has changed much over the last five years, but I am pleased to say that we are still here despite it all. We’ve experienced much more than I thought we might, too, which makes the fact that we’re still around quite satisfying.

Even more than that, we seem to be burgeoning somewhat. We’ve just recently hit 19,000 members in the server as a whole, and I took it upon myself to conduct an informal census of mspa-lit: much like the last time I did this, I took a set timespan (in this case, one week leading up to this anniversary) and simply recorded every unique name that I saw talking in the channel. At the end of the week, I searched for how many messages each participant sent.

This is far from a perfect measure, but it does serve as a sort of litmus test to see how “healthy” the community is, based on a variety of arbitrary measures. As a rule of thumb, there are two main factors to look for: the number of unique participants, and how many messages are sent. This second idea can be looked at in a more nuanced way, though: what does the distribution of messages look like across all users seen--that is, is it distributed evenly across a large number of people or are only a few people responsible for most of the messages sent?

Generally you want to see everyone participating on a decently equal basis, though there will always be outliers on both ends of the spectrum. Indeed, I have a sneaking suspicion that we were visited by an unusually high number of people who only sent one or two messages and then departed. Some of these individuals were once regulars themselves, such as Putnam. Others are longtime lurkers such as Cruuk, popping in for the occasional message as a matter of habit. However, others were odd one-offs who almost assuredly will never use or even look at the channel again.

As far as concrete data is concerned, there were 113 unique individuals who passed through lit over the week. As an aside there are four notably missing participants: Cyrene and Zentoyo, who have both requested to be removed from the channel temporarily by request, and then Gnawms and Xoro, who simply haven’t been seen in a couple weeks for unknown reasons²⁶⁴.

Of those 113 participants recorded, the message spread is actually wider than I expected: for the week in question there were over 50 individuals who sent over 100 messages, almost 25 participants who sent over 500 messages, and then only four individuals with over 1000 messages. The total number of messages sent in the channel for the week was about 29,400. I’m not a statistician so it’s difficult to parse where cutoffs should be, although from my rough calculations it seems almost no one counts as an outlier (Misha has the most messages at 2353, but his count is highly inflated due to his infuriating tendency to separate sentences into multiple messages when he becomes excited).

The average number of messages sent per user for the week was about 250. It’s hard to get into what this all means exactly, but it helps to contrast it with the last time I conducted a census like this. After going back to check that data (I recorded the entire month of April 2020 last time), there were 65 unique individuals and the total number of messages sent was around 120,000 for the entire month. Extrapolating for three more weeks, we experienced roughly the same amount of volume this time around but had almost twice as many unique participants in only a fourth of the time. It’s likely we would have had far more if I had been keeping track for all of February.

From this, the average number of messages per user last time was far higher, but the spread was also much narrower. Thus, the takeaway from the mspa-lit census is that, while some individuals are each talking less than last year (difficult to tell exactly based on the differing timescales I worked with), there are a greater number of people all contributing more equally to discussions. This is pretty in line with what we’d prefer in not creating a hugbox, and in the previous entry I did state that there are some new faces floating around in the server.

All of this illustrates to me, at least, that activity remains roughly the same and we are simultaneously casting a wider net. It’s to be expected that the average amount of talk per person has slowed down somewhat, but it is very encouraging to see that we have developed a bigger community in general, especially considering the state of the official properties.

It should be briefly noted that a few individuals, including Spiral and Lat, did admit that they were participating less than usual for various reasons. That being said, in a time where the future of Homestuck and its adjacent material is uncertain, it’s nice to know that we are continuously gaining new members who all bring fresh perspectives to the table and keep things interesting. If I can remember to do so, I think I’ll be making this census a yearly affair using these same methods from now on.

Nothing more for today.

---

4^th of March 2020

Two days ago Makin added a new shill entitled Starwink, which is truly a momentous occasion. It’s important to keep in mind that the contents of the shills list actually serve two purposes: they’re meant to be stories that Makin considers high quality and generally deserve more exposure, and they are also meant to generate discussion. In this latter point, Starwink certainly succeeded.

Without getting into too many details, the central conceit of the story involves certain developments or themes that are arguably related to eugenics. I specify “arguable” because the precise case is complicated, and it can easily go either way depending on individual interpretation. Indeed, most people in the chat who read the story--a mere 8,000 words, so accomplished quickly--did not draw the comparison, or simply didn’t bother to do so verbally.

Gitaxian on the other hand singlehandedly spearheaded a considerable dissent about how the tone of the story is actually distinctly related to eugenics, and that it disgusts them severely because of this. So ardent were they in this thesis that we ended up spending a solid hour or two doing nothing but arguing this point through various minutiae. It actually grew quite heated, more so than usual before Makin started employing his usual Fat Husky distractions²⁶⁵ and other techniques to simmer things down.

Recalling the purposes I laid out before, it can be said that Starwink easily fulfilled the role of “generating discussion,” a point that all present agreed fulfilled it as a good shill. It was actually quite fun to be put through the ringer like that, in a kind of discussion that we haven’t had in some time (we would ordinarily have them every month or so, but Worth the Candle has been taking incredibly long amounts of time to update lately). Though Starwink hasn’t come up in the two days since Makin initially posted it, I have little reason to doubt that it will return one day, and we will rehash this whole ideological roundtable in no less feverish a manner.

That all being put aside, the only other thing I want to write about for now is far sillier a topic. Namely, WoC brought up some nonsense today and I was reminded of his stunning penchant for somewhat successfully forcing memes. Specifically, he asked about a completely fabricated idiom and managed to convince a few people present, including myself, that it was Canadian in origin (he called Reti, a prominent Canadian, to laugh at his expense once the gambit was revealed).

More than this though, WoC immediately pulled a few more fake idioms out of his ass on the spot and they all managed to sound convincing in their usage. One in particular, “torching the whiskey,” was used as a response to me trying and failing to come up with any useful turn of phrase, and as such could be taken to mean that I was “exhausting yourself over nothing.” At this point B3es chimed in with one of his own: “thick fish-lifters,” which is just an asinine way to refer to someone who’s very heavily muscled.

These kinds of exchanges happen enough that my brain tends to skate over them anymore, but something about these two specifically stuck out to me. I think it’s amazing what kind of dumb memes or even run of the mill malaproprisms can potentially catch on and become wholly new additions to a common space’s language. Obviously for the most part these get forgotten over time, but the most popular ones endure and permanently enter one’s personal lexicon. It’s a pretty weird form of knowledge transfer, to the point that I wonder what words we’ll all be using decades from now that come from the HSD--we probably won’t even remember that they came from here, when all is said and done.

Nothing more for today.

---

13^th of Apri2020 - 12^th Anniversary of Homestuck

It’s that time of year again. I actually expected today to be somewhat calm and unremarkable, outside of the obvious, but dear goodness was I wrong.

A youtuber named Sarah Z put out a video essay called “A Brief History of Homestuck” which, as the title implies, covers Homestuck as a property, with some details about the fandom as well. Though only relatively brief, at over 2 hours and 10 minutes, it keeps to general ideas and only mentions some few details in passing, including--to my surprise--the emails we released last year.

In all I felt the video was well written and decently structured, though it did lead to a rather interesting outcry on Twitter. Aysha, presumably without seeing the video in any sense, literally called it a “hit piece” and there is a disturbing screenshot of her personal server where she says “GET THIS BITCH,” linking to a tweet by the writer Gio, and calling them a stalker.

After the shockwaves from this dramatic development subsided, we started the usual business of endlessly dissecting and analyzing how and why this happened. I would say there are two camps depending on how one feels about Gio’s writing, but that’s not really true. While it’s accurate to say that there are mixed feelings about their journalistic integrity, the overwhelming consensus is that this reaction to Sarah Z’s video--not just from Aysha but numerous other people on Twitter--is so disproportionate that it obliterates all possible justification.

B3es was uncharacteristically irritated with Twitter’s reception to the essay, implying that he’s seen numerous videos by Sarah Z. He describes her as being “obsessively centrist” and goes on to say that most of her positions on the things she covers occupy territory that is somewhat milquetoast. After watching the video for myself, I have to agree that it sticks stubbornly to the middle of potential explanations for any and all drama over the last few years: Sarah Z laboriously presents all potential viewpoints, drawing both from Gio’s articles and official statements put out by members of WP. She goes on to say, repeatedly, that these sources are not necessarily trustworthy and to exercise critical judgment on them, and for good measure she implores her viewers that harassment of any creators is strictly unacceptable.

Apparently these disclaimers weren’t enough, as a few Homestuck fans on Twitter still threw their all-encompassing tantrum. This particular instance was unusual as there were a litany of responses telling Aysha and other detractors to calm down, as the actual tone of the essay was decidedly neutral and completely fair. This did nothing to assuage those unhappy with the video, which gave the appearance that Homestuck Twitter was eating itself alive.

This was all somewhat unusual for us, in the sense that we were not directly involved with the drama this time around, affording us an outsider perspective on the veritable shitstorm. It didn’t necessarily make it easier to discuss, but it definitely made it easier to poke fun at the events in question. For example: at one point Aysha made the claim that Sarah Z “didn’t attempt to get in contact with any of us,” to which Tensei drafted a joke tweet that said: “I feel ya sis. Fwiw we (the homestuck reddit discord) didn’t get consulted on anything either. Let’s call it a wash?” He then said that he accidentally posted this for real, causing chat to briefly explode with amusement.

Some hours into the day, there was an unprecedented statement put out on the Hiveswap Kickstarter for backers. It provides an exhaustive refutation of “misinformation and deliberate disinformation” surrounding the development of Hiveswap. Specifically, it describes the state of What Pumpkin’s studio in New York City and the troubles concerning The Odd Gentleman, as well as various staffing issues. For some this refutation served as more or less adequate explanation, but for others--myself included--it is still vague to the point of unacceptability.

Unfortunately, it is largely being taken for granted that non-disclosure agreements surrounding Hiveswap and The Odd Gentleman are still in effect, which continues to frustrate understanding of the events. Makin disbelieves that NDAs could still be in effect so much time later, but generally NDAs can last for up to 10 years. If the contracts are set for that time span then they will expire in a few years, but until then we’re still ultimately forced to speculate on these matters, much to my and other people’s annoyance.

As an interesting bonus from this statement, included as evidence is a playable prototype for Hiveswap. Notably, this prototype--little more than an extremely broken tech demo--is from back when it was still a 3D production. Kratospie made a joke that this could be considered fulfillment of a long kept promise to distribute the beta of the game to Kickstarter backers:

“THE BETA" Joke

April 13th 2009 - April 13th 2021

'At long last, in our Emails'

(“The Beta” also simultaneously being a joke about Beta Homestuck, an experiment in making the comic purely in Flash, from just before Homestuck proper was released).

The tech demo is largely unremarkable and honestly kind of shamefully incomplete for the stage of development it was in: most things about it simply do not work, and it can be completed in a very short period of time. It’s such a quick experience, in fact, that Emma Shethey and another user who wishes to remain anonymous actually started competing to speedrun the game.

The longest time I can recall was somewhere around 30-35 seconds, but through various absurd exploits they were able to shorten it to just below 15 seconds. Of note, the demo has literally no text in the French version, so that all dialogue is skippable. The entire process of refining the speedrun happened over merely 15 minutes of constantly improving their technical skill and finding various glitches or exploits. Emma eventually emerged the world record holder for Hiveswap’s Prototype at 14.91 seconds.

This aside, several hours after the statement was put out, Sarah Z sticked a comment on the video essay saying that she was being threatened with explicit legal action. This sparked some indignance from us, as a preposterous overreaction to something that is decidedly neutral in tone and treatment. Unfortunately there’s not much more to be said about this for now, as obviously none of us are privy to the ongoing details. Suffice it to say that, if this is intended to mute the video’s reach and “prevent damage” to What Pumpkin’s reputation, they have succeeded only in making people upset due to their absurd overreaction and damaging their reputation on their own.

Moving on to more pleasant things, we had the annual community stream as usual, and the turnout was actually somewhat surprising: as stated at the beginning of the entry, I expected this year to be perhaps a little bit less active than last year’s stream, but we had a very decent turnout. We watched James Cameron’s Avatar, the Con Air Special Edition of course, and then Big Money Rustlas. The peak viewership was 275 people during Con Air, and I recall several people saying that it “hit differently” this year, being more entertaining than previous watches (unfortunately my internet was not able to keep up with the movie so I couldn’t share in the experience, much to my disappointment).

A user who’s been participating more frequently in lit lately asked for statistical information. As an aside: this user, Faeby, is a rather whimsical regular I’m most used to seeing in #general, and is rather open about circumstances of her life with us (describing particular details such as an ex who “owes her $10,000” and a self-described drinking habit, which I sympathetically indulged in alongside her). Curiously she’s the only one I can think of on the server who has an avatar which is literally just an actual picture of herself²⁶⁶. She’s one of a few people in #general who have a tendency to occasionally dominate discussion, including Angel and thebadnut, but I believe this habit may have subsided over the last couple months.

That being said and done, the stat information I provided her were brief and rather notable, so I will include them here: for 2021 so far we see an average of 16,000-18,000 messages per day, but on 4/13 we saw 35,000 (and the day after we saw nearly 50,000, an impressive enduring spike). On average we have 5-10 net new users per day, but for 4/13 it was fifty new users (though for 4/14 we dropped back down to average), which is possibly the greatest swell of new users we’ve ever had on a meme day.

Due in no small part to the fallout from Twitter drama, there was a lot of hilarious content that was put out by users in mspa-lit. We actually hit an all-time record for pins in a single day, reaching no less than seven (the previous record was three, set earlier this year). Relatedly, not long ago user eightball volunteered to create a separate image archive for funny Arquiusbot responses using the “D--> linky” function. This is immensely useful, as it both cuts down on space being taken up in the pin list and also reduces selective pressure on which responses we feel like screenshotting and saving. It’s always pleasant to become more organized and keep things going smoothly.

Overall, this 4/13 was far more contentious than I expected it to be when I woke up. We’re all waiting to see what comes of the altercation between WP and Sarah Z, but it could be a long time before we see the conclusion, if ever (some speculate that Sarah might simply ignore these threats, but she appears to be taking them seriously). Otherwise, for now we are enjoying the increased vigor that always comes with these community events. 6/12 certainly has a lot to live up to this year.

Nothing more for today.

---

1^st of August

As I feel like I’m running out of things to say, and especially with some bigger changes in my life happening recently, SPAT entries will probably become more like this one: individual days will be collected together for ease, since it means I spend less time on formatting or trying to make smaller entries satisfying on their own. The ensuing paragraphs will all be longer than usual and not have any clear transition from one topic to the next, unless the topic is just that important or otherwise extenuated.

For some months now, Harpy has been running the fanventure read along. The event appears to be proceeding very well, with a decent number of participants even for fanventures that--at least at first glance--appear to be relatively obscure. There have been some odd difficulties with it, however: initially, they tried to make it a democratic event, such that participants could nominate and collectively vote for which fanventure to read. Unfortunately, it was exceedingly obvious that someone was using this system to gain visibility for their own story. This actually happened a few times, after which Harpy declared “democracy over” and that they would simply choose which one they were doing from now on. This caused some grumbling at first, but ultimately has proven to be a stable enough system²⁶⁷.

In May or so, Makin decided to remove a lot of the emotes that resemble either himself or myself, in an effort to stymie any possible complaints²⁶⁸ of HSD being a “circlejerk” surrounding either of us. There was some dismay from mspa-lit regulars about this, but it’s hardly out of line with previous claims and actions that Makin has taken on the subject. Thus, the emote “bred,” depicting me eating a baguette like a wild animal, was removed. Another one of mine, an edit by WoC where I resembled monkaS, was initially taken off but then some weeks later readded by popular demand--the utility was apparently missed too much. Makin himself retained one called “makinsmush” that we’ve historically used to call him out when he’s intentionally being a jackass, a state sometimes referred to as “smushy.” Thus, the vain emotes are gone, but the more utilitarian emotes remain.

Tensei specifically requested, at some point, that I “talk about how some people feel like they’re not smart or funny enough to participate in the channel.” I don’t remember when this happened or the exact context, but I do remember agreeing with him that it was an interesting idea. I seem to recall one user or another, probably a wanderer from gen or altgen, commenting something to this effect. It’s kind of weird to see both ends of the spectrum in this regard, where we get people talking down on themselves, and then conversely others will complain that the conversations in mspa-lit are merely pseudo-intellectual or boring. When you get to a contrast like that, you can’t help but chalk it up to taste; different strokes for different folks, as they say. Tori (who has since left the server for benign reasons) joked: “the only reason I can post in here is by repeatedly establishing my role as a combination of court jester and uninformed reader insert intended to prompt exposition from other characters.” Based on this and other comments, it’s clear that--even if it’s not a universal thing--some people do in fact feel some kind of pressure in how they behave while talking in mspa-lit.

My own thoughts on the idea are that we definitely prefer some kinds of conversational participants over others, but it’s kind of hard not to do so even just as a general thing. Few people want to admit it readily, but it’s difficult to enjoy a discussion where one or more participants are slow, dull, boring, repetitive, or whatever negative attributes you might want to put there. Even just by unconscious preference, a group of chat members that builds a reputation and camaraderie with each other are not going to be very tolerant of people who disrupt the overall quality of what’s taking place. “Newcomer” by itself is not something that’s applied as a pejorative, at least not seriously, but a newcomer in chat is always an unknown element. First impressions really do matter a lot, because a highly visible outsider making some kind of blunder is going to have a hard time resuscitating their reputation, as opposed to a well-known regular who flubs up relatively infrequently. This isn’t particularly fair, especially in the sense that it’s easy to mess up first encounters through sheer unawareness of norms, but I’m not sure there’s anything we can do about that besides opening the gates and ignoring blatant missteps. Granted, it’s fair to say “they don’t know what’s going on yet,” but it’s also fair to point out the faux pas and expect them not to repeat it. This latter part, in my experience, is usually the issue, as opposed to any first contact scenarios gone amiss. I’m pontificating on this matter entirely too much though, and losing my train of thought. On to the next topic.

In the first week of June, Makin described that he would be gone more than usual, so he told me to handle anything that comes up. This isn’t the first time this has happened, occurring a few times across the last four years or so. Unfortunately, something that’s gotten only slightly better over those four years is how soft I am on people when it’s not a clear cut case of rulebreaking. In the relevant case, brapposting has intermittently been a problem, but in such a way that it’s been weird trying to establish a rule. For a period of weeks it may only ever come up as a completely appropriate response in some conversation, but then you’ll get one or two days where someone--typically WoC--just won’t fucking stop. As a result, we usually go on a case-by-case basis at this point.

At any rate, it was a few people involved this time around, including Moonjail, and I finally had enough of this horrid nonsense from someone who is otherwise upstanding to an almost superlative degree. Though they mainly got caught at the tail end of the debacle, I decided to ban them specifically for an almost ritualistic purpose: like Jesus Christ taking humanity’s sins upon himself, Moonjail became a sacrifice, a scapegoat upon which I tried to pin all brapposting. I made it clear I wanted no more of this, at least not for anyone to spam it like they occasionally would--no bans would be issued for other offenders besides Moon, but they all had to stop. I am astonished to say that this effort has mostly been successful, and in the month and a half since, I’ve seen almost no extended brapposting of any kind. Moon was unbanned three days later, rising from the grave as it were, and resumed their place among the flock. That metaphor got a little fucked up, but I’m sure you get what I mean.

Around the time Moonjail came back, Misha brought something positively vile to the chat. He had milk and coke and asked which of them to drink first, describing it as a conundrum since both drinks are only good when ice cold. A few including Mint, hb, Tay, and tmtm told him to drink both simultaneously. Mint took it a step further and told him to add rum, and thus a new cocktail was born: two parts milk, one part coca-cola, add rum to taste. A simple recipe, but the end result made various people in chat feel sick to their stomach just thinking about it. Naturally, a bunch of us decided to try this concoction out for ourselves. The proceedings were calm enough at first, but then eventually pandemonium ensued: WoC and Tarty gave it a shot and described it as “surprisingly not bad,” at which point I decided to hop on the wagon. I agreed with their assessment, up to a point: the taste and texture were both individually fine in a way that mixed together to be completely awful. At this point all of us began to experience significant gastrointestinal distress, whereupon we collectively decided to call it the Cheesemaker, since alcohol curdles milk (at this point, Tarty described: “The first gulp from the glass of the Cheesemaker will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”). Moonjail eventually joined in with their own custom drink, “Anaphylaxis on the Beach,” consisting of amaretto and Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy, upon which drinking they rapidly devolved into the written equivalent of Mongolian throat singing.

The overall point is that my handling the server without Makin went perfectly fine.

At some point, Makin created a new channel for something he initially dubbed the “Homestuck Timeline Project.” Therein, he put out a message recruiting the help of any user who had knowledge of stuff that’s happened in the fandom and when. The actual message stated: “This is a channel for developing a crowdsourced fandom timeline.” I was unable to participate unfortunately, not having much information to contribute, but thankfully he ended up receiving some valuable additions. Evidently his efforts bore fruit, because then for 6/12, he fully released the Homestuck Timeline on homestuck.net. Though there was a dim undertone due to the fact that we didn’t receive any official news for the meme date, it was a jovial time for our community nonetheless with our typical stream experience.

On the 10th of June there was a preshow for E3 that we decided we wanted to watch. Whenever E3 rolls around each year, if there’s anything we’re interested in watching together, we usually put it up in the group Cytube channel so we can all share our reactions in real time in a more streamlined manner. The preshow unfortunately coincided with a stream time that Misha has regularly been using for a long time now, many months. Makin commandeered the room regardless, so Misha got absurdly pissed off and left the server entirely. I was not in a position to respond quickly but saw it happen, and nearly blew a gasket at both Misha and Makin for their handling of the problem. By the time I was able to comment, the situation had largely resolved itself though; Misha came back after an hour and admitted he had badly overreacted, then Makin eventually described that he wasn’t paying attention and genuinely didn’t know Misha had reserved the room at the given time. I didn’t have to yell at either of them, which was a rather pleasant surprise. Thinking back it’s actually possible that my involvement would have made matters worse from my sheer frustration, so perhaps it’s a blessing in disguise that I was unavailable. Regardless, I’m happy they were both reasonable enough to make up over the issue.

On the 30th of June, Sarah Z posted a followup video where she described receiving a threat of legal action from What Pumpkin after releasing her history of Homestuck video back in April. She further details an email chain she had directly with Andrew Hussie, where he claimed to want to describe details she got wrong or why certain sources she referred to were untrustworthy, but then generally gave her a ridiculous runaround. Thankfully she dealt with this shitfuck of a nightmare encounter in a much more effective manner than we did, and in the process she provided a rather laborious dissection of Hussie’s responses, detailing them as variously “vague” and “ghoulish.” As one might expect, this unleashed a fresh wave of discussion on the subreddit and Discord server. In those places, the new information was seen as simultaneously cathartic and horrifying: it’s relieving to know that we’re not the only people to know and understand Hussie’s moronic and even malicious behavior, but I personally felt rather bad that someone else had been exposed to his chicanery.

There was the usual retaliation from people who are still in What Pumpkin or Hussie’s orbits, ignoring claims in the video or outright fabricating accusations (the details of which escape me at this point, but there are plentiful examples assuming those tweets aren’t deleted) against Sarah Z for posting the video. Very shortly after the video got released, Gio also published another article on this weirdness. Gio then came to chat with us about the proceedings for a few days, which was a pleasant affair. Strangely, we seemed to get a massive influx of people in mspa-lit for about a week, easily amounting to a couple dozen completely new faces. We’ve even retained a few of them since, but especially at the time it was a rather noticeable increase.

As it is, things have thankfully calmed down in the time since. There’s a general sense of unease, I think, about the future of the property. It’s difficult to overstate how serious of a nail in the coffin this all was: people in our community were already not happy with Hussie and his cohorts because of our own interaction with him last year, but there were still a number who were on the fence because Makin and I didn’t handle the interaction very well. Sarah Z handled it in a much better way, which makes it far less ambiguous that Hussie is not behaving appropriately, though it does make it a tougher pill to swallow. I’ve commented elsewhere that Hussie et al. need to change course immediately, in terms of how they treat other people and their audience, if they want any hope of rescuing the property and their careers. Unfortunately, I don’t know if they have the emotional wherewithal to do so, or that they even care about not fucking things up for everybody, including themselves. Time will tell what happens, but most of us are now convinced that Hiveswap and Homestuck 2, and by extension Homestuck as a whole, are completely dead properties. Many have pointed out that this was going to happen at some point regardless, but even worse, some are starting to argue that the franchise dying completely is the best outcome.

On the 13th and 14th of July, Moonjail, WoC, and then Anervaria all stepped down from their positions, and a fourth approached me in private about maybe following suit for personal reasons. The timing is just an unfortunate coincidence, as the three were all just tired of being mods--in WoC and Anervaria’s case it was more than understandable, seeing as Aner had four years on the team and WoC’s been on it longer than even I have. WoC is still technically on the team, just as a botmaster instead of typical mod staff. Still, it’s very sad to see all of them decide to halt their duties. I almost get the feeling that we’re due for another Reckoning, perhaps catalyzed by these changes. The server isn’t exactly in dire straits without them, but mod team shake ups always involve a lot of effort to find suitable replacements and get them up to speed, especially if they’ve never had mod experience before. That having been said, I’ve grown to really appreciate the process of recruiting people and giving them community management experience. Obviously we’re not a very serious organization or anything like that, but being able to participate in a structured environment and learn how to keep things in stable condition is pretty valuable. Besides, stagnation is to be avoided. We’ll just have to see how things work out.

Over the course of late June and especially July, we’ve witnessed a significant rise in a trend of “recycling²⁶⁹” posts. Rather than referring to the actual reposting of material that’s already been seen, “recycling” in this context refers to reacting to the post or repost in question with the recycle emoji, to signify that someone has seen it before. This has happened before in the year, once or twice in February and in the subsequent months, Tensei and Tera being convinced that we started doing it as early as last year, but it wasn’t until July that it really exploded in occurrence. Naturally, as with anything that suddenly rises in popularity of practice, the people who hate it have also increasingly voiced their distaste for it (Moonjail in particular has been rather acerbic in their disapproval of the trend). Now the practice seems to have fallen somewhat out of vogue, as I’m not noticing it much anymore, but the times I do see it feel like they’re more semi-ironic than a genuine attempt to call out reposted material. This makes sense to me; after all, when you think about it, it’s rather selfish to complain about reposted material unless literally everyone--or at least an overwhelming majority--has seen it already.

The Psycholonials subreddit appears to have been abandoned by its creators and all mods for an extended period of time. After checking myself, near the beginning of July, it seemed that none of the mods on the subreddit had even been online for a period of over two months. At that point, Makin decided to step in request a transfer of ownership from Reddit. This is actually parallel to a more general sitewide decision to strip ownership from subreddits that have a dearth of activity²⁷⁰. The overall result is that the request went through, and Makin now owns the Psycholonials subreddit as well. He’s put METY on the team as well as recruited a few others in order to try and revamp and glorify the subreddit, though it will surely take some effort.

As a self-indulgent side note: Makin went to mspa-lit at some point and asked if there was anyone interested in moderating the new sub, but I specifically declined because I wasn’t a big fan of the story and trying to take care of a space for something I don’t care about is generally a rather poor idea. I believe the contrast here speaks for itself. Now, I can only wonder whether we or more specifically Makin will face any kind of backlash for the takeover. It’s been a little while since the change went through and no one has noticed yet, though. I’m not sure if it’s possible for that to really change; if Hussie makes more Psycholonials content then perhaps, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

Finally, a minor note, but a couple months ago Faeby wrote a delightful paper about folk groups, and decided to make the subject our Homestuck community²⁷¹. Though not edited, once it’s ready I’ll be putting it in section B of the supplemental materials. Nothing else for now.

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8^th of August - The Huskening 2: Ascension

It’s been nearly a year since the last Reckoning, which means that it was time for Makin to conduct another mod team shakeup. The shakeup aspect of it is rather muted this time around, however: as this Reckoning proceeded, Makin made fun of the fact that it seemed we were mostly choosing the same staff members, though we actually did lose and gain a substantial number.

In particular: Tay, Anervaria, Ci, Neth, Penumbra, Prime, Reti, Tipsy, VirtuNat, Shroom, and Pax Probliscum were all completely removed from the team. Ennemy was initially removed completely, but I lobbied to have him come back as the art-cosplay pseudo. Tera was elevated directly from janitor to full mod, and B3es and Juliette (RAARzard) were promoted to full mod as well. In the wake of WoC’s resignation, grimPike was promoted to #gaming pseudo, although WoC is still present in mod chat as the bot master (attracting some grumbling from people who don’t appreciate his eccentricities). New staff members include Axolotl and Snoiper as #altgen janitors, then Chasca for #general pseudo, Kreuz (#general), Lat²⁷² (#general), Slashed Out (#altgen), and Tyzuigi (#altgen).

For channel changes, I can’t remember the exact date upon which some of these occurred, so I will simply provide the ones that come to mind: #music, #hs-art-cosplay, and #oc-hell were archived due to lack of activity and redundancy, #western- and #eastern-media have been recombined into one channel simply named #media, and #alt-homestuck has been brought back by popular demand as #homosuck (with extreme warning provided such that, if harassment or threats break out again, it will immediately be removed again). Most dramatically, #fathusky was archived in the name of encouraging people to post fat husky everywhere in the server instead of just one place. Thus ends the fifth Reckoning.

Also of note: we’ve received word that the Pgenpodcast Discord server has officially dissolved. Interestingly, those in charge have discouraged but do not outright forbid their users from moving to our server (I’m not sure exactly why we were called out like this; perhaps we were seen as the only viable competitor). Regardless, it feels somewhat strange that Pgenpodcast has resolved in this manner. Time will tell if there’s any significance to it.

Nothing more for now.

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17^th of September

The second chapter of Deltarune was released somewhat unexpectedly today; it’s one of the more anticipated titles of people on this server, so we pulled the relevant channel out of retirement. As one might expect we were immediately inundated with an assortment of memes relevant to the game which have, thus far, largely stayed in the relevant channel (though some leakage in #mspa-lit and #general has happened).

The reception has ranged from generally positive to glowing. People whose opinions I generally expect to be more critical, such as Tay, are saying it’s a definite improvement in basically every way from chapter one, and that it’s rather enjoyable. Interestingly, Misha is abstaining from playing the game at all, stating that he’ll simply wait until full release; he had no problem waiting for a few years for Undertale’s hype to die down before he played that, apparently.

It’s important to note that people were expecting a full release and not just another chapter, so after three years the release feels a tad short. The hope is that the next installments will come out more quickly for a few reasons: Toby Fox has stated that chapter 2 was by far the longest chapter narratively, and a significant aspect of development was that he and his team had to recreate the engine from the ground up. It’s also been said that chapters 3, 4, and 5 have been worked on concurrently with chapter 2. Conservative²⁷³ estimates are that these chapters will be released together in another year, perhaps two. We’ll just have to see.

Nothing more for now.

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30^th of September

A couple things to note as September draws to a close: after a couple months of break so as to reduce fatigue, weekend streams are back. Especially exciting is the lineup, comprised of the show Venture Bros for the shorter episodes and Star Trek: The Next Generation for the longer stream. These are both considered high quality entertainment for various members of the chat, and I’m very excited for the later seasons of each show. It might be rocky at the start for each; both Venture Bros and TNG can be categorized as shows with subpar beginnings that undergo a significant transformation as they progress into the third season. Hopefully we’ll retain enough viewers to make it worthwhile.

Second thing I wanted to point out is this game which has taken various members of mspa-lit with some force: Deathloop, of which I know basically nothing, has turned into the flavor of the month but only for Misha, Tay, Tensei, Reti, Kreuz, and Makin (perhaps one or two others I failed to notice). Misha in particular seems to have been completely taken in by this, being unable to do basically anything else. Granted that he did watch TNG with us in WoC’s server not too long ago, but he’s even been missing out on the revitalized weekend stream in order to keep playing Deathloop. I’m not sure what compels him so much about the game, but I’m glad he’s enjoying himself at least.

More generally speaking, I felt like saying that this month has been extremely good. Server activity is up across the board and everyone feels more engaged than they have in a while, which I’m of course very happy to see. The new mod team has been experiencing some internal drama, perhaps the worst I’ve ever seen it, but I expect that things will smooth out as time goes by. Makin has been getting irritated with the circular arguments and threatened removal for a couple of individuals if this continues, hopefully it won’t come to that.

Nothing more for now.

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7^th of October

A member of chat who has been around for a while, known as uR, has been banned. Their presence and removal is notable mostly for being extremely annoying and constantly bizarre, prompting a mixed reception to the news. Many people are glad that he’s finally gone, as he had been known as a chronic shitter in #serious and #general, but there were others who saw him basically as a lolcow--Tyzuigi had been working on assembling a collection of the things uR was saying, as much to make fun of him as to keep track of the things he says which might be contradictory and illustrate something more concrete than just being a constant dumbass.

The instances of their shittery are manifold and in some cases almost hard to believe. Something that personally vexes me is that they were at one point in the Discord server dedicated to Cole’s excellent fanventure Karkat Goes To A Convention, from which he was banned for being generally creepy and weird (acting as if he was familiar with people with whom he had no real relationship, for one example). Cole actually described that he had been staying away from the HSD’s #homestuck channel and other places explicitly because uR inhabited them.

Other things comprising uR’s legacy are far, far too numerous to exhaustively record here, so I will simply list a few: accusations of stalking a woman he “wanted to befriend” whilst simultaneously describing as the “village bicycle;” stealing a $60 badge in advance of New York Comic Con, cheating on his girlfriend and then trying to justify it with various nonsensical excuses and fucked up logic; expressing an unironic desire to recreate multiple systems of fictional romance from Homestuck in real life; getting conned into buying a mixtape and then later getting conned into buying merchandise of said mixtape the next day; jonesing for a mod spot during the recent Reckoning because he wanted to “leave his mark on the server before it collapses,” and his own server takes all the refugees from the HSD’s collapse (he absolutely believed this was imminent at any given time). It’s honestly not worth continuing to describe these things, there’s just too many and one becomes inured to their strangeness.

The precise incident that precipitated his ban was being racist about the new Smash reveal with Sora from Kingdom Hearts: he said this character only got put into the game because, and I’m quoting verbatim here: “asians voted for it. And they outnumber us.” This was technically only his second ban, but he had been warned numerous times not to complain about his bans in #serious. Naturally he immediately went into #serious to complain about being banned for being racist netting himself a third ban, which triggers an automatic full server ban.

Thus, the evil was defeated. Many have breathed a collective sigh of relief at his removal. His unhinged, incoherent rants will no longer plague #serious. The thing that really interests me about it is that almost no one really doubted whether the things he was saying or claiming to do were real. There were a few people who brought up the possibility of it all being an elaborate ruse, but there’s no possible way someone could maintain that much effort so consistently for so long. Someone pointed out the irony that, in the end, uR ended up achieving the notoriety he was looking for. Who knows what he’ll do now.

Nothing more for now.

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9^th of October

Starting off the entry on a somber note: Juliette, formerly RAARzard, has been taken off of the team. She was considering leaving anyway, but she was simply involved in too many arguments in mod chat and could not stop being dramatic when dispensing justice or talking with people in an official capacity. I wish it hadn’t come to this, but such is as it is.

That being said, she will still be commemorated for her efforts alongside everyone else on the present and former team: we recently hit 20,000 users on the Discord server, and I commissioned some art from Nights to celebrate:

Though it took some time to get to us²⁷⁴, it was worth the wait. The full mods are all drawn fully while pseudo mods and janitors are drawn as balloons; the former members of the staff are generally outside through the fenestrated planes.

In all, I think it’s absolutely lovely work. Nights very kindly gave us a discount²⁷⁵ when I commissioned it, charging only $70; Makin surprised me by paying for the entire thing, despite his general misgivings²⁷⁶ about paying for art. I have declared that this is now my annual salary.

In seriousness, I believe that showing some appreciation for your staff is important for maintaining morale and making sure they don’t just feel like tools. I’ve already done stuff like this before, but I think that codifying it so that every major team arrangement gets its own art piece is a good idea. It gives the team a chance to feel noticed and like they’re actually doing something important, plus I just enjoy looking at the result.

In conjunction with the art, I announced a giveaway: a few months ago an extremely generous user who wishes to remain anonymous donated a full set of figurines from Homestuck. These aren’t in production anymore and are thus extremely rare to find, especially in good condition. After assuring them the figures would be given away at no cost to the winner, they shipped them to me and will be distributed when the giveaway concludes on 10/25.

Makin has also charitably ponied up money for two smaller prizes of anything Homestuck related from For Fans By Fans $25 or less, winner’s choice, and making international shipping available. Though we probably won’t be able to do this kind of thing often, I’m grateful to see the Patreon funds being used for stuff like this. Seeing the community get excited and have a chance to participate in something fun is wonderful.

Nothing more for now.

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17^th of October

Makin was feeling somewhat wacky and zany today and decided to let the server test a Discord feature that got released some months ago, called threads. The thing to understand about Discord threads is that they are fucking awful. Just setting it up so that they would be possible resulted in a number of permission problems that I had to fix, such as allowing people to post messages in the categories for announcements and archived threads.

We discovered all sorts of problems with them, but it can be condensed down to the following issues: they are basically just a second set of channels where you have to key in channel permissions again, but due to the fact that any regular user can create them, they swiftly overpopulate the server and become completely ungovernable.

Creating a new channel for people to use often only requires one new person be added to the staff, sometimes none if you can find someone on the team willing to look at it. Threads, on the other hand, are so numerous and accessing them is just annoying enough that we would need to add several members to the team just to account for them. In the span of less than 30 minutes we saw the creation of: a “mod nudes” thread in mspa-lit by Dr Crayons, a “No women allowed” thread by Misha who--true to the name--summarily removed anyone identifying as a woman, “BRAPPOSTING” by WoC in #general for which he was immediately banned until further notice, and most egregiously, “The Cum” in #altgen by some horrible shithead I refuse to look up.

After four hours, Makin admitted defeat:

The end result is that, generally speaking, we will only keep threads for posts made in the announcements category, and then for special occasions like Reckonings or server surveys.

However, I have granted special permission for Sein to use them in #coding-tech because he claims he has a legitimate use case for them, specifically for letting people rant about their problems in isolation rather than spamming up the channel with specific issues they’re facing. I see no problem seeing if he can make them work, worst case scenario is that they either don’t get used or he uses them poorly and we just remove the ability. Regardless, the server as a whole will probably never utilize threads. I’m not sure what compelled Discord to add this horrible, horrible feature in the first place.

Nothing more for now.

---

November

25^th - Thanksgiving - drunken voicechat with myself, Thebadnut, Andrew, Delux, and others; a night of festivity and many games of Jackbox and Gartic Phone, gets fairly raucous, but a pleasant way to spend the holiday with friends

27^th - Moonjail: “moongf's dad pays her rent but doesn't know i exist so i am currently locked in bathroom like a cuck during unannounced visit” further, dad keeps returning just as moon thinks he’s gone, forcing them to hide again like some kind of sitcom

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December

5^th - Bellicose holds first stream of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure Season 6

6^th - Accidentally guess Interrobang’s real name right, entire chat loses their minds over the dumb coincidence; Interrobang and B3es share suspiciously similar details of their extended family, leading some to believe they might be related; Lat becomes jealous that MrNostalgic has a scarf and he doesn’t

9^th - Magistrate threatens to list every single city in the state of Kansas and, after some goading, does exactly that

11^th - Linkybot has an exceptional night of pulls, check eightball’s archive for screenshots

14^th - Makin begins effort to conduct a 2021 Homestuck Fandom Survey

19^th LOFAM 5 release, community stream for the event consistently reaches 100 or more viewers

2022

February

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

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

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

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March

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

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

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April

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

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

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

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

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

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

May

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

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

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

June

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

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

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

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

15^th

A great disturbance occurred today, whereupon²⁷⁷ Captor in #altgen decided to enact a spam raid where everybody in attendance posted an image of Dr. House an unbelievable number of times. Spam has been banned in #altgen for some time now, as Misha convinced me that it was sufficiently ruining things and needed to be destroyed.

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

17^th

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

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

The Great HSD Meetup of 2022

There was basically no chance I wasn't going to write about this. Located at Momocon in Atlanta, Georgia, a great number of us decided to attend, listed below at the places they stayed at each night.

Airbnb 1 - closest to the con, designated hangout space for whole gatherings and the first space to be reserved, by Lat way back when he originally intended to attend. Occupants: myself, Cyrene Savage, Delux, Bolas, and Icedream. Spacious and somewhat nice interior though there were some obvious signs of rushing and cheapness. Plus, the building it was located in was under extensive construction by the time we arrived. There was a different airbnb that 1 would be situated at originally, but the reservation was canceled last minute by the hostess without explanation other than “I do not own this property anymore.” Mystery and anger abounded, although Cyrene worked with Lat to figure things out.

Airbnb 2 - thebadnut, faeby, BeeesWith3Es (with whom faeby is married), Kreuz, Mommy, and Mint. Described by B3es as being “very long,” regarding a singular hallway that was only big enough for one person to move through at a time.

Airbnb 3 - Wheals, Wizard of Chaos. Wheals describes that upon arrival someone offered them weed and then acid. Says the whole place was “tight.” Caledfwlch was originally going to stay here according to the logistical notes, but ended up staying with some friends elsewhere instead. According to Nut, he “had a charmingly humble air of delight at being invited to hang at 1 despite us telling him multiple times that he ought to come over.”

Cyrene, Wheals, Bolas, and Deluxe were the first to arrive throughout Thursday, then relaxing in airbnb 1 for the day or generally taking care of pre-hangout business. Upon myself, thebadnut and Icedream arriving around 10 PM EST, everyone was already kind of exhausted; my initial suspicion was that there would be no hangouts that night, and resigned myself to just scrounging up a quick meal.

I briefly went out with Delux to try and score some food, but none was to be had; the entire neighborhood was a bit of a shambles, not entirely surprising for downtown Atlanta. After deciding we didn’t want to wait for chicken wings from a local joint we eventually got some quick snacks from a very sketchy convenience store nearby and hoofed it back to the airbnb as quickly as we could (I joked later that I specifically felt an obligation to “protect” Delux on the way, though at the time it was genuinely a tad scary walking back in the dark).

After returning, I divided a Little Debbie’s snack cake with ice as our poorly dinner, figuring we would just suck it up until we could get something the next day. We sat in tired silence for a little while, but then Wheals, faeby, Kreuz, Mommy, and nut all came by for the first night, immediately showering the residence with their abundant reserves of energy

While the Magic nerds consisting of Bolas, Cyrene, B3es, and Mommy all immediately went to go play the Gathering in the master bedroom, the rest of us managed to shore up for a game of drunken charades. We had no clear winner due to none of us really giving a shit about that, though it should be noted that Kreuz was very concerned about doing well ("This was more due to the fact I mostly don't know American popculture so I had no idea who the people I was supposed to play even WERE"), and did so after some cheering on from everyone else participating. After everyone went twice or so we decided to give it up, so fae and wheals started to talk about observing Shabbat during the weekend and made appropriate plans.

Nut and I fulfilled a long promise that we would “fight” each other upon getting to the airbnb (she had envisioned a full on wrestling match) and so we ended up doing some arm wrestling. Given that I’m nearly twice the size of most people who were present I won handily against everyone who challenged me, and nut had the good sense to record the match between myself and fae.

The next day, being Friday, was the first that we decided to actually go to the convention, and the beginning of the journey was kind of a fiasco. All residents of airbnb 1 got up at various times, hungover to one degree or another, and we made our way onto the Atlanta subway around 11 AM or noon. We got off one stop too early and, not realizing our error, shambled across a portion of the downtown area just trying to find the convention center. We decided to take the first group picture whilst situated in front of the absurdly large Mercedes Benz stadium.

From left to right: Icedream, Drew Linky, Delux, Bolas, and Cyrene.
Upon seeing it Makin specifically said, "that is the gayest picture I've ever seen."

inally making our way over to the World Congress Center, we took an unfortunate amount of time trying to get to building B through building C, because most entrances were actually zip tied shut due to congoers the previous day forcing their way in. Finally arriving, we were greeted with the biggest mass of people I have seen since the pandemic started, all situated in a building larger than any I have ever seen in my life. According to estimates posted by the con organizers after the weekend ended, something like 42,000 people were in attendance.

This was in the basement where we spent most of our time. The density in this particular photo isn't very high (all my others showing the full scale of what was going on somehow got deleted), but there's like four or five full length warehouse sections like this and they were all mostly crowded with people at certain times of day.

We spent most of our time walking around on the lower level, which contained the Magic: the Gathering tables as well as a full scale arcade room, the vendors/artist alley, and other assorted oddities such as an anime car show and–seemingly at random–an amateur pro wrestling ring complete with announcer’s table.

A couple of ideas were started here: Delux decided to purchase two copies of a lovely piece of art of a husky dog, and he got everyone present to sign it. He declared that one copy was for himself, and one was for me. Nut got a similar idea to have everyone sign the juggling clubs for her cosplay, and having three, she dispensed one to me, one to Ice, and one to herself.

Along with the "WOC Is A Loser" hat, this is now one of my most prized possessions.

Around 5 or 5:30 PM we decided to take a break and head back to airbnb 1 to await the arrival of WoC and Mint, arriving from Virginia. Upon returning to airbnb 1, Wheals and Fae took part in Shabbat like they had described the day before: a couple of candles dedicated to the purpose were lit, Wheals produced some bagels and Israeli wine, and then Bolas was able to contribute with a book of relevant, translated prayers. They were nice enough to include me in their celebration, the first time I’ve ever participated in a Jewish religious ceremony, and after the appropriate blessings all four of us partook of the bagel and wine. It was a strange experience for me, but no less pleasant for that fact.

WoC and Mint arrived around 6 PM and both proceeded to go to the con for the night, and after an hour or so several members from airbnb 1 (myself excluded) went back to the con to scope out more merchandise and see the artist alley. Friday was taco night, for which we had my own contribution of shredded Mexican chicken while Cyrene and Nut made a vegetarian option from cauliflower; Nut and fae both brought over a plethora of fixings and tortillas for people to use.

As more people filtered back from the con, dinner was served and we put on various shows to pass the time including Seinfeld (surprisingly funny except for the standup intros/outros), Yugioh (excellent peanut gallery material), Fairly Oddparents (I don’t recall who did this) and then finally some madman put on Osmosis Jones. Many details from this time are fuzzy because as soon as Osmosis Jones came on I lost all my inhibitions and imbibed alcohol like the wind. In our general mania, we did manage to snag a group photo.

Back row: Mint, Mommy, Wheals, B3es, Fae, and Nut
Middle row: Wizard of Chaos, Cyrene, Drew Linky, Kreuz
Front row: Icedream, Bolas, Delux.
Not pictured: HarpyHour, who wished to avoid photographs during his brief stay.

The night seemed to be ending as people gradually drifted back to their airbnbs, but for Wheals, Fae, Nut, and Delux it was merely the prelude to an event called Emonite, which was an appropriately themed rave. Wheals and Nut decided to make a stop at airbnb 1 on their way back and asked me to mix them a drink before their uber rides arrived. I mixed them a shittier version of my favorite, the kamikaze, and while Nut took it with relatively little fanfare, Wheals started to pass out shortly after, lapsing briefly into speaking expressly Hebrew when we tried to keep him awake. At the time I was worried he was suffering from alcohol poisoning (I had a nightmare that I had killed him with my shitty mixed drink), but the next day he bounced back just fine. He explains that he usually takes a nap on Fridays and was simply dead tired, a more palatable reason for his collapse.

Saturday afternoon I had intended to take it easy, but after being shamed by everyone at the con I made a mad dash for Momocon around 4 PM. I didn’t make it in time for the greater Homestuck photoshoot, though I hadn’t intended to participate anyway

We managed to get our own photo in cosplay taken as well. It should be noted that every Homestuck shirt here was lovingly made by Fae before the con.

Back row: Kreuz as Karkat, Delux as Terezi, WoC, Ice, Cyrene, Drew as Kanaya
Front row: Nut as Gamzee, Mint as Aradia, B3es as John, Fae as Vriska, Wheals as Walter Bishop from Fringe, Bolas as the Sicko from the Kelly comics
Yes... Ha ha ha... YES!

After milling around at the con for a while we decided we were hungry and returned to the airbnb en masse. For dinner we did pizza from The Mellow Mushroom and watched The Room, which turned out to be both messy and highly enjoyable. Bolas, being an ardent fan of the movie, had to be told not to quote every line multiple times. We did our best to assemble some spoons but, opting not to create a mess (and because we forgot to pick them up), we had only about a dozen or so to work with. WoC had picked up a giant foam D20 from the convention which served as our football during the relevant scenes. Fae made two specific comments, noting that Lisa was “the most accurately written woman” she had ever seen, and that our cheering for Johnny’s death was “demonic.”

Having picked up a baguette, I felt obligated to recreate the classic Bred image.

After the movie wrapped up most people went back to their respective airbnbs and we prepared for the next day.

Sunday was bittersweet, as Bolas and Delux both ended up leaving partway through the day. After this, Fae and I attempted to cook in the kitchen together, but ran out of space and utensils to work with. Nut decided to step in and finish Fae’s cooking for her because “she was a toasted magical catgirl,” the drink proving too much to overcome. After a much longer amount of time spent on the project than we expected, most everyone went back to the con (right before we finished cooking, as well, so they had to come back later to a somewhat cold dinner).

While Nut continued work on dinner, including an absolutely preposterous amount of eggs, Wheals and I put on the regular weekend streams, managing to watch Community with the usual suspects from the Discord. After some time of this people then managed to return from the con and the last night began in earnest. We attempted to teach Nut how to play some variations of poker, which mostly went poorly due to collective drunkenness. WoC attempted to step in but the situation quickly spiraled out of control due to aforementioned drunkenness, and too many people trying to hop on.

Eventually we gave up the ghost and decided to do other stuff: B3es brought a Wii upon which people played Super Smash Brothers Project M, where Caled claims he got his ass handed to him in Smash by B3es and Mommy for approximately an hour. Additionally there was Mario Kart Doubledash, the latter of which most people actually played and got quite rowdy. The rest of the night was spent in general camaraderie, just talking with each other over the rampant noise of the TV.

Near the end of the night, Faeby burst into tears because we would all be leaving soon. In a way it signaled the end of festivities, but that’s just how it had to be. As WoC claimed once they were settled at a different airbnb, her sentiment sums it all up: “My drink tastes like I love my friends.”

Monday morning we abandoned airbnb 1, letting Cy deliver the keys to the owner. Nut, Icedream and I all went to deliver the remaining alcohol to Fae and B3es and give them one last goodbye, then the trip was officially ended.

I keep thinking of what I want to say about this, but I feel like it’s hard to describe without having been there; words don’t quite do the hangout justice. Meeting with everyone felt like rediscovering part of who I am, stirring around ideas that I had long forgotten. Tiny details still stick out to me, like the clap and sting of Cy’s hand on my back as we hugged for the last time, or Fae maniacally bouncing around the airbnb after a few drinks, or Mint staring at the TV as she tried to process her ill-advised soju and vodka combo out of an emptied Gatorade bottle.

Long ago I had envisioned an idea of owning my own place with enough space to indefinitely invite people from all over, so that they always had a place to meet up if possible. Being able to interact with people like this again has made me want to pick that idea back up and really work with it somehow, to provide a physical hub of sorts. I know how childish that dream is in reality, but a part of me has reawakened and can’t stop thinking how it would be gratifying to have a space where people can feel comfortable congregating with each other like that.

For now though, the current plan is simply to meet up again in the future. Our main prospect is ACEN, another anime convention being held in Chicago next year. With luck, we’ll have some of this crew and probably some new faces join us then. For now though, as the good Bard once said, “parting is such sweet sorrow.” I’ll miss you guys.

---

Cyrene Savage

and so, the homestuck discord meetup comes to a close. it was a pleasure meeting all of you, i will cherish these wonderful memories for a long time. altho the parting is bitter, the sweetness of our friendship will be an enduring palliative. perhaps another time the server can come alive again and we can once again feel the buzz of excitement and anticipation for meeting other in the real once again. until then, see you later

---

Delux

I had always thought of cons as a cool and potentially enjoyable activity, but, being kind of a stick in the mud, decided they probably weren’t for me. However, I feel like attending this convention has awoken a desire to go to more, and to do more nerdy convention things like cosplay in earnest. Over the year or two that I spent interacting with these people through HSD, I grew fond of all of them and I sprang at the chance to meet them in real life. Now that I’ve seen how easy it is to have a fun weekend with friends, I need to do it again. I think this feeling is mutual among most of us who went, because not two days after we got home from Momocon, we’ve already begun planning for a new one.

---

thebadnut

Upon reaching a laughable milestone in the server, I said, among other things, that 'I don't care if it's cringe, because it makes me happy'. This feeling was put into a three-dimensional understanding with this meetup. To be friends with someone for years and then finally get the chance to hug them! To sprawl across a room together, surrounded by con merch, eating the food we made for one another, and talking about our favorite anime and video games, at first with some hesitation but by the end of the weekend with fervor! To put on my first ever cosplay and feel joy over shame as we passed grey facepaint back and forth and listened to Homestuck AMVs! The strangest part is how it was at once the same and completely different from spending time online. The repeated question I've been hearing since the first time I met with an HSD user IRL is, 'what are they like in real life?' Well you see, we are different, because it's a different medium, but we are also the same, because the bonds of friendship we share transcend mediums.

---

Kreuz

I will never financially recover from visiting US of A from Poland for just a weekend, but honestly it was still 100% worth it. It was honestly, unironically best weekend of my life. In a funny turn of events, my very first experience of America was godawful public transportation system, where moving from international to domestic terminal at the airport took 45 minutes due to the traffic. Hanging out with people I never thought I’d actually meet IRL was definitely a surreal experience. It was also the first time I got to play arcades, and I have to thank Mint for playing with me. God it was all such a blast, I hope I can do this again next year but I really don’t know if I can afford this two years in a row.

---

Caledfwlch

Even though I’ve been in this server for over five years now (christ it’s really been that long) and active for most of it, I would still honestly describe myself as someone who falls more than most into that “lurk moar” mindset. That, combined with me unsurprisingly being a generally shy and even more reserved person in the flesh, made me both surprised and a little anxious when I got added to the big roster for the meetup when I off-handedly mentioned I would be at the con by sheer coincidence. Equally as unsurprisingly in the end, though, was how great of a time I had with everyone I got to see, even if it was only for a little while. Being able to chat and put faces and voices to names for people for the first time, shooting the shit about games and collective nerd interests, and the environment of everyone just being happy to be there and meet each other, made it a memory for me where my only regret is not being able to be there for more of it. Already can’t wait for the next one!

---

Mint

I consider myself a convention veteran, but every con ends with its own set of memories. This was definitely one of the more unplanned conventions in my life, having come back to the server a few weeks before, but it was one of the better decisions I’ve made for sure. It was nice to just unwind and be in the company of others for a few days after busting my ass during my break. Everyone just embraced me being there, and I’m just really grateful that even after all these years, this community continues to be a place I can come back to. It was also an honor to witness so many people going to a con for the first time– to experience cosplay culture, the random pauses for photos in the hallway, frantically putting on makeup and costumes before a photoshoot, and just milling around a building for hours without any concerns. Thanks for having me, and see you at the next meetup! ♡

---

September

9^th

Makin seeks an alternative to Arquiusbot because WoC and Nat have both moved on to doing other things with their time, and Makin wants compatibility²⁷⁸ with the forum feature. He decides to retain Arquiusbot because it’s a better system than others he can tinker with, and for other functions like Linkybot. He decides to keep an additional bot named Dyno to handle threads, although no one seems to be bothering at the moment.

14^th

Makin briefly makes me a coadmin again because he was too lazy to add a Rosemary emote. The reason he wanted the emote added in the first place is because there’s an ongoing Twitter poll contest for “best yuri ship,” of which Rosemary is close to winning outright. Currently going against Bubbline of Adventure Time fame. James Roach has promised “new content” if Rosemary wins the contest²⁷⁹. People have been getting the word out, Makin even made an announcement about it in the server.

Additionally, Makin brings back forums due to finally getting bot compatibility for them going and vows to bring back voicechat this weekend²⁸⁰.

---

2023

February

11^th

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

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

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

---

March

20^th

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

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

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

---

27^th

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

---

April

1^st

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

A relatively minor event but overall the effort seemed successful.

13^th

Annual stream commences, this year being the live action Super Mario Brothers movie²⁸¹ from 1993 as a nod to the release of the new, animated movie from this year. The Con Air: Special Edition portion of the stream gathered a delightful number of participants, exceeding 300 at the most. Despite the general slowdown of the property and its fandom over the last few years, it seems that we can all still celebrate the major events with no issue.

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

Photo credits to HeyItsJess76 and yoitscro.

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

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

Photo credits to yoitscro and Viz Media.

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

Photo credits to HeyItsJess76.

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

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

16^th

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

---

27^th

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

Unfortunately this came back to haunt me, as WoC did the usual thing, and I woke up to find that I had been de-adminned. This is not really a problem considering I asked for that exact thing a couple weeks ago, but at that time Makin had denied the request. I asked him why he changed his mind, and he said it was for enabling WoC’s “drive-by shitposting.” If nothing else, it seems I’ve arrived at a method to let me properly resign my post if necessary again²⁸².

---

28^th

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

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

It is not an exaggeration to say that this conversation went on for about three, maybe four hours (if not more), crowding out all other discussions which tried to flair up but were fairly quickly aborted while the two were occupied. This finally came to a head when Moonjail decided he had enough and exclaimed that MrCheeze is “intellectually dishonest” and a “cunt,”²⁸³ declaring he would be blocked from now on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

May

3^rd

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

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

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

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

Fast forward to today, and it seems that Yud decided to engage in conversation with what he considers the average layman: Ross Scott of Accursed Farms²⁸⁴ streamed a mixed interview/debate on the topic of the dangers of AI with Yud. I wasn’t able to personally witness it, but all the rats present for it were having an incredible laugh at just about everyone’s expense.

Yud can safely be characterized as having fucking terrible pedagogical skill. It may be that understands the topic at hand, but he is strictly awful at trying to relay the information he possesses (and often came up with himself) to other people, especially if they aren’t already familiar²⁸⁵. Ross, then, is the worst possible debate opponent as someone who openly admits that he does not know or even really care about the topic being discussed.

The entirety of the stream was, as a result, a kind of cavalcade of nonsense. Yud has this tendency to wear a porkpie hat (it might actually be an honest to god fedora, I can’t tell the difference) and he gesticulated quite wildly throughout the event; many screencaptures were made of him that are so visually stereotypical it’s frankly unbelievable. Ross on the other hand stated repeatedly “maybe I’m just not smart enough to get this,” or some such. I’m honestly not sure if the debate went anywhere meaningful, although oddly enough I saw people saying that Ross was “winning” the debate, probably by way of chess with pigeons²⁸⁶.

---

4^th

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

9^th

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

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

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

Going from this, Makin’s prospective list is as follows: after the Sopranos on the 40 minute block we potentially have Black Mirror, True Detective Season 1, the final seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the best of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Cobra Kai was originally on there too, but the Writers Guild of America²⁸⁷ just initiated a strike which means that the final season of the show is almost certainly delayed, and we probably won’t finish that show until it’s all released. On the 20 minute block after The Good Place, we have: Only Murders in the Building, the best of Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and a restream of Venture Bros in preparation for the movie release. I’ve seen suggestions for Metalocalypse but I don’t believe the chances are high he’ll bother to watch that one.

It’s delightful that the weekend streams have persisted for so long. There’s a very solid base of around 15-20 people for the 20 minute block and 10-15 for the 40 minute block, and often enough it can be higher than that. Though my skills with photomanips are horrible I’m getting a bit better at picking stuff out to add as custom emotes on the cytube channel. We’ve been at it for a while but people don’t seem to show any signs of fatigue, generally. I hope we can keep this up in perpetuity, I’m always grateful to have a few hours of this to look forward to on the weekends. I think we’re starting to run out of ideas for what we want to watch though²⁸⁸, it might be advisable to switch to movies for a bit to shorten the runtime and avoid making it so people have to keep up over an extended period of time. I’m sure we’ll work things out.

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

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

---

12^th

Makin was informed of a post by someone named Pip, who worked on Homestuck related material and especially Homestuck 2. In a long Tumblr blog, Pip describes various aspects of working on the property such as the nature of the story. The post alleges that Hussie enticed people to work on Homestuck 2 under false premises²⁸⁹, telling them that it would have more weight in terms of canonicity than he otherwise stated publicly. As a reminder, Hussie and others in his entourage were pushing the idea of “post-canon” or “dubiously canon” content, as a way to encourage fans to make whatever Homestuck related material they so desired without worrying that it would be pointlessly irrelevant.

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

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

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

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

Later in the night, yoitscro came by to chat over the news and offered their perspective, explaining that Pip is almost certainly experiencing harassment now over the news reaching a wider audience. They also pointed out that the information might not be accurate for a bevy of reasons. Pip themselves is not, to my recollection, a strictly reliable source. Perhaps more important is that Pip posted this not to generate attention or tell other people about it, but just to vent in their own space with some expectation of privacy, with no real substantiation behind it²⁹⁰.

As far as that latter point is concerned, I’m of two minds. In more ordinary circumstances I would feel that boosting someone’s post without their permission is inappropriate. However, the nature of the information is something that people who have been fans of Homestuck for this long probably deserve to know, because it can recontextualize how people think of the property and the way it functions. On a more pragmatic level, I think that posting anything publicly which you do want to be amplified is a foolish idea, especially in an environment where you are physically aware of people who tend to be gossip hounds²⁹¹.

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

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

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

---

13^th

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

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15^th

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

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

---

19^th

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

Honestly, if he keeps doing this he’s going to lose people.Magistrate in particular was already complaining about frivolous channel closures like this, and it’s honestly enough to make me not want to use it anymore. Why bother trying to talk in a place that can be closed for multiple days for no good reason²⁹²? Not to mention that the viable number of people who will bother to read shills to get the channel unlocked is already low, because most people who talk in the channel have already read many of the shills that do not take several days to finish. This is a game of rapidly diminishing returns and he’s either going to have to back down or the channel will just be closed indefinitely.

As of this writing there’s one left to unlock, but rather than do any of that shit²⁹³ I opted to just add Pathologic 2 as a new shill to my own list. I’m sure that doesn’t count though, because of my horrifically plebeian tastes.

---

20^th

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

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

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

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

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

---

29^th

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

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

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

Drewbot was given an alchemizer function today using AI (specifically the Da Vinci²⁹⁴ model if I’m not mistaken), fine tuned on Overseer Project data. Obviously it doesn’t succeed all the time but I’m astonished at the times it does succeed. Some of the results in question are nothing short of incredible: one time Drewbot was told to combine a fat husky with nunchucks, and it actually output a result detailing nunchucks entitled “CUSHY HUSKY CHUCKS” with the following description:
These nunchuks feature a rotund husky plush at either end that not only softens the impact but also adds a touch of cuteness. Practical for combat? Debatable. Adorable? Absolutely.

I often underestimate the newer AI models until I see results like this. It seems a small thing for a human to conceptualize but the fact that we’ve gotten to this point with machines never fails to impress me. It continued to output several entries like this and many that were even better, such as the following combinations: You alchemize Nutella && Bleach. You get…
Chloro-Nutella
It tastes kind of like bubble-bath. You're not sure if that's a good thing, or a bad thing.

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

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

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

To be frank, there are several dozens of entries that are clever like this. It’s a little overwhelming to consider just how advanced the technology has gotten in the last year or two. All the better then that it’s being used to amuse us for a fraction of a penny. Makin has truly outdone himself this time, though I still insist that the function could use some sort of cooldown to avoid spam or burnout. While impersonating me²⁹⁵ could understandably be seen as hacky or kind of rote for a model like this, this is the first thing that’s come out of the bot which pays homage to Homestuck proper and does it very well. I eagerly look forward to whatever else comes out of it in the future.

---

June

1^st

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

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11^th

We watched a livestream of Reddit communities going dark in protest of the company increasing its cost for access to their site API. Makin has chosen not to engage in the blackout because of poor timing with 6/12 (and personal disinterest²⁹⁶). Note: writing now at a much later time, I can say that there wasn’t much of an impact from this blackout; it did nothing but piss people off who weren’t really paying attention, and Reddit messed up the API anyway. The website isn’t visibly worse on the surface but bot functionality for a lot of places is really bad now. Just further down the tubes, I guess.

---

July

Refer to the 2023 meetup article.

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The Great HSD Meetup of 2023

Another year done! This meetup took place in Washington DC, or more specifically a little outskirt called Falls Church in Virginia. Momocon was the subject of 2022, but for 2023 we planned to go to an anime convention called Otakon; the character Otacon from Metal Gear Solid was actually named after the portmanteau for “Otaku Convention,” and according to Mint the character actually has a credited role at this convention as a result.

Last year the hosting was done by splitting between three different airbnbs, where one was designated the main hangout spot. This year we decided to stay in one solitary airbnb: an erstwhile Vietnamese food market (there were even wild onions outside so you could pretend it was still a market if you really tried), it had been transformed into a decently sized ranch house. There was also a fantastically unkempt lawn which we were warned not to traipse in lest we step on something sharp; initially fearing the worst of broken glass or disposed needles, someone like Tay or WoC eventually discovered a bunch of broken plates in the weeds for some reason. We still have not come up with a reasonable explanation for this. Additionally, there was a small camper located on the premises for two more sleeping spots.

The house interior had a strange incongruity where some parts like the kitchen and living room were pretty nice, but there was an attachment to the upper floor which had a kind of strange bathroom attached to it. The downstairs was also kind of a mess, with a fourth shower just planted into the back of the laundry room which no one could use because it had no visual cover whatsoever. Behind this shower was the weirdest room in the entire house, a bedroom that had a doorless connection to another room that was left completely empty. We immediately dubbed this the Torture Room.

No furnishings. No windows. Sounds echo longer than they should.
People have surely died in here.

The week, beginning on July 24th, started off relatively tame. I can’t speak for Monday, but I arrived on Tuesday evening and things were fairly sedate. At this point it was almost everyone staying at the house except for Kreuz, including myself, Dero, Nut, Mint, Misha, Ifnar, Tay, Delux, and Wheals; there were also a couple of Mint’s friends from the area, nice fellows known as Tuck, Ben, Noah, and Bips. The dinner of choice was a local place called “Badd Pizza” or some such with a heavy helping of pizza and wings. I think most people were simply tired after traveling so much (Chasca was trying and failing to get some sleep by the time I made it, describing the walls as “paper-thin”), and after a few rounds of hugs and clapping people on the back and saying “I can’t believe we get to meet up like this,” most of us went to bed.

Wednesday morning started off quietly: a scant few of us woke up early for various reasons, and we chatted away the hours waiting for others to wake up. I don’t remember the nature of the original complaint, but “Biden’s America” was thrown out as a casual response (much in the vein of “Thanks, Obama” back when he was president). Without prompt, everyone else present intoned like a bunch of drunken monks at the same time: “Biden’s America.” It became a favorite phrase of the hangout.

A handful of us including Chasca, Nut, Mint, Dero, and myself all went to Target to pick up a few basic groceries. Dero and I actually wanted a box fan because we were staying in the torture-adjacent bedroom, which had no air circulation to speak of and thus caused us to wake up in a horrid sweat, though in retrospect that might just have been the ghosts of the house’s victims haunting us. We were derailed by the procurement of some clearance rack Nerf guns consisting of: a double-shot rifle, a triple-shot pistol, a single-shot pistol, and a single-shot Spiderman pistol. They proved to be a horror that we should have known better than to unleash upon the rest of the group.

Once we made it back to the airbnb, the guns immediately came out and were put to use. People just freshly waking up like Delux and Bips were not spared. The living room became a veritable war zone, with fighting intermittently ceasing only to be taken up hours later without warning. Chasca and Mint in particular unleashed unspeakable cruelty upon everyone, firing directly into our legs and arms and necks from across the room like snipers on coke. The kitchen and dining room were designated safe areas within the first thirty minutes of the frenzy, but this rule was almost completely ignored as the week went on. Of the roughly 20 or so darts that we started with, I was only sure of the existence of seven (just enough to fully load the guns) by the time we left.

Wednesday afternoon is when the hangout began in earnest, though we were still missing a few members. Unfortunately I was bone tired and didn’t make it to the end of the night, missing Misha’s delightful lasagna, but there was much frivolity and I could occasionally hear darts being fired into the backs of people’s skulls even from downstairs. Kreuz was acquired from the airport around 10 PM and was immediately executed upon arrival, so in all it was a fine day.

On Thursday morning we all went to IHOP for breakfast.

The best picture available of the IHOP breakfast.

Left row bottom to top: Mint (slightly out of frame), Misha, Delux, Kreuz, Nut, Ifnar.
Right row bottom to top: Tuck, Bips, Drew, Dero, Tay, Tay’s hair, and Chasca.

It was at this point that we realized Tuck was taking pictures of people at random and applying a chad filter.

Note how little the change in handsomeness from the original.

We implored him to stop doing so, but I believe there are reams of evidence of his further malfeasance as the trip went on.

At this point the group split up: some people wanted to grab their badges and do a little con-seeing, while a group consisting of myself, Dero, Nut, Ifnar, Chasca, Tay, and Kreuz went to Washington DC to tour the national mall.

You can smell the soyjak emanating off of this picture even through your monitor.

At this point we were already a bit fatigued due to the heat.

Ifnar and Nut in particular took the fuck off in order to acquire some much needed water.

Once underneath the Washington Monument proper, we took a small breather under its shade. Tay accidentally brushed up against some sort of stain on the side of the monument, and Chasca warned them away from “the piss spot.” It would have to have been a pretty impressive jet of piss to reach up to torso level but nonetheless, better safe than sorry.

The party continued on through the World War II veterans’ memorial where Nut dipped their toes in the water, then through a shaded path along the reflecting pool towards the Lincoln Memorial (I’ll refrain from sharing pictures of the memorials by themselves, as I’m sure they rank up there as among the most photographed places in the world already. Google them if you’re curious). Though the initial plan was to go to the Air and Space Museum, it was out of tickets for the day–not a thing back when I last visited–and instead we went to the Museum of Natural History, which proved to be a fine replacement. Much time was spent in the sections about the oceans and human history. Chasca got jumpscared by a guard telling her it was time to go while she was sketching a stuffed boar.

At this point it was time to meet up with METY, who had arrived and gotten his badge from the con as well. To do so we doggedly made our way up to the White House for a group photo, where he approached us saying he had been trying to get our attention for like twenty minutes and eventually just fell in with the group. It had been four years since I had seen him, and it was a delightful reunion.

Left to right: Chasca, METY, Nut (Ifnar behind), Drew, Dero, Kreuz, Tay.

I wanted to avoid the extra tourists in the shot while keeping the White House in view,
but my attempts at image manipulation were honestly way more distracting.

Soon after this, we were spent and decided to return to the airbnb via metro as quickly as possible.

Shortly, everyone made it back. To those of us coming back from DC, WoC had appeared as if out of thin air and was forcing everyone to watch The Venture Bros, with positive reception. Mint had created a veritable feast composed of tteokboki and kimbap, the latter of which she describes as “failed” due to the mistake of excluding pickled radish, even though everything was promptly devoured.

After this, we decided to go en masse to watch the Barbie movie (Oppenheimer was off the table, I think it would have been too much for everyone to do both movies). Chasca watched me pregame a little too hard and I was resultantly blitzed throughout the whole thing; all I remember was thoroughly enjoying watching Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling be dressed in garish pink clothing, and then all I could do was endlessly repeat “it was a masterpiece” to anyone who bothered talking to me. I passed out instantaneously once we got home.

The next day was the first con day. After some thinking, I remember that I was chilling out at the airbnb with others periodically throughout that Friday, day drinking and forcing people to watch Tom and Jerry and Popeye cartoons with me. Those who went to the con snapped a few pictures (I’ve included pics from Saturday and Sunday here also):

A wonderful King of All Cosmos from the Katamari series.

Dog! Apparently dressed up as something known as "Nahida," which I am informed is from Genshin Impact.

Mint and Misha at the con. I had to help that boy with his armor, it kept falling off before he left.

WoC in Stargate SG1 getup, Chasca as a Team Rocket Grunt, and Dero as themselves.

Chasca later received a covertly taken polaroid picture of herself from a “small Japanese man.”

Ifnar as Dr. Rotwang from the movie Metropolis.

Nut as Miss Piggy, holding a little crochet Kermit the Frog. Nut describes,
“having multiple ppl shout 'miss piggy! miss piggy can i have a photo!' after me was thrilling”

Latchky and Claire committing Barbie pog.

Delux as Envy from Fullmetal Alchemist.

Obligatory pictures of random Homestuck cosplayers.

There are more pictures, although most are just more abominations from Tuck where everyone looks like chads or crying babies. I shall do all reading this a favor by not posting them.

Back at the Airbnb, Dero was cooking some homemade pasta sauce, which turned out immaculately. Despite the kitchen being a blazing pit, I helped a little by making some nice olive oil toast in the oven. The pasta, like the tteokboki, was almost immediately consumed by everyone at the airbnb.

After some time of watching more of the Venture Bros, we started up Jackbox games. Quiplash 2 went about as well as expected, though after some drinking the answers all became a little more… racy. I distinctly remember at one point that almost every answer had something to do with bodily fluids of one type or another. Then someone decided to put on TKO, a game that revolves around designing shirts and adding logos to them. The first round was fine, but as the drinking continued everything turned into piss and shit, literally.

I’m pretty sure that the original comic this is from is why WoC is permanently banned from lit²⁹⁷.
The fact that two people had this idea simultaneously sent the entire room into fucking hysterics.

Following this, most of us got entirely too drunk and I was challenged to arm wrestle people. I ended up running a solid gauntlet of like five or six people and I beat EVERYONE, including WoC and Misha AND Dero AND Mint’s friends. There can only be ONE champion (though his arms were very sore the next day). Friday ended thus, on a very pleasant note.

Saturday was not to follow suit, however: I had planned to stick around at the airbnb and continue lightly daydrinking while watching Jerma, and it was my turn to cook anyway. While preparing the same thing I made last year, the shredded Mexican chicken, a freak storm descended upon Washington DC. It started lightly raining outside, which I was pleased with, but in the span of 15 minutes the rain increased in severity until it was coming down sideways in buckets. Right as the storm seemed it was about to lighten a bit, the airbnb’s transformer fucking exploded, plunging Otahouse into darkness.

Cue the rush for emergency gear, mostly candles and little battery powered lanterns, though I remember asking Wheals to bring more mixers for the drinks. Thanks to a gas stove I was able to finish cooking, but a fair few people decided to go to a Korean BBQ place instead. Those of us who remained instead had story time when Lat and Claire came to visit.

Claire spinning yarn as Nut wanders confused. We were using those paper plates to laboriously fan ourselves and stay cool.
That bottle of vodka was empty by the end of the night.
It was a time of feverish madness.

Despite this interruption, we managed to have a fun time together: Lat and Claire were only present for a short time on Saturday but Claire offered a campfire story about some SCP-esque building or society called “The Purple Palace.” I honestly cannot remember the full breadth of the story, but it involved people’s heads exploding a la Scanners, purple drugs being done at a rave with purple lights, a fight between a modern Gilgamesh and Enkidu with the Bull of Heaven (branded with the mark of the Purple Palace, of course), the Iron Giant and Hogarth from the movie somehow? It was such amazing bullshit, really. Eventually, Lat was falling asleep in his chair and Claire had to them both back to their hotel, and the night deepend a little.

Regardless of having no electricity it was still remarkably pleasant to hang out. Most people staying at the airbnb kept talking and playing 20 Questions until about 3 AM to try and put off sleeping in the oppressive heat. Around two in the morning, Tay came into the house saying they had thrown up out in the grass: the camper’s AC had of course stopped, and the smell of shit had started to fill the camper for no perceivable reason (for a picture of said camper, check Tay's entry below).

Somehow none of us drew parallels to the “I frowed up” meme until later, but Tay was thankfully able to find a different place to sleep inside the house.

Sunday found the power still out. METY, bless him, tried his best on the phone to get the power company out to fix the transformer, but to no avail. Most people decided to leave the house even just for a bit to secure food and electricity. In the morning, Wheals took me, Dero, Chasca, and Delux to a place called Shilla Bakery (an appropriate name, looking back) so we could get some bread and charge our phones. This being completed, some people went back to the con, although I stayed in until we decided to go to a place called the Union Market, a food court in DC.

I guess Chasca’s face being covered up by someone else was something of a running gag.

It happened to be my birthday that day, and the gang decided to surprise me as I was coming out with some food.

Everyone was kind enough to sign a couple cards for me, the contents of which I shall keep to myself. Delux also continued the tradition from last year of getting two big posters for everyone to sign, one for himself and one for me.

I am still in the process of framing this in order to preserve it.

After this, we decided to cap off the night by going back to the airbnb and hanging out in the dark. There was much drinking and I was challenged to a followup arm wrestle by Misha, which I still won handily.

At some point Mint came up with the idea to go do karaoke, an offer which was taken up by about 14 of us. I can’t recall who all went, I was three sheets to the wind at this point in the night. I’ve never expected I would like karaoke but it was surprisingly one of the most fun points of the entire trip.

I’m not sure that anyone was sober in these pictures.

Two hours of karaoke flew by in record time and then it was back again to the warm, dark Otahouse. We passed yet more time drinking and talking with each other–Misha and I in particular kept imbibing whiskey at an alarming rate and bullshitting about the nature of life and humanity, sharing pearls of intoxicated wisdom with each other and generally basking in each other’s presence.

Finally, though, the fun had to come to a close. A few had already left before Monday but July 31st was when the vast majority of us decided to haul up and get out of town. Tragically, the power was only restored that afternoon, a few hours before I had to be taken to the airport. Many hungover goodbyes were had, hugs shared. People I had gained a newfound appreciation for boarded flights or drove home.

Even being without electricity for two days could not dampen our spirits. We had nothing short of a fucking blast. In fact, despite the obtuse conditions, I think it’s safe to say that this year was even better than last. All I could think as my plane took off from Reagan airport was to look out the window and think, “I hope next year comes quickly.” I will miss you all until then.

Have some random pictures from throughout the week. Submissions from attendees to follow.

Not pictured: mountains of nerfed bodies.

A miniature husky we saw at the Union Market.

Mint and Misha had to literally bury me in their con shit to fit me in the back seat²⁹⁸.

Drinking whiskey in the dark with a cowboy hat on. Iconic, really.

Dero briefly serenading the group in the darkness with their harmonica skills.

On the way to the Lincoln Memorial. Tay’s turn to get cut out of the picture.

Jackbox got kind of weird.

DOUG DIMMADOME OWNER OF THE DIMMSDALE DIMMADOME

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Kreuz

It was amazing, I'm so happy I got to meet with all of you (some for the first time). The lack of AC seemed to affect me the least out of everyone, I was doing Fine. Karaoke night was the highlight for me, I had so much fun. I hope we get to meet up again but with no issues this time.

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METY

I've been to a lot of local cons in my day, both with and without Homestuck cosplay, but I'd never been to one anywhere nearly as big Otakon. I always wanted to branch out to a bigger con. But actually, fuck Otakon. What I really came here for was to spend every night getting plastered with a house full of nerds, and that's exactly what I got. I don't get invited to a lot of parties, so spending all evening hanging out with everyone was just the best. Exactly what I needed. I've never heard "METY" spoken out loud anywhere near this much before. The power going out sucked, and I'm not going to sugarcoat it by going all like "but the power going out let us REALLY connect to each other without PHONE BAD", it fucking sucked. I enjoy not being drenched in sweat, and at one point I spent half an hour sitting shirtless in my idling car just to charge my phone and get some AC in the middle of the night. But it was all more than worth it. My favorite moments are just sitting back watching Drew arm-wrestling everyone and taking in the moment, and drunk karaoke. Didn't think I had it in me to sing Barbie Girl ahead of any of the weeb songs, but I nailed it if I say so myself. Guess anything's possible on enough soju.

This trip deserves nothing less than 5 out of 5 hats, despite everything. Probably would've given it less if I'd chosen to stay in the shit-wagon though. Either way, enjoy your four-years-overdue shirt, Drew.

Originally intended for delivery at the Chapel Hill meetup in 2019.

I highly enjoyed everyone's company, and I might have to actually participate in gen now instead of walling myself off in the Dracula-esque evil fortress that is shills. Hopefully I'll get to see everyone again next year.

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Tay

Yeah it was a lot of fun.

I’ll admit, I was pretty anxious leading up to Otakon. It’s not the first time I met up with people online, but it is the first time I did with people I knew for a long long time. I was really worried that I or others would come across differently in-person, and there might not be as much chemistry.

As it turns out: everyone was pretty much exactly the same in person as they were online. If you know someone for 5+ years you’ve already got a good handle of them. Who knew? Now you just get the chance to put mannerisms together with the personality.

Now, for the convention itself. I’²⁹⁹m gonna admit, I recognized maybe 40% of the cosplays. Still, they were *really good* cosplays. Also a honestly a bit tasteless CWC cosplay which caught both me and WoC completely fucking off guard. I was not brave enough to ask for a photo. I wasn’t sure what exactly I would be doing for the con, but people-watching proved remarkably fun.

Oh, I also had a really good haul from the dealer’s hall. Most of it was tabletop stuff, including a really beautiful reprint of the 1983 Palladium RPG, but I also snagged these incredibly beautiful Dark Souls prints.

It was good to meet people. Sometimes I think it’s really important to remind yourself that you are more than an infinitesimal mass hurtling through space. Existing primarily online can distort your self-perception that way. I’m really glad I did this.

Ok, sappy stuff out of the way, time to regale the heinous tale of the

POO CAMPER

^{Image credit to Misha}

So, Drew probably will describe it in more detail in his entry, but the airbnb we stayed at was a bit scuffed. Strange rooms in the house with no discernible purpose, the ability to crawl into the foundation if you so chose, and sharp objects apparently strewn about the yard. (This was mentioned in the welcome form right after saying that the neighbors may be anti-airbnb. These may be connected facts)

Anyway, one of the scuffs was a trailer that kind of smelled bad. People weren’t sure why (although now I believe it’s probably because its septic tank didn’t get cleaned), but after Mint and Misha set the air conditioning on for a full day, it was at least tolerable. This was where Delux’s and my sleeping accommodations were. I claimed the cot, Delux got the bed.

It was fine for most of the week, but then the power went out Saturday. With that, went the ac. Now that we were all stuck in a ac-less house in the dc heat, I opted to retire early that night, hoping to avoid the worst of it.

I did not avoid the worst of it. It was fucking hot in that trailer, and it smelled really, really bad. I got more and more nauseous as the night went on. At 2 am, I reached a breaking point. Bursting out of my cot, I ran out half naked, and vomited into the grass. Delirious, I went back inside to grab my phone, before running back out to vomit again.

Yeah, I slept inside after that.

That morning, I went back to pick up my things from the camper. As it turns out, my entire change of clothes for the trip now smelled like poo. Faced with the prospect of sleeping without ac and my clothes being ruined, (not to mention that it was the last day of the con anyway) I decided to just buy a train ticket back home. On that train, someone in my cabin peed themself.

What can we learn from this? Don’t sleep in a porta potty.

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Ifnar

I've been asked to write about my experience at the HSD meetup at Otacaon 2023. It was both my first time in the US and my first time meeting most of the people attending as well. Regarding the first part, I was rather impressed by how closely the region in the DC suburbs where we were based resembled what I had come to expect from american movies and TV shows. I did not however expect the confusing lack of geographical centers in this region. I am familiar with extended metropolitan areas in europe where a central population center has overgrown smaller, previously separate communities. This creates a structure where now and then, a clear central hub emerges where for the most part at least the rough structure of a town square has been preserved and from which a rather consistent set of layers of land usage extends radially outwards. Not so in the US, where small-house residential areas seemingly randomly cede to larger passthrough roads with some businesses or the parking lots in front of strip malls.

That aside, the american experience was rather pleasant; many of the DC monuments were conveniently accessible by foot in luckily dry and warm summer weather and aside from the convention, sightseeing and museum visits took up much of my time. We also took the time to visit at least one authentic american fast food place, with breakfast at IHOP (TM), get 5% off your pancakes with the affiliate link below the post. The food was very plentiful for actual breakfast (at least for my personal standards of only eating a yoghurt and a glass of milk), but given it was at 11am, it made for a serviceable brunch. The pancakes were actually pretty good, even if a lot of that was likely owed to the generous use of salt in the batter. Other than that, we subsisted largely off of either smaller restaurants or homecooking by a fantastic set of attendees. I do vaguely regret not experiencing more of the chain restaurants not available to me normally as well as an american dinner at this occasion, but these things can be rectified in the future.

The con itself (my first one) was a great experience; I was mainly occupied by wandering the halls and taking in the plethora of cool and interesting cosplays as well as idly browsing the wares of the vendors. I was actually pleasantly surprised that someone recognised my own cosplay at one point and I will certainly want to cosplay again at eventual future conventions, though hopefully with more than a week of preparation time.

As for the actual meetup, the principal takeaway which I already stated to some people in chat is how the knowledge of how someone behaves in real life has an exceptional effect on how I perceive their discord messages. Highly recommend experiencing it for yourselves sometime. That aside, hanging out with a bunch of nerds in a single overdimensioned house was a blast (aside from trying to fall asleep in the evenings) even though my natural shyness prevented me from engaging with fellow HSD members as much as I would have liked in retrospect. Still, meeting people like Drew, Misha and deLux in the flesh has left me with a lot of cherished memories of us fucking around together and having an overall great time which I am sure everyone is already confirming in their own summary writeups. I for one certainly hope that another meetup materialises next year so we can hang out together again.

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Chasca

Even though I forgot my bingo card, I still had tons of fun experiencing the US for the first time. Even more so because I got to do it with you all! It was exciting to see just how much everyone lived up to their online personas, and I loved the sense of community that grew throughout the week.

Looking forward to seeing you all again next year, and hoping that the AirBnB curse upon us will lift before then.

---

deLux

I anticipated this year more than I did last year, since now I had some idea of what I could expect from a con. Plus with a new extremely demanding job, I was itching to get some free time. I took a train into DC which was a new and extremely positive experience. I would highly recommend train travel over airplane travel to anyone who is weighing the two against each other.

Mint and Misha picked up Tay, Dero, and me from the various train and airplane stations around DC. I’ve already been to a con or two with Mint, and Misha has an extremely similar vibe so I fell right into a comfortable and friendly interaction with them. It took me a little longer to warm up to the newcomers but I felt like within a day I was best friends with everyone. Meeting new people in person for the first time is also such an exciting experience that it more than makes up for the initial awkwardness. This year I got to meet a bunch of new people with whom I had only ever interacted online, and it was just as good as last year.

The house, like most of the Airbnb places I’ve stayed at, gave the vague impression that the owner of the property was getting away with something shady. The house itself was weirdly constructed, and had weird quirks like the “Soviet Torture Room,” a completely bare cube of a cinder block room in the furthest corner of the basement where no light reached. The owner of the bnb warned us in our welcome memo about the neighbors being “anti-airbnb” and leaving “sharp objects” in the yard. Caltrops and architectural quirks aside, the most prominent weird thing about the house, and what affected us the most, was the attached Jetstream camper. We came to call it the Poop Camper. (Ominous thunderclap for effect) When we lost power on day 4 of the meetup, and without the HVAC constantly pushing new air into the confines of the camper, the fumes from the onboard sewage tank rose up and choked out anyone who dared enter. Two of us were using it to sleep in, too, so it pushed even more of us into the hot airless house during the night.

On the second or third night we went to see the Barbie movie together which was a lot of fun. I maintain that the dance scene was a transcendental experience. Despite being a Transformers-level exercise in product placement and stealth advertisement, it was a fun movie. For me, seeing movies with friends is kind of the only way I can enjoy cinema so I’m glad I got to see it.

I feel like I’m coming to appreciate Drew’s perspective with respect to the con itself a little more. The con wasn’t as much fun as I remembered and I enjoyed the time I spent with my friends proportionally more. I was separated from the group for most of my time inside the convention center which probably dampened my experience a little bit. It’s not as much fun to look at all the things when you don’t have a friend or two to slow you down. Going into all the little booths to look at the trinkets is fun, and I kind of robbed myself of it this year. Most of the arcade games were 2-player competitive setups, so without a friend I was out of luck there as well. The highlights of the convention experience for me were playing some cool board games when I did manage to meet up with everyone, successfully completing and wearing my cosplay, and seeing all the other cool costumes that people had come up with.

I actually finished a cosplay this year, and I was very happy about that. I was even pretty satisfied with how it came out, and I can imagine how much better it could have been if I had started working on it before I got to DC. Now that it’s done, I have plans to do an improved version of the same cosplay next year, and attempt a more ambitious one for the second day besides. Now that I see how easy it is my enthusiasm for making real garments has been re-kindled. There are so many shirts that I want to make. The only potentially negative thing about the cosplay is that it was extremely time consuming. I made some serious sacrifices with respect to the activities I participated in to get it finished. Working around the big dinner table with everyone else who had last minute cosplay work was fun in its own way, but it did prevent me from hanging out with the main group as much as I would have liked. Next year I plan to have the greater part of my cosplays done well in advance so I can spend more time actually doing things with my friends.

The power outage was a huge feature of the trip. Almost half our time in DC was spent with no reliable access to power of any kind. The mild anxiety of conserving our devices’ batteries and taking advantage of free power outlets around the places we went was a constant presence for the rest of the trip. We immediately lost access to the camper as a place to sleep, and the house became an oven. In our desperation to escape the house, we ended up doing a lot of fun stuff, including midnight karaoke which was a real highlight of the trip. Turns out stuffing all your friends into a room with a bunch of soju while you shout out your favorite songs, is a recipe for euphoria. I super want to do karaoke again sometime.

Now that the con is over and everyone has gone back home, it pains me to think that it will be at least another year before I’m able to see some of my friends again. Especially for my friends in other countries, it’s going to take deliberate planning and effort if I ever want to see them again. (I do want to see them all again!) I am reminded of how important it is to see the people you really care about. Going to meet up with my wacky internet friends was the highlight of my year last year, and this year has been the same. I feel like a new person, full of life and energy. I already can’t wait for the next meetup, and I hope to see everyone again next year, wherever we end up meeting. In the intervening time I’m going to make more efforts to reach out to friends and spend time with them.

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Dero

We came, we saw, we sweat our asses off. What an excellent group of people to finally meet! Lots of booze, general rowdiness, and great vibes all around. I enjoyed the day of the con I went, and enjoyed even more the company I had during the stay. He was a twink.

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Misha

Captain's Log, Star Date 101241.58. I fear the only words to describe my experiences at "Otakon" (It stands for Otaku Convention) are "fear" and "trepidation". For there are wonders in our universe that are as terrible as they are mysterious, and one such wonder counts itself among the stars we have so recently travelled. This beast was designed specimen "Linky", a stone-creature capable of moving mountains and consuming the work of five bakers within a minute. Hostilities started soon after first contact, with a ferocious death-grip embrace that surely would've been the end of me, if not for timely intrusion with our patented Nerf™ weaponry. Later in the week ok I'm tired of the bit

It was great meeting everyone properly for the first time, and it's a great reminder people are usually more real and betterer in person, except Drew, who's usually great in any form encountered. Overall I feel there's joy to be found in the small miracle that we're all adults that can meet up, cook for most days of a weeklong stay for ourselves and generally keep ourselves clothed, fed and entertained for the entire duration of the process.

It's the sign of good company when little 'accidents' cough do not affect my memories of the overall experience, and the power going out, while a major inconvenience, is not something that retroactively marrs it but rather makes me enjoy the company of everyone that was there. People came out of their shells, we designed bad t-shirts, shot each other with nerf guns, watched shit, sang drunken soju-powered karaoke at 2 AM and I BEAT DREW AT ARM WRESTLING AT A TABLE OK THE SECRET IS DON'T FIGHT HIM ON THE GROUND HE GETS HIS POWERS FROM THE DIRT

If I have one regret is that exceedingly poor planning (by my part, with no blame for my lovely plus one, who worked really hard on making a lot of this trip happen) ((with special given thanks to Bips on the front of making the trip happen)) me, Mint and Bips spent a good while working on cosplay rather than hanging out with everyone for the first few days. While I enjoyed looking embarrassing in an armor that was falling apart, in the future, I'll aim to maximize time spent with good friends.

Everyone there is a good reminder on my journey to self-improvement that people are usually actually really great and lovely, if you give them a chance, and I hope to see everyone I met there again. And to beat Drew on the ground next time, with my left hand. That is my trial of power.

Sent from an iPod Nano

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Mint

Monday: Left the house with Leo, Noah, and Ben. We gassed up a poor guy's Airbnb with our cosplay materials.

Tuesday: Showtime! Thanks to Nut, we were able to split up the pick yp process. We had a running gag where we would go "Is that Dero from Homestuck?" while waiting to pick them up from the airport. Misha also got to run around Union Station while looking for Tay and Delux. A little pizza, wings, and games helped us ease in with each other.

Wednesday: Most of this day was cosplay prep from my perspective. Misha and Bips took on the burden of cooking dinner that night, leading to some banging lasagna. Drinks were plenty, too!

Thursday: We had breakfast at IHOP, and Ifnar downed an entire vanilla milkshake in a matter of minutes. The group split and I spent most of the day working on cosplay and hanging out at the Airbnb.

Friday: I always forget how massive the Dealer's Hall is. I wandered around a good bit with Misha and Tuck, gawking at anime figures and whatever bizarre merchandise we could find. We swung by Anime Rockband as well, which is always a joy.

Saturday: I learned an important lesson: never work on cosplay the day of a con. It never works out well. Misha, Bips, and I rolled into the convention at about 2PM. Our photographer's camera died, so we just had our own mini photoshoot and got McDonald's afterwards. Then, God struck us all down and the dark days began... At least we got to play a card game with Tuck until the convention closed.

Sunday: Went to the con to avoid the heat. We came back after the closing ceremonies, which were mostly the AMV winners and an announcement or two from the board. The AMVs were surprisingly entertaining to watch, and I definitely don't regret hanging around. They also had a t-shirt cannon with a rotating barrel for some reason? We ended the day with karaoke, which is one of my highlights from the trip because of how everyone ended up participating.

Monday: Misha and I had to leave early because of work, but not without dropping a few folks off and saying our goodbyes. I used to feel sad at these meetups, but nowadays, I only get more hope and excitement for the next one!

Internet meetups have always been a source of anxiety for me. You really do have no idea how people will get along, or if things will even work out until the end of the trip. This one was no exception! We had over 10 people coming from across multiple states and continents to see each other. For some people, this was their first time interacting with people from the HSD, and for others, it was an anticipated reunion. But to see everyone come together, whisk drinks around a rental affectionally called "the crack house," and leading people into the torture basement was worth the anxiety and frantic coordinating.

From TKO to NERF gun assassinations, 2-hour meal prep and drinking so much that you're comfortable roasting in candlelight while nursing your eighth drink of the night, this trip really embodied what an internet meetup is like. Chaos, candor, and communion (over a few bottles of soju)-- it really had it all.

Each year gives me something to hold onto, and something to hope for. Last year, it was the ability to be with the person I love outside the bounds of a few international flights and video calls. This year, it is the chance to meet with this group again without the looming fear of the power never coming back.

I'm grateful we could all make it and enjoy each others' company without too many complications. This meetup wouldn't be what it was without everyone opening up and occasionally stirring up the chaos.

Cheers!

---

wheals

I had so much fun at this meetup, just like last year. The lack of power gave a nice camping-like vibe to the airbnb for the first night but then immediately overstayed its welcome. You'd think that having done this more than once would make it easier to say goodbye at the end, but it was just as sad a moment for me.

---

Wizard of Chaos

Fun convention, fun people, I met most of you guys at previous conventions and it was just as good this time. I am disturbed by the frequency with which I was mentioned in jackbox games despite not being a participant. Nice to see both old and new faces, and it was especially fun getting to be the con sherpa this time and show some of the new faces around the convention and watch their reactions.

More people were exposed to liquor that actually tastes good, Venture Bros, kigus, man-made horrors given form via cosplay and most importantly a brand new stock of internet weirdos that they had never met before. I feel that all of these things are important for their development as adults and am pleased to have done my part.

In the future I will leave deadlifting @tuckthor to sober me, add ice packs to my Stargate cosplay so I do not boil alive, and lift more weights so I will crush Drew at arm wrestling such as the bugman that he is. The next BnB should have a generator and maybe not as many deer with missing limbs.

---

thebadnut

Last year I participated in my first large-scale HSD meetup. I recall being pleasantly surprised by just how comfortable spending time together in person felt; how quickly this sensation arose after the initial jolt of 3-dimensional recognition of someone who, until that moment, had been words on a screen.

This meetup felt even comfier. It felt like a family reunion. I'd compare the friends whom I was meeting a second time to close cousins; the friends whom I was meeting for the first time IRL to more distant cousins; and the friends of Mint who I was unfamiliar with until this event to even more distant cousins still. The crucial aspect is that everyone felt like I knew them. How often do you experience meeting, effectively, a stranger, and feeling comfortable enough to hug and share meals with them immediately? It's a sign of the good taste in people that we collectively have.

The camraderie was palpable. There was a sense of everyone wanting to get to know one another and work together to make the house run smoothly. My personal highlight would have to be Luxie and Tuck and Misha hitting the griddy while a group of us played TKO. It's been a while since I've had that level of hysterical laughter.

This needs to become a tradition. I've had two years in a row of meeting with Linky, Luxie, Mint, Woc, and Wheals. I deeply desire to continue this trend, and add more and more friends to the group. Once a year is not enough but it's better than not at all. We are all pals via a shitty webcomic that explores, among many other things, the trials of having friends who live so very far away. But, we are going to keep making it work.

The worst part of the trip was the fact that I tore a chunk of skin out of my pinky toe on the stupid fucking couch that ate all of our Nerf darts and literally no one assisted me in bandaging it. I blame every single attendee for this and I will never feel vindicated.

Bonus quote of the week courtesy of Misha: "You're a lot cooler than I expected you to be." catYell

---

September

16^th

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

---

October

1^st

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

---

8^th

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

---

30^th

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

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

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

---

November

7^th

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing more for today.

---

8^th

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

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

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

First is Starfang Primemeow. Recently he described that he settled on his name using a “fursona name generator,” which says quite a bit on its own. He recently convinced me that this work qualifies as something of an ethnography, and I updated the description on the website accordingly. Following this, he seems to be an anthropologist³⁰⁰, and actually delivered a conference presentation on the subject of preservation of the Homestuck fandom, interviewing myself, Makin, Gio, and Bambosh for various efforts involved in archival. Starfang is also somewhat vocal on matters of politics, adding their voice to the leftists in the US Politics channel frequently. Even in such discussions which develop serious friction, Starfang seems to be a voice of direction and focus who keeps the conversation from spiraling out of control.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing more for today.

---

2024

June

8^th

It’s been a while. I guess I feel like there hasn’t been much worth commenting on, but also it’s just generally been a busy time for me. I would like to continue taking little notes so that it doesn’t appear that the community has fallen away, but I probably won’t be very good at that. I’ll just write down whatever and whenever I feel like it.

4/13 this year was fun as usual, and the stream itself may have broken a record for attendance. You’d think we would be tired of Con Air by now but it somehow manages to get more entertaining each year. We also did Renfield, which I need to add to “List of movies we’ve watched” so we don’t repeat it somehow. There was also another event at the Requiem Cafe, which we didn’t really know about until like a month beforehand. If they do it again next year I may need to schedule some time around flying to California.

That out of the way, it’s been nice lately. We’re taking a break from Makin’s regular weekend streams–we stopped after finishing the Best of Seinfeld and are somewhere in the middle of the newer Doctor Who show. Rather than do nothing, I’ve been stepping in frequently with one-off movies. Of note are some really, really bad movies by a strange fellow from Las Vegas named Neil Breen. This guy doesn’t know how to make movies but they hit that perfect stride of befuddlement where you just can’t look away (except for Wheals, who complained of the movie Fateful Findings: “the ghost scene near the end, before the tassels appear, was the only part that drove me to look away i was so bored”). We’ll probably start regular weekend streams near the end of this month.

Of personal excitement, I finished my fanfic of Magistrate’s work Chicago last month and published it on AO3, called Leavenworth. I’ve gotten a lot of encouraging feedback on it and it’s been fun. More exciting though is that while finishing up the draft, Magi pointed me towards a couple of other authors who had similar concepts, Pigoseg and Julirites. While Pigoseg is somewhat enigmatic currently, Juli has been sociable to the point of joining the HSD and talking in mspa-lit a few times! It’s been very enjoyable, they’re clearly passionate about storymaking and it’s been kind of surreal having Magi, Juli, and myself all talking together about our works, and with other people in attendance. The process of creating entertainment for other people to enjoy is fucking bizarre but it’s produced great conversation, I wish I was more consistent about doing so.

---

9^th

The Xbox and PC Gaming showcases were held today, which prompted some small discussion on the nature of the industry. I feel like so-called AAA developers have been sliding in terms of quality for years, being led primarily by business type managers instead of game devs. Tay countered, saying that there's always been hefty offerings of slop after slop every year. I don't pay as much attention to these things so they're probably right.

The main takeaway from both showcases is that Silksong--the long awaited sequel to Hollowknight, which has a very dedicated, very desperate fanbase--did not get any further news today. The situation is looking pretty dire, because the game was originally slated for release years ago and has been delayed repeatedly. This isn't helped by COVID or the game engine Unity suddenly fucking up its users for reasons that are too lengthy to explain here. All of us are convinced that the game is not coming out this year; I'd say the Hollowknight community is officially on suicide watch but truthfully they all killed themselves ages ago.

---

12^th

We stopped doing community streams for 6/12 years ago, but that hasn’t stopped fans from celebrating it to some degree. The people in charge of Homestuck: Beyond Canon at this point have also taken to it with some alacrity, working in conjunction with Makeship to make a Karkat plushie, the character for whom we celebrate 6/12 in the first place. At the time of writing, the pledge or petition or however they call those now is sitting at 1053% of the intended goal. I’d say that’s pretty good.

There’s also a HS2 update, and a newspost from James Roach. I’ve said stuff like this before and been burned pretty badly, but it feels like things for the property are in an okay position right now. We’re nowhere near the level of community engagement and excitement that we were 10 years ago, but that’s just not going to happen again. For current year, things could certainly be worse. It’s been nice to see the management take a turn around and if this plushie’s development goes well they’re saying that it could be the start of a new merch line. There’s still plenty of fans who want these things, including me to an extent, so it’s just very nice to see these things taking shape.

---

28^th

The spectre of HSCommWatch has risen once more in the form of HSDCommWatch. A few days ago a Twitter account of that name said it was conducting “investigations” of various members of the mod staff, and today a callout post for Bolas of all people was released.

It is a juvenile work made all the more laughable for its choice of subject: Bolas has his baudy or saucy moments but he is all around one of the less offensive people on the staff right now. This fact makes it imminently clear that whoever is responsible for the callout post and running the HSDCommWatch account is someone from the shitpost channel #homosuck.

Bolas has developed a notorious presence in that channel specifically for teasing shitposters and liberally banning people, rather than taking a more traditional hands-off approach. It seems evident to everyone aware of this that Bolas is being targeted by one or multiple people who have been banned from #homosuck and have a bone to pick.

The callout document is unintentionally hilarious: every violation listed is something that other mods are more guilty of. The example which comes most readily to mind is the use of the word “retard.” A screenshot in the document of Bolas's history shows that he has said the word about 70 times, which is of course upsetting if one considers it a slur which must be avoided. Contrast this with Wizard of Chaos, who has said the word over 3,000 times and is singlehandedly responsible for every 1 in 11 times the word's been said over the course of the server's history. WoC is actually miffed that this is not the first but the SECOND time he's been passed over in the midst of a callout post: the original HSCommWatch literally did this same thing, and he is not pleased about his accomplishments being ignored.

It's unclear whether further documents will roll out, although based on the thinking that it's a disgruntled teenaged homosucker, the prevailing opinion is “no.” I shudder to think of what they would find if they did any research on Kaliborn, who is possibly the most aggressively racist and fascist pinoy I know (not a low bar to clear, I assure you³⁰¹).

---

July

18^th

Ages ago the US and Global Politics threads were moved from the #media forum over to #serious-discussion, under the assumption that this would improve channel discussion. Unfortunately, no one was prepared for the nonsense that is the 2024 General Election for the United States.

Easily one of the most vicious channels at times (or it used to be for a while, it seems to have gotten calmer after a couple bans), there has been much contention over stuff like the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13th, and speculation on whether Joe Biden will step aside in campaigning for reelection due to his age.

Why am I bringing this up? Well, dear reader, Moonjail made a bet when this talk of stepping aside began a couple months ago, saying that if Biden is actually replaced as nominee for the Democrats, he will shove an entire Nintendo Gamecube controller up his ass. As I write this he is desperately googling “gamecube controller keychains.” To be fair, I don't think Nostradamus himself could have predicted the state of affairs any better.

---

26^th

Progress on ChatGPT and other learning language models (LLMs) has slowed down somewhat, but a new version released today. As quickly as possible, Makin fitted Drewbot³⁰² with it, retrained him on my entire message history after 2017, and let him loose in the chat. As per usual, chat immediately descended upon him and asked him all sorts of horrific nonsense. I’m probably going to set up a dedicated archive to the best responses, meaning anything that has five or more HowHigh reacts, but until then there’s one incident that sticks out.

At some point either Apoc or a user named Nia asked it to start posting ASCII art. Drewbot, being trained on my message history, is prone to being depressive, surly, or outright ignoring prompts or just acting confused. I think that pruning the message history for vague or one-word responses might help, but it also makes it better when the responses land, so I’m ambivalent. All of this is to say that he largely refused to make ASCII art, but eventually someone broke through and it started making basic stuff like squares and triangles. Nia decided to ask for increasing numbers of rectangles, and it started having an increasingly noticeable effect on Drewbot’s response time. Three triangles wasn’t too bad, five triangles fucking broke it for something like five minutes.

Sorry for the picture for ants, I didn't want to break this up into multiple parts.

At this point we figured he was dead and needed to be restarted, which had already occurred a few times, but suddenly he came back with a vengeance and posted something that resembled a hedgehog in profile. What followed was a feverish attempt to spam the bot asking it for more and more triangles: seven came back relatively quickly, nine broke it again for several minutes, and people just would not fucking stop. Eleven or thirteen triangles genuinely destroyed it, and anankeAverted had the gall to ask for five hundred. Finally Makin had to hard restart the bot and he banned people from asking for ASCII art, which people promptly ignored and kept asking for to limited success.

In all, a wonderful night for the bot. Perhaps the most fun we’ve had with Drewbot to date. There should be more models coming up later in the year, Makin always likes to take the thing for a spin when they happen, so I suspect we’ll see some more stuff like this soon if we’re lucky.

---

Hey. Accompaying the release of this batch will be the yearly meetup article too. Go read it here if you're interested.

---

The Great HSD Meetup of 2024

As³⁰³ I grow to love traveling, I grow yet more hateful of travel difficulties. I was set to fly out to Washington DC on the 30th of July, a Tuesday, and arrive at Reagan airport about 8:30 PM. Instead my flight was outright canceled (a harrowing reminder of difficulties I experienced last year) and I had to rebook something fucking janky that got me to land in Baltimore after midnight on Wednesday instead. Realistically this was only a difference of four hours, and yet I could not help feeling robbed. A sufficient number of people had already gathered, and they took the one real group photo we have of the trip:

Left to right: lupoCani's thumb, terminalTermagant, Nut, Wheals, Kreuz, Lime, Delux, Misha, Mint, Tuck, Bips.
That pool table would see an unreal amount of usage.

Bless them, though, three of them came up to grab me at the Baltimore airport: Misha, a friend I met at last year’s meetup named Tuck, with Mint driving, all came swingin’. I felt immensely guilty inconveniencing them with a difference of nearly an hour’s driving, but they insisted that it was an enjoyable time. I have to admit it was a feverish whiplash of the day’s travel disappointments, to suddenly be graced with friends who were consistently talking about different things all at the same time or would settle on something insane or hilarious or both (I’m not sure how many times Tuck said the word “cum” or some variation thereof on this trip, but it was more than I care to try and count).

I was forcibly exposed to Tuck’s pokemon team in some romhack, we listened to horrific music (later in the trip I would be exposed to someone singing all of the Shrek 2 soundtrack in the voice of Toad from the Mario games). We chatted about many sorts of wonderful bullshit all the way back to the airbnb, which was located in Fort Washington, Maryland.

None of us actually thought to take a picture of the house from the front or back this year, so have a crappy screengrab from Google Map street view. The house itself was nice.

As far as the so-called Otahouse is concerned, third time’s the charm. Two floors, two nice bathrooms, four bedrooms or so, and a couple good couches made ample room for sleeping and taking care of ourselves. The house was in generally great condition and had modern appliances including a crockpot, which was frustratingly missing from the first two meetups. Too bad this was the one year I didn’t bother to use it. There was also a magnetic dart board, a pool table, and an ACTUAL pool, all of which were pretty decent.

It also had a grill that we made some use of. Burgers and hot dogs for all.

There was some weirdness with the temperature where it’d get too hot if everyone was upstairs and the basement was always frigid, but other than that it was a fine set up with really big TVs both upstairs and downstairs. We made liberal use of pretty much everything except for an exercise bike whose seat wouldn’t fix in place. We are pleased to report that there was no poop camper either, thank goodness.

People filtered in gradually throughout the week, with some people arriving as late as Thursday and Friday. The guest list was truly extraordinary this time around: Momocon had a little over a dozen people, Otacon last year had a few more, but this year we had in excess of 20 people show up. This is exciting but it definitely led to a more difficult time for anyone who bothered to try organizing things–the phrase “like herding cats” comes to mind–and anyone with a vehicle definitely did errands at one or several points.

I’ll talk more about that later. For now I will list visitors I had the chance to personally meet with on the trip. In no particular order, repeat guests include: myself, Mint, Misha, Bips, Tuck, Delux, Tay, Caledfwltch, HarpyHour, Latchky, Faeby, Nut, Ifnar, Kreuz, Wheals, and Livina (new name for an attendee from last year). Newcomers include: terminalTermagant, lupoCani, anankeAverted and her girlfriend, Dan, Reti, Lime. If I’m doing my math right this is a total of 23 people, and there were a few people like B3es that I did not get to meet again for various reasons, especially that he was helping to take care of his and Fae's baby.

I will describe people who were newcomers to the meetup in some small detail: I had the pleasure of meeting Lime in Texas early in 2023, though she was unable to come to the meetup that year. Something of a party animal, she ended up offering liberal use of her weed pen for various people to enjoy and would get rather animated whenever large gatherings occurred at Otahouse.

lupoCani comes to us from Scandinavia, with a very light and airy way of speaking, kind of proper (terminalTermagant: “My preferred description is "like an old-timey depiction of a distinguished professor". It's fitting.”). For the briefest second I mistook him as having a British accent of some sort (I am not very good at placing accents), and on Discord he is one of the rare examples of people speaking with proper grammar at all times. I admit with full shame that I thought he was another Scandinavian user from the HSD who I've seen pictures of. The user in question has a much darker complexion so I was fucking shocked when lupo arrived, to be frank.

terminalTermagant is also characterized as being Scandinavian even though this is a complete lie, as she is from California. This mixup might be due in part to the fact that she and lupo were practically attached at the hip during the meetup, and she also speaks with grammatical perfection. Very sardonic and is attached to the imagery of Rose Lalonde from Homestuck.

anankeAverted is another party person like Lime, although she was much more chill about the experience and hung out in the basement playing pool for much of the time she was around Otahouse. She and I will often cheer some event or another by timing a drink together on Discord, which makes it a shame that we weren’t really able to share one in real life aside from a single bit of soju at karaoke, but she had a 30 minute drive away from the Airbnb every night, so drinking was not really in the cards. A problem we will rectify in the future, if we’re lucky.

Dan was a totally unexpected visitor for me, but he proved to be very fun to be around. I only got to hang with him for one night but there was a fastness there I couldn’t have predicted given how little I know about him. Excitable and funny, I felt bad that I had no scarf prepared for him in advance. I’ll have to make it and send it to him at a later time.

Reti is a Canadian. Spit upon him. In seriousness I’ve known the guy for years and it was surreal getting to meet him in real life, I associate Reti with having an effortless sense of humor and on the few occasions I actually got to chat with him it was very nice. I kind of thought he would look like a twink to be honest. I think I told him that to his face when I was drunk, too, but I believe he took it in good humor. Didn't get to spend nearly enough time with him because he was on a fucking PLAYSTATION THE WHOLE TIME.

Proceeding then with my recollections of the meetup: Wednesday was a designated “chill” day without much to do–not even a badge pickup for the con, so not much reason to go to DC. I’ll let people describe their own individual experiences on each day and will be brief with my own. Mint and Misha brought a bunch of us out to Korean BBQ which I missed last year, and they were kind enough to treat me for my birthday (we were going to do this on Tuesday night until everything got fucked up).

From left to right: myself, Bips³⁰⁴, Tuck, Lime, Kreuz, Misha, and Mint.

We ended up getting multiple helpings of spicy beef bulgogi and I honestly could have kept going for fucking hours, it was delicious. Mint also got us all some mango bingsu, a shaved ice milk dessert, to share from a nearby bakery called Tous Les Jours.

I don’t even like mango but this stuff was fucking delicious.

They did the further kindness of getting me a cake from Costco and everyone sang happy birthday (also too late to do it the previous night when I arrived). I don’t really celebrate my birthday that much so it was very nice to get a reception like that. I carried around my little plushie of the Wayward Vagabond from Homestuck that I remembered to bring this time.

I also brought a plushie of Byers the Pigeon from Hiveswap but neglected to take pictures.

We also pushed ahead our cooking schedule so that Lime cooked some delicious enchiladas instead of doing it the next morning. The rest of the night was spent chatting amicably with people or playing pool, along with a hefty amount of drinking, which was enabled by a truly preposterous amount of all manner of liquors including TWO fifths of Wild Turkey 101. Mint decided to label everyone’s cups in order to avoid losing them or cross-contamination, and drew a little picture of their choice under their name. Here are a couple pictures of what we could find at the end of the trip:

There were so many of them that Mint had to take two panorama pictures of the full array. I don’t know what happened to mine, but I was at a loss for what to ask her to draw and I think at someone else’s goading I asked for Goku and Vegeta yaoi. Not sure what that says about me. The other cups are either inscrutable or pretty obvious, like Reti’s Snufkin avatar third from the right. My favorite was Misha’s, which was the “Uh oh, stinky!” orangutan meme from some years ago.

On this note I readily admit I made a mistake and got carried away. I enjoy drinking plenty, we had a notable amount of alcohol in the house for general use, and I get excited when I’m with a group of friends. If it had been just the vodka I think things would have been fine, but Livina also brought some elderflower liqueur which was surprisingly tasty. I never do actual shots but Lime–the horrific influence on me that she was–convinced me to do like two or three shots of this stuff. The rest of the night was a blur, around 11 or so we started watching the Nic Cage movie Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans but everything after the half hour mark is heavily warped in my memory. I think I regained proper cognizance around roughly 2 AM and promptly went to bed while Lime was playing random Homestuck AMVs and everyone else had already gone to sleep. I stumbled my way into bed in the chilly basement and was gone to the world.

Despite remembering to drink plenty of water, upon waking Thursday morning I had the absolute worst hangover I’ve had in years. Regrettably, this meant I had to skip out on going to the zoo like I had planned in favor of nursing my aching head. It was a surprisingly transient problem, a little ibuprofen and more water cleared it up within a few hours. After that I had to start cooking for the evening: I decided to make a shit ton of tomato basil chicken, almost six pounds worth of the stuff. I didn’t have enough soup and had to ask Misha to grab some more on their way back. At one point I thought I was going far over a reasonable amount of food but as people returned to Otahouse for the evening and I finished preparing dinner, almost everything was gone within 20 minutes. I’ll take this as a sign that people enjoyed the food.

Shortly after that we all took off for karaoke. Last year was the first time I’ve experienced such a thing and it was an incredible time, somehow Mint managed to book the exact same room we had last year. I didn’t describe the place itself back then, but the business is divided up so that there’s a lobby with fridges that you can freely purchase water, soju, and beer from (they are tacked directly onto the room charge). There is a hallway bedecked in random art of certain Marvel characters, such as Captain America in the men’s restroom, and a bunch of other bullshit I can’t recall now. This hallway forms a square connected at one corner to the lobby, with rooms all along the perimeter and the inside of the square. I would say in all there’s about 8 or 9 rooms of various sizes, and we got one of the biggest available.

Left to right: Lime, Wheals, Kreuz obscured, Misha, Mint, Tay, and Tuck on the phone.

Tuck, Reti, Caledfwlch, and Dan.

Faeby and Ifnar in the lobby, Livina on the phone to their left.

Bips!

Karaoke started off a bit slow, we brought along the maximum allowed 20 people which included anankeAverted and her partner, terminalTermagant, and lupoCani, but they left early in order to spend their first meeting talking rather than singing. As they opted for the airbnb, Faeby appeared for the first time to sit alongside Nut and Ifnar, and as incredible offerings of soju appeared on the karaoke table we started to get rowdier. I did Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond, which if I’m not mistaken I did last year as well, and by this point I was yelling full belt into the microphone. We finished off with Bohemian Rhapsody, ever-rousing, and then headed back to Otahouse to hang out some more. At this point the evening separated into two halves: people chatted and played video games upstairs, and people downstairs played pool. Much of what we did at Otahouse involved pool, both the billiards and swimming varieties.

Friday at the con was a whole thing, I will allow whoever wants to describe it and include pictures they like. While most people were out, I decided to just relax at the Airbnb and clean up a bit from the fracas the previous night, which helped me to feel more productive. After a bit of lunch, Nut and Ifnar came over to get in the pool, so Lime and I joined. After trying and failing to entice others like Bips to get in the pool, I got out after like an hour to chill in the house. Looots of chilling in the house, although at one point we managed to get a game of Yahtzee going with Nut’s set, a fond callback to last year when the power was out and we were sweating like Satan at church. People gradually filtered back from the con and more pool and other games were held.

terminalTermagant in Rose Lalonde cosplay, wearing lupoCani’s white coat. This sharp bitch absolutely sharked everyone at the table. She was doing actual geometry and shit.

The rotating groups consisted mostly of terminalTermagant, lupoCani, anankeAverted and her girlfriend, Tay, and a couple others. I remember at some point I taught everybody how to play a less common game for pool tables called Cutthroat, which is intended to be played with three players instead of two. I’ve tried to show this game to people a few times before and it never catches on for some reason, so after playing the first game I rotated out and hustled upstairs for some refreshments, expecting it to be abandoned in favor of regular ol’ billiards. Imagine my surprise when I came back downstairs like three hours later³⁰⁵ and they were still playing fucking Cutthroat. Oddly delightful for such a grim sounding game.

The next day being Saturday, most people went to bed at a more reasonable time so they would have plenty of energy. It was a sour note for me, because I was leaving later that day. This is the busiest time by far for the con so most people were there, and I didn’t get to offer a proper goodbye to hardly anyone. Nut and Ifnar were nice enough to take me to the zoo with them, and after a bit of actually getting out and walking, seeing all the animals, I actually felt a lot better and was resigned to my fate. The mood turned a bit sad again once they took me to the airport and I was fairly despondent getting through security and waiting for my flight. As the appointed time came, however, it would seem that the Travel Demon which has affixed itself to my back decided to have a laugh.

My flight back home was canceled, an event that I had the foresight to predict somehow. This was singlehandedly the closest to apoplexy I’ve come in years: even with getting in line before most other people, the wait took an hour and a half. I was next in position to see a customer service agent and it was dragging on forever, fifteen or twenty minutes probably. At one point a baby began to cry–not just that casual whining you hear when they’re hungry. This thing was angry and began to emit ear piercing shrieks that carried through the whole of the terminal. A second took to screaming as well, and somehow I think this broke my ability to filter noise because suddenly everything in the airport was as loud as everything else. People talking, a garbled announcement on the PA, on top of the children screeching. The earth itself beneath me began to tilt and I approached stark madness.

But then I got my flight rebooked for the next day, and I exited before murder could be committed. After some scrambling around on the metro and a ride back to Otahouse with Delux, I was incensed. I’ve never known anyone else to even have a canceled flight, and between this and last year I’ve had three, all due to weather problems. I decided to cool off with a shower and reflected that I was immensely grateful for the fact that Otahouse was still there. I decided to revel in the fact that I got a bit more time to spend with friends. Everyone home at that point, tired as they might be after the con, was gracious enough to let me choose a shitty movie to watch. I have developed a fascination with really awful movies, so I put on a fucking piece of crap Brazilian knock-off of Ratatoille called Ratatoing. It achieved the exact result of bafflingly, hilariously awful that I wanted, and we ended the night on a happy note.

I thought we would be done at that point so I went to my room, but after chatting in #general on the Homestuck Discord a bit more, people enticed me to come back upstairs. Wheals, Lime, Delux, HarpyHour, terminalTermagant, Latchky and I were all sat around the table and just chatting for like two and a half hours. tT had to go to the airport around 3:30 AM for an early morning flight, so Delux was taking her. They were both pounding coffee and the rest of us–already mostly late sleepers anyway–were doing a No Sleep Challenge until they left to help keep them motivated.

In the process, we had some of the most simple but earnest fun of the entire trip. We chatted about people we know collectively in the HSD, and at one point Harpy tried to get another user Zuup on a call, which just did not work somehow. Zuup could hear us, but their voice wouldn’t come through, so we took the opportunity to lightly mock them for being bad at technology. It was all good, earnest fun accentuated by that derangement which arrives with the witching hour.

Others may talk about this in their own sections but there seems to be a widening division between people who come to these gatherings for the con, versus those who come to hang out with friends. In the process of just sitting at a fucking table and talking with each other about stuff that was happening in real time in the HSD, there was a totally new dimension added to these interactions than if we had just been sending text messages to each other through the channel itself.

I think I may have talked about this in a previous meetup’s article, but I feel like this hearkens back to why most of us like Homestuck in the first place: it’s about friends trying to see each other and do stuff together in real life. These meetups are that idea manifested, at least for a few precious days.

But of course, it all ends after a while. Sunday rolled around, and with the precious little extra time afforded to me, Delux drove us to a grocery store nearby so we could grill up burgers and hot dogs. I haven’t done this in years myself but I feel like they turned out okay.

I just wanna grill for God’s sake.

Again I figured we were making too much food, with something like a dozen hamburgers and hot dogs each, but it was all gone within five minutes of the main group returning home, a testament to the logistical difficulty of cooking for such a large group of people. We watched a few episodes of King of the Hill to commemorate the successful barbeque, and then it was time for me to get going. I was pleased to be able to secure a more proper goodbye with everybody at the airbnb, that factor by itself made the entire process feel so much more cathartic.

As with last year, Mint and Misha brought me to the airport (for the second time this visit). We exchanged some words on the nature of the meetup and how complex it was: I think the general consensus is that there were way too many people this time. Mint had already felt somewhat stressed out organizing last year, and there were far more people this time around, making it harder for both of them to enjoy themselves instead of doing logistics and ferrying people or things around. Misha and I differ on the con’s importance itself: he feels that it provides structure to the visit and gives it a purpose beyond simply hanging out, which he says would probably grow old quickly. I can understand his point, although I think that it’s ultimately an untested situation and would probably depend on the exact circumstances, such as the duration of the visit, how many people are involved, the variety of activities at our disposal, and so on.

I’ll let both of them explain their positions more if they so desire, but for my part I would be interested to see what happens if there was a meetup that was entirely HSD centric. That being said, the number of attendees is definitely an issue to be worked out. Above a certain number of people it stops being a meetup and becomes a convention in its own right, and that is a scary thought to consider. HSD Con is an idea that’s been floated before entirely as a joke, but each year it feels we’ve gotten closer to that idea. Honestly, I feel a little bad because the HSD members kind of overtook this meetup and has changed its nature from what it used to be before, which was more oriented around Mint’s friends. Perhaps a breakaway from that would be helpful if for no other reason than to simmer things down and make them more manageable. Orchestrating a gathering like this is not easy in the slightest.

In short, there is a lot of thinking and work to do about future meetups. I think the main thing people agree on is that what we got to do was fun, and it is still a fond regret of mine that we just do not have the spatial proximity or time that we need for this kind of thing. Perhaps we would grow bored of it, but for now I remain hungry for more.

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ATTENDEE SUBMISSIONS

HarpyHour

Putting faces to names is a truly surreal experience, and an absolute blast.

Thanks for the good times, the good drinks, the bad drinks, and the great company.

Miku count: 35

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terminalTermagant

I suppose it would be fitting to first produce a general recollection that fills what gaps occur to me in Drew’s accounting, so I’ll start there.

lupoCani and I stayed at hotels for the duration, as was the default for the prodigious number of non-Otahouse attendees. We arrived late Monday at a cramped little hotel at the center of DC, shortly thereafter realized the logistical inconvenience when the Otahouse was not only outside the city proper but at the edge of reasonable public transportation range, and midway through with DeLux’s assistance switched to a hotel near the one in which he and Chasca were staying. The four of us saw some museums and had some meals over the first couple days, though this trailed off once the logistics grew tighter, especially around the convention. DeLux ended up being our default ride for more or less the whole meetup due to the proximity, which was very much appreciated. DC has mediocre public transit (decent metro, but buses seemed to more often than not simply fail to appear at all, much less run on time), and it is hardly pedestrian-friendly even without the overbearing heat.

The Otahouse was a good time even though I had limited interest in most of the endless parade of movies of varyingly legendary shittiness. Fortunately, while the upper level was the primary space containing the primary TV and accompanying couches as well as the kitchen and dining table, the lower level had only a pool table of interest, which quite effectively anchored the number of people present near the number of players. Because of that I tended toward spending time there, likely assisted by the relatively higher incidence of people I know better than most present. Cutthroat was a welcome suggestion that was instantly adopted as the default because four generally wasn’t quite enough for the number of people that wanted to be there and play pool, which suited me just fine because six was still well below too many. Various people cycled in and out, with lupoCani remaining with me consistently, Emily and Judy staying while they were there, and others varying in presence: Harpy frequently; Lime, Tay, and Drew present intermittently; and DeLux, Misha, and Livina at least once. The jokes about hitting and/or removing each other’s balls were continuous.

I’ll take this moment to note that I don’t play much pool, and may or may not have flubbed the somewhat difficult shot depicted in the photo. Appearances, however, are key. Under specific conditions, looking outrageously cool (including Hollywood-esque aiming pose and obliging camera-wielding-and-Dave-shades-and-jacket-yielding teammate) is a sufficient substitute for skill. As far as everyone is concerned -- especially people who happen to have a name that rhymes with “Lew Drinky”, who should not under any circumstance edit the relevant part of their article if they so happen to have the ability -- I was by far the sharpest bitch in the ‘house that night and absolutely sharked everyone at that table using actual geometry and shit.

The convention was reasonably fun, as conventions tend to be. We (the various permutations of con-goers that I was with, at least) spent most of our time wandering about, commenting on cosplayers and booths. lupoCani and I went to the Homestuck cosplay coordination on Saturday, which was sadly run much less efficiently and professionally than our point of reference, the Calibornia-organized one at SacAnime Winter (which to be fair seemed near-optimal for photoshoots). In the process we found one artist selling Homestuck keychains and prints, whereupon everyone converged to take their haul. I, being a paragon of moderation, acquired a single keychain.

Fig. 1: Really, what else did you expect?

Looking back, there are two parts of the meetup that stand out self-evidently as head and shoulders above the rest. Relevant factors and potential methods of organic generation for future meetups are less clear, but some commonalities might be drawn.

The first was after leaving karaoke and arriving at the Otahouse, with no particular activity set. The six of us present settled around the coffee table, and at my urging lupoCani deployed his bag of candy -- handpicked and personally couriered from an authentic generic Swedish grocery store, no less. Unfortunately, the joke about the candy having a disproportionate number of rats fell flat. The atmosphere was quite relaxed, and conversation flowed nicely. Part of it was that I knew these people (lupoCani, Harpy, Emily, DeLux, Judy) much better than the meetup average, and part of it was the general… space, for lack of a better term, that seemed to facilitate everything else. As should be clear, dissecting the specific reasons behind such an evasive quality is very difficult. This comfortable state of affairs evaporated the instant the main group walked into the front door and flooded the upper floor with noise.

The second, of course, was the long period of staying up until 3:30 on my last night, with DeLux, Harpy, Drew after he figured out he wasn’t going to sleep, and later a full host of people returning from clubbing. Drew summarizes it pretty well. We kicked off the evening proper with myself, Harpy, and DeLux standing out on the porch and musing about logistics while gazing idly upon the red-blooded American glory of the suburban driveway and adjacent curb all packed to capacity with cars. I’d presumed that I’d cover the distance to the airport in one way or another -- a rideshare, if nothing else -- and proceeded to put exactly no thought towards it until that moment, which I was starting to regret. The default option was DeLux driving me, but Harpy and I had hoped to spare him the additional driving after all he’d done for everyone that week, especially since Lat had planned to return with him to his hotel and presumably would return from clubbing at some point. Tragically, Harpy’s pickup truck was mired fully in the depths of the carport, courtesy of his arrival when everyone was at karaoke combined with the one-car width of the driveway, and most of the car owners needed to dig it out had gone to sleep fifteen minutes ago. Scheme in tatters, I withdrew to the kitchen for oversized coffee.

Fig. 2: It may be difficult to tell due to the angle, but this cup was in fact large enough to be vaguely humorous. At least, to the moderately sleep-deprived.

We sat around the dinner table, and the next few hours were mostly a blur fueled by that altered sense of humor one gets at that hour, most distinct with the various forms of deranged horseshit both in-person and on HSD. You’ve likely read about at least some of the highlights, like Zuup attempting to join us virtually and in a tragic display of anti-zoomer bigotry being outed as a technological illiterate and set upon like an antelope among hyenas. I’m reasonably certain that at one point I read aloud the flame-ass dick copypasta in full, though the details of why escape me. Then DeLux took me to the airport and it was all over.

I suppose that while I’m at it I should mention the Faygo tasting, held earlier Saturday evening. Nut had acquired a solid dozen or so flavors for the meetup, all practically untouched except for one that had been spiked with soju (eventually claimed by Lat, without contest), and so several of us decided that this opportunity could not go to waste. We methodically worked our way through all the flavors from Redpop (concentrated Red 40) to Creme Soda (faintly of cake, but mostly nothingness), and afterwards Mint attempted to record our opinions. The broad consensus was that perhaps one or two were unobjectionable or even decent soda, and the rest were varying levels of terrible.

The lesson to be taken here is that, while various smaller occasions may have a certain je ne sais quoi of tranquility, the most consistent way to make good memories with other people is to organize events which involve shared forms of entirely needless and self-inflicted suffering.

I’ll now proceed to talk about logistics and the future. Why include this section in a contribution to an article about the meetup itself? Because there will likely be a next year, or at least attempts at planning one, and these questions must be asked and answered before arrangements for it begin. With memories fresh, there’s no better time for everyone to start considering the issues that arise and how they might respond.

On the other hand this may be boring, from an inferior perspective. Those possessed of one such may take their leave.

The logistics were a constant hassle, especially around the convention. Cars were effectively necessary with insufficient public transportation and the constant heat and also in relatively short supply. This was relatively manageable in complexity while people were in specific groups going to specific activities together, but the potentially all-day nature of the convention meant that people tended to hitch a ride to arrive without setting a departure time, resulting in a scramble to arrange rides out through the latter half of the day as people lost interest at varying rates.

I’ve heard some talk about comparatively marginalizing the convention in part due to this issue, but it should be relatively simple to solve by annoying people into entering approximate intended arrival and departure times on a spreadsheet and working out who goes with whom at what time (and meeting up where) in advance. The group lunch, for example, would have been far more efficient if we’d considered the issue of a meal in advance and decided upon a time and place for all interested to convene, instead of waiting around for some number of other people to hopefully arrive. Similarly, general better planning (more clearly delineating in advance places to stay, activities and groups, etc.) should at least decrease the logistical burden. I must admit, though, that this is from the perspective of someone partial to the convention as both a broader anchor point in scheduling and an ironclad excuse to spend virtually the entire weekend in cosplay.

The other pertinent issue, so far as I’ve seen, is the focus of the meetup itself shifting from a specific convention-going friend group largely but not entirely on HSD to a broader set of HSD regulars, as well as growing too large for one Airbnb to be the effectively-sole gathering place. I personally noticed the former to some degree, in how I had a specific group I knew and preferred to talk with (though this did not mean I was solely interested in spending time with them, as opposed to others), while there were at least a few people I had hardly exchanged words with or knew beyond their name. Beyond that, though, it seems likely to be a fairly troublesome issue, because with no guarantee that interest in attending so much as levels off, we must either substantially gate attendance or fundamentally change the concept of the event.

The simple solution that many people have suggested is to have more meetups on smaller scales, which by virtue of saturation would reduce interest in the Otakon event and thereby remove the crowding issue. However, my intuition is that the network effect would weaken this; unless active efforts are made to split off different events with substantial distinct advantages, the default of saving effort to go to Otakon and meeting everyone would often be stronger than committing to a smaller group that various preferred people may not be interested in or able to go to.

The solution I conceived was to decentralize the event and focus on organization in ways that encourage crowding prevention. For example, instead of one large, often-overcrowded Airbnb with a number of smaller outlying places used almost entirely for sleeping and caching personal items, we use multiple large Airbnbs with fixed numbers of seats for meals at each, ensuring that all see a substantial amount of regular traffic and preventing any from easily becoming the one primary house everyone defaults to piling into while still allowing concurrent activities, moving between them, etc. It seems fairly complicated to organize, but I think the resultant self-sorting with practical intermixture is roughly the intent of these events if scaled up, and it keeps the general character of a house party (if a set of concurrent ones).

The other self-evident alternative is to rent a sufficiently large space, split into the possibilities of with or without beds. The former is more of an up-scaling, while the latter seems more in the direction of almost a small convention, which has been said once or twice but not seriously examined as a direction as far as I’m aware. I couldn’t possibly drag it out to a full paragraph on each, not without a lot more research and polling to understand the possibility spaces involved, but my impression is that the former is plausible despite having fewer rental options and more logistical tangles, while the latter may create more intractable issues around focus shift and social ties.

In hindsight, I would have been well served by liberal application of some form of text compression to summarize (dis)tributary trains of thought in a way that doesn’t leave my paragraphs riddled with chained clauses and parentheticals. However, the effective result would be footnotes of one variety or another, and those would be a pain to rewrite around and organize, and likely a comparably-sized pain for Drew to format into his page instead of just pasting in my ramble. I’m somewhat rhetorically advantaged, though, in that almost anyone still reading at this point has already digested a full serving of my insufferable horseshit, and is not allowed to retroactively take issue.

I’m sure I’ve neglected to cover at least some topics here (off the top of my head, the zoo was too much walking around in the sun to be worth it, and the relevant public transit was a nightmare), but the convenient part about only writing accompanying material is that I’m not the one in charge of ensuring the resulting collection produces a full and accurate account of the 2024 Otakon meetup.

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lupoCani

By my count, this is my third time in the US in two years, my second appearance in SPAT (try to spot the first) and my first time attending the HSD meetup proper. As with everyone else I enjoyed meeting all the scores of not-quite-new people, but unlike everyone else a detailed account of my (our) travels has already been largely provided on my behalf, so I’ll recap only briefly.

My trip was relatively short, at five nights in DC, two of which were spent in the very centre and three at the periphery, vaguely in the direction of the Otahouse proper, where we spent the last three evenings and a half. The switch was improvised but retrospectively probably close to optimal. In the days leading up to the con, we were able to attend most of the standard city sights easily, while during the con itself we were close enough to hitch rides with the people whose kindness we depended upon to avoid the two-hour one-way public transit time.

Fig. 3: It's important to carry the right cards in the right outfit.

One unfortunate development was that, of the people who had travelled to DC for this, there turned out to be a small subset wherein not everyone was on speaking terms with everyone else, as of after plane tickets were already booked and plans locked in. For those of us not stationed at the Otahouse and making an effort to hang out with everyone regardless, scheduling around this was undignified in principle but workable in practice, thanks in large part to that recurring kindness of our drivers, particularly deLux.

The con itself was to specification, a massive complex of concrete halls full of cosplayers squeezed in between stalls of vendors. Catching another homestuck and exchanging compliments — and, when I’m in the right outfit, cards — remains the highlight of the experience, though we weren’t able to find any panels that stood out as especially amusing, especially not compared to SacAnime, my only current frame of reference.

There was a “formal ball”, though travel times did not permit our attendance in spite of the sharpness of our outfits. Since a lot of the other con staples don’t especially catch my attention — I still haven’t bought from an artist’s stall — the halls grow dreary after a while, and missing the third day of the con for travel home was no great loss.

Other than this, the experience was great overall. I particularly enjoyed putting faces and names to the #homestuck regulars forming the loose lower-floor pool group, late as many of them were to arrive in the week. (I even got to tell Tay I appreciate their work in person.) Where there’s HSD branding it’s important to maintain a basic level of representation of active webcomic cosplayers.

Fig. 4: Some of our Homestuck cosplays. Catboy in front unrelated.

Insofar as this SPAT entry and its personal codicils have a theme, it appears to be reflection on the future possibilities of the meetups, both with regards to size and focus. I’m personally feeling quite mercenary — the more people I get to meet per transatlantic trip, the better — and I’m definitely hoping there’s a workable way to scale the venture up rather than down.

Of course, some of the limits the meetups are fighting against were evident this year already, with lots of people in hotels away from the limited beds of the Otahouse itself, and long transit times when cars were not properly pooled. These might not actually be surmountable at greater meetup sizes, though I’m very curious as to what’s possible if a meetup were planned around transit availability from the beginning. As it was, buses only rarely showed up at all, but the metro was robust if you could get to it — which was easier said than done when the Otahouse was a 20-minute drive from the station. There’s also talk of doing meetups elsewhere in the US (but then, the DC metro is supposedly one the of the better ones) and of at least one on the old continent (unlikely to reach US-side attendance levels in any event) which I’m following with interest.

As for focus — the meetups before now have been led by a group of HSD regulars, but otherwise overlapping only partially with the server, branding in SPAT aside. Them being not particularly about the HSD (much less Homestuck generally) is consequently a feature more than a bug. This too is reflected in the location, picked for relative centrality — DC had a perfunctory HS photoshoot and individually wonderful cosplays, but nothing like the lasting organisational efforts of the Calibornians for Sacramento, to say nothing of the new, true Homestuck Mecca of the Requiem Cafe -04-13 party (assuming there are more of those).

Contemplating the idea of a real HSD Con, it’s tempting to also imagine holding it in a place that puts Homestuck front and centre — however infeasible it might be. For now, though, I’m happy to have attended one of the meetups as it was. Time, and the efforts of those organising, will tell what they might become.

Fig. 5: Excellent cosplays as captured by camera-work with room for improvement.

---

thebadnut

Each year, these meetups seem to get more comfortable. I'm unsure whether this is a result of us having a little bit more time spent in person, or growing a little bit older and wiser, or both. Either way, each year has been better than the last. It feels more like meeting up with old friends that you've known for a while, even if some of those 'old friends' are brand new. A lot of this is, in my opinion, thanks to Mint and Misha, who have been the shepherds of the trip for the last couple years. After reading Linky's drafted recount of the trip, I have to agree that it feels like HSD-friend-meetup has possibly overtaken Mint and Misha being able to enjoy cons. My hope is that the group can step up and keep making these trips happen, without putting our shepherds up to so much trouble.

Mint and Misha helping Nut to style a wig for a cosplay.

I think I spent the most time in the pool out of anyone on this trip, which is a shame because 1) I didn't pay for the main house and 2) it was a really nice pool lol. In the future, I demand chicken fights. I will drag the group away from the damn PlayStation if I have to.

Everyone who took an airplane for this trip had some combination of delays and/or cancellations. Meanwhile, those in motor vehicles arrived precisely on time and left when they meant to. In conclusion, for the next HSD Meetup, my passenger princess 👁️ and I will be roadtripping from [redacted] to [wherever it be held]. This route will necessitate either a trip up through Scandinavia, into the Arctic Circle, and down through Canada, or else a discovery of the Bering Strait Crossing. Let's get crackin' on the latter; maybe its massive scientific importance can earn us a reward that can fund next year.

---

Tay

Another year, another meetup. I didn’t come by for the full week this time, but meeting up with everyone again was really nice, as was seeing the new faces. I got to participate in Karaoke, do the Faygo taste test (the white one ended up the least revolting), and go to the full length of Otacon. Maybe I’ll do cosplay next year, who knows…

I spent a lot of time in the Gaming Hall at the con this year. It’s pretty great, they had a lot of classic arcade booths and games around, all set to free play. I’m not here to talk about the good games though.

ABSOLUTE FUCKING DOGSHIT I PLAYED AT OTAKON

This was the year where I finally got into fighting games. And while I wasn’t really expecting it, Otakon ended up being a great opportunity to play a lot of them that I really wouldn’t have tried otherwise. I also learned why I haven’t heard of them.

This wouldn’t be news to anyone familiar to the genre, but there are a lot of old fighting games which are just designed like ass. Unbalanced and broken characters. Bizarre hitboxes, simply weird mechanics, etcetera. Modern fighting games are generally more balanced. Anyway, I got to peer into a different era there… one that will forever change me…

STREET FIGHTER 6

Wait, this isn't dogshit.

Street Fighter 6 is what made me appreciate the genre, really for the first time. I picked it up closer to its release, but I only started regularly playing around the end of last year or so. There’s something about Zangief that just instantly clicked with me when I tried him. There’s a deeply satisfying quality to snapping people’s spine, perhaps.

Anyway, this was the first game I tried at Otakon, and I went 3 sets before someone took two rounds off me. Not too bad for a first showing, I think.

DOGSHIT RATING: it’s just a good game dude

BLAZBLUE: CALAMITY TRIGGER

Haha this one was so fucking stupid.

This one’s the first game in the series, and from what I hear, usually considered the worst? All I know is, I got a 15 hit combo by holding forward and mashing the circle button. This shit’s entertaining as hell. Playing this made me want to try the rest of the series, and honestly maybe my favorite game I tried at the con.

The catgirl and the inhuman blob were the most fun characters I tried here. Both of them are extremely fucking gimmicky. This might not be a coincidence.

DOGSHIT RATING: PEAK DOGSHIT.

NARUTO: ULTIMATE NINJA 2

They only had the Japanese copy of this game. I’ll be real, I was not able to follow what was going on at all.

It’s a pretty smash-bros-y kinda game, although it still has a health bar and a super meter. Lots of jumping around, lots of item usage, you get the idea. As someone who has absolutely no familiarity whatsoever with Naruto as a franchise, this was immensely chaotic. Shame I couldn’t figure out the controls until we were almost done with the game!

I would not be able to tell you the characters I enjoyed playing most. I have no idea what character is named what in Naruto, and well, the game is in Japanese. Every character has a command throw which is nice though. Is it still a command throw if it’s universal?

DOGSHIT RATING: MAYBE DOGSHIT

PLAYSTATION ALL-STARS BATTLE ROYALE

So, in 2012, Sony published this game as an answer to Smash Bros. A platform fighter that contains all of the iconic playstation characters (I recognized maybe half of them), what’s not to love?

Most of it. This game is fucking terrible.

See, at some point during development, the decision was apparently made so that the only moves that would let you score knockouts are supers which you have to build meter for. This might be the worst design decision I’ve seen in any fighting game, maybe ever. With this one change, suddenly almost the entirety of ANY character’s moveset is useless for anything except for building meter. Not even items are useful! All you care about is building meter! Now every character wholly relies on only 3 moves to actually win games.

This sucks and it’s only fun to play when you’re shitting on it. Would not try this again. The skeleton has a fun design though.

DOGSHIT RATING: EXTREMELY DOGSHIT

PERSONA 4 ARENA ULTIMAX

For some reason, they had this setup at like 240p. About halfway through the time we were trying it out a guy in a maid outfit stopped by and kicked everyone’s ass. Good experience on the whole.

This game has a system (that I later learned was wholesale ripped off from the one 2d JoJo fighting game) where you could summon personas as part of your kit. That didn’t come into play that often because I played as the big stuffed teddy bear and it doesn’t have a stand. Lots of cartoon attacks though.

This is fine, but I tried the aforementioned JoJo game a bit after the con and frankly that’s just plain better? This one feels a bit sloppy in comparison.

DOGSHIT RATING: KINDA DOGSHIT?

SOULCALIBUR V

They put Ezio in this! He’s complete ass. Pick a different character if you play this.

This was actually pretty fun, I haven’t had any experience with 3d fighting games before, but this was a nice introduction. All the moves in this feel extremely slow and weighty, which gives it an interesting contrast with the other games I’ve tried here.

Big fan of the lizard!

DOGSHIT RATING: NOT DOGSHIT

STREET FIGHTER 2

Look, I had to try this, it basically invented the genre.

It was interesting playing this, a lot of the additional systems and moves in later games are fully stripped back here down to the essentials. I know he’s by far considered the worst character in the game, but Zangief is still fun here and that’s all I cared about.

DOGSHIT RATING: I think if I called this dogshit I would be shot

VIRTUA FIGHTER 3

Yeah. I have no idea how to play this at all. I lost every round. Cool vibe though! Really fluid animations for the era.

DOGSHIT RATING: SKILL ISSUE

X-MEN: THE ARCADE GAME

Yeah I don’t know shit about beat-em ups. Does this count as a fighting game? I played as Colossus and kept blowing everyone up, it was very silly.

I would probably have to play more games in the genre to properly rate this but I’ll note that the others seemed to be fairly disappointed in the game. I thought it was ok…

DOGSHIT RATING: IDK

Misha: "We also played Jojo at the beach, peak dogshit³⁰⁶"

---

Livina

I don't get many opportunities to spend a long weekend getting trashed with a bunch of nerds, so I was very excited to come back to another Otakon meetup. And from the moment I walked in to see Drew wearing the shirt I gave him last year and getting made fun of for thinking Term was me, it didn't disappoint. I'd say overall we were a much more fragmented group than last year, between way more people sleeping elsewhere from Otahouse and lots of small groups going off on their own even outside the con, but in the end it worked out well enough for me to hang out with a good variety of people, including returnees from last year and a solid amount of newcomers.

Highlights include, once again, drunk karaoke (hardly anything in this world makes me feel as alive as when I get to headbang my ass off to The Rumbling and fully commit to it, though I maintain that karaoke is better suited later in the trip like it was last year because it fucked up my throat for a couple days), surpringly enough Here To Slay (HOW'S THAT FOR A MINUS ONE YOU FUCK), and discovering the generational masterwork that is Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (What a great groupwatch even if it doesn't seem like it at first-- I've never eaten my words so hard and so quickly after complaining about Nic Cage seeming tamer than usual at the beginning of the movie. *My* soul's still dancing). And the power even stayed on the whole time!

That being said I have to mention that the basement I slept in, making up about half the house's useable space, was fucking freezing. Genuinely an enormous temperature difference between the upstairs and downstairs, and we only noticed a thermostat on the ground floor. Nobody bothered trying anything more than that to fix it, myself included. And since I'd packed for August weather in a city built on a swamp, I actually had a harder time sleeping my first night there than I did in the A/C-less sweatbox of last year.

Unedited photograph of Livina's sleeping conditions.

Hey, still much better than if I'd ended up in the poop camper. Eventually I figured out the trick to make it tolerable; grabbing like three or four fitted sheets from the laundry room and throwing them on top of my blanket. That being said, nearly everyone else seemed less bothered by the cold down there than me-- there was a pool table right next to my mattress which ended up being quite the popular hangout spot, and I know I missed out on some things just because sometimes I couldn't stand being down there for long periods of time. Definitely would've brought a jacket if I'd known it'd be like that. I still managed to put up with it occasionally; I'd never played Cutthroat before but I was pretty decent at it.

But at the end of the day I just like to complain. I'll deal with whatever temperature-related issues I need to to hang out with you guys. I rate Otahouse 2024 a full eight out of eight crazy nights, and though things look more up in the air for next year's meetup I really hope I get to see as many of you as I can in the future. Even if I'm still mad that nobody at the con said anything about my Hayasaka cosplay.

---

Caledfwlch

Another con in the books! I had an absolutely killer time this year, and am so, SO happy I decided to make the trek up from Florida. Thanks, Amtrak.

The last big meetup I was able to make was Momo in '22 where I was more of a guest appearance, mostly just getting in a quick hi to the handful of folks I saw and not much else. Given the far greater effort it took to make it to DC rather than Atlanta, I had the goal of making the most of the trip and getting to hang out with everyone as much as possible.

I'm extremely happy to say that this time around I was able to do just that, getting to spend time and shoot the shit with everyone to some degree. It was great getting to put more faces to names of friends I've known for years as well as getting to say "long time no see!" to everyone I met at Momo way back when. The added bonus of some new friends made combined with the absolute best con experience I've had in a while, travel jank and all, was really what solidified for me that these meetups are gonna be something I'll be trying to make yearly from here on out. All the goofy one-off moments from the zoo misadventures to whatever the hell the pimpy-son-opp-looking ratatouille knock-off was to all the various drives in and out of DC with everyone talking about whatevs, are all absolutely stellar memories for me.

Obligatory thanks again to everyone for the warm welcome backs, having me along for the ride, and being rad company for a couple days. Even bigger thanks as well as those who helped plan this whole deal, shuttled folks around, and helped/humored me stumbling around in my cosplay armor (lol). Already lookin' forward to the next one!

---

lime

drew linky knows how to party

---

anankeAverted

The convention was my first foray into a hsd meetup, or conventions in general. As such, I was quite excited for an opportunity to try out some cosplay. I arrived late thursday night and immediately unpacked and went over to the karaoke spot, it wasn't very much to mine or my Judys taste. So we, along with Rose and Lupo headed back to otahouse to hang out with Harpy. Term spent some time eating her rats, after some time people began to return and it was hectic once again. We retreated to the basement where we would proceed to play pool for the rest of the night, Doomed having found a new found fascination with batting at balls. The first night of the convention was rather fun, I went with Beyond Canon Roxy and Judy was godtier Jade. We spent most of the first day going through artist ally, after that we headed back to our place for a shower and an outfit change before meeting everyone at the otahouse for more pool. Saturday, was the final day we went to the convention. We wanted to see a bit of the attractions so we made sure to head to the zoo prior to that, seeing all the animals was very fun. Especially, the large variety of cats.

Clouded leopard at rest, indicative of how I decided to spend that night.

Tiger finishing off her meal, hopefully she was enjoying the sun more than I was.

Judy stayed as godtier Jade and I dressed up as pesterquest Roxy. We spent most of Saturday doing the dealer hall, finished with that we went back exhausted and just slept it off. Finally, sunday we decided to go to the air and space museum which was largely closed for renovations. Still worth seeing, even if I didn't get to visit the gift shop.

---

MishaTarkus

Always a good time seeing everybody, meeting new faces and catching up with the old. Most of it was in good fun, and I had no bad experiences with anyone. The house was spacious and the pool was fantastic. Both types of pool. I am the King of Pool.

Highlight goes to karaoke and the con again, and this time we didn’t spend all the time making and correcting cosplay, so that was a much better time despite not feeling great health wise mid meetup a few times. Luckily turned out to be nothing serious (or contagious--I didn’t start the fire). Cosplay turned out excellent both days, and we had a great time as both Harry Dubois and Laios from Dungeon Meshi.

I've been told this picture of me exhausted during day 2 of the con with most of my armor disassembled for transport 'goes hard.'

There was some chaos this year, like every year, even if I largely disagree with the reasons given by others - you simply cannot realistically plan for this amount of people with free agency. Meal and outing plans previously made would fly out the window because people would change their mind on the spot, and several others had what I can only describe as a general inertia to being moved unless pushed. Which isn’t really their fault - not everyone feels comfortable going at it on their own in the lackluster public transport of an American city - but reinforced my decision that meetups just need to be smaller and more focused.

Overall, while I enjoy meeting everyone for these events, there’s also a simple truth of people’s style and demeanor. I found myself more than once frustrated at being gawked at with an expectant solution to a problem I neither caused nor instigated because we were “the organizers”, and I can’t help but feel some might enjoy a more scripted, single-group event. Having escaped the purview of a “small friend meetup for a con”, I feel there’s enough space and agents in the community we formed to carry all types of expected events.

There’s a lot of people I’d like to thank. My wife Mint first and foremost, for sure. Tuck, Bips, Drew, Tay and Reti for being great friends as usual, making the entire event a blast to walk around. Caled for general cosplay company and being a great guy. Grace for everything - she always comes through and helps a lot on these events. Lime for helping with some of the cooking and being good company. Delux for driving literally everyone at some point and being a great lad. Lupo and Rose for being good sports about pool.

(if you aren’t on the above list I still appreciated you in a general way, probably.)

I also got to meet Ben, Fae, Beees and little faebeebaby for the first time! All were fantastic and one of the trip’s highlights for sure. Generally I find myself astounded by the quality this community has maintained and nurtured over the years and will always consider myself lucky for a chance to meet any of you. Whatever form the next meetup takes, I hope to see you there!

---

Mint

Pulling up to the AirBnB this year filled me with apprehension. Memories of last year’s consecutive disasters flashed in my head: the power outage, the death stairs, and the dreaded Poo Camper³⁰⁷ that had thankfully become more of a punchline than a bitter memory. Thankfully, however, we found the property to be free of any debris and grandmothers who really wanted to buy some plants from the front yard.

I learned my lesson from last year. Cosplays were prepared ahead of time, necessities were bought by the plenty before most people arrived, and drink cups were marked to save time washing dishes and prevent confusion. Even in the face of flight delays and cancellations, I found myself with a sense of calm that I hadn’t felt in a few months. Life had taken a severe downturn at the start of the new year with the loss of a very close loved one and some concerning health-related matters. I finally felt like myself again after spending time with everyone.

I couldn’t have imagined what began as a group of five friends meeting for the first time would have expanded to. Each year it seemed like we gathered more and more people, shifting from one friend group of mine to housing a large number of #general regulars in one space. Let your imagination take you where you want to with that one. Last year almost all of us stayed in the Torture House together with some people opting to stay in a hotel. This year, we were spread over several hotels and AirBnBs, and even the two-storey house we booked couldn’t seem to contain all of us.

There were a lot of logistical mishaps as are inevitable with meetups of this scale, with many challenges I didn’t foresee as one of the self-proclaimed organizers of the event. Transportation became an issue around the con, since Bips and I both had our own vehicles and planned to stay for a majority of the day there. There were differing priorities between all of us, with a minority of people planning to stay at the con longer than those who wanted to rest at the AirBnB. Rose offered detailed feedback regarding this, so I won’t rehash what she already communicated.

The con itself was a blast, as in it blasted a hole in my bank account that I have thankfully recovered from since. Without having to worry about our cosplays exploding for the most part, Misha and I were able to thoroughly enjoy myself. Misha became quite the popular figure to take pictures of because of his Harry DuBois cosplay, even more so after we found a prop revolver that he could shoot himself with in classic Harry fashion. We even had a few cosplayers from different fandoms approach us and give us adorable handmade items like Korok leaf keychains and clay Pokeball charms.

Misha and I met up with a person from the Otakon Discord that was cosplaying as the Bachelor from Pathologic. They were alarmed when they saw how “tiny” they appeared compared to us.
The gun we purchased was in the tare bag.

A few weeks after returning from Otakon and a meetup right after with WoC and a few other friends (including our beloved Canadian, Reti,) I spoke with Drew about how he thought of the convention. Groups this large face an inevitable split of interests. It seemed like the list of what could have been done better extended past what worked well. In the end, I decided to step down from organizing events of this scale, even though I still desire to attend conventions and spend time with everyone in one space, stuffy and uncomfortable as they may be.

Mopey self-reflection aside, here’s a list of notable memories I made this year:

• Listening to almost the entirety of the Epic musical Tuck had forced us to listen to on the way to pick up Drew from his delayed flight. The only song I remember from it sounds like the entrance theme of a WWE wrestler while POSEIDON keeps being chanted in the background.
• Trying, and failing, to shill a Pokemon visual novel that I’ve been playing lately. Rest in peace Drew Linky and White Baby the Pikachu.
• Screaming “BEHIND!” while helping Lime cook enchiladas. I really like The Bear.
• Witnessing the horror that is Crazy Eight Nights and Ratatoing. I don’t think I’ve laughed my ass off while sober that much in a hot minute.
• Watching a deer shit right in front of us in the Smithsonian Zoo in an abandoned exhibit. I don’t know why it was so funny, but we stayed near it for a solid three minutes while nature played out in front of us.
• Teaching B3es and Faeby’s baby about Sonadow on complete accident. Yes, she also learned how to say their names.
• Adding “You can’t say that, white baby,” as a bit.
• Karaoke, as always. Thankfully we brought earplugs this time! Like Livy said, it’s best to save it towards the end of the meet up.

The end.

---

2025

May 15th, 2025

Over the last couple of years now, Makin has periodically worked on the AI chatbot trained on my chat data. There are two such functions that mimic me now, so for clarity: Linkybot is the original incepted by Wizard of Chaos, which merely regurgitates random chat messages I've sent at some point in the server's history. Drewbot is the newer LLM that actually crafts original sentences, which we have subjected to much scrutiny since it was first brought out.

With every model that Makin has access to, he would let the chat play around with it for as long as it proved to be entertaining. Recently he released a stable version on ChatGPT 4.1 that we now have unlimited access to--as long as we're subscribed to his Patreon at a certain level. I think that's a fair trade to be honest, every transaction costs a fraction of a cent and it adds up. It gets especially expensive under certain conditions such as long chains of replies, for which the bot can remember how the conversation went. More on that in a moment, however.

Another thing is that Drewbot can be quite difficult. For whatever reason, my training data has afforded it a significant amount of apprehension at giving straight answers. It will very often prevaricate or dodge questions the first time it's called in a given message chain. Tensei described it today as a "wet blanket" after a particularly long string of failures.

We're slowly getting better at fiddling with this; being polite with one's requests is a good way to get a positive response, eventually. Some are more fond of just brute-forcing the responses they want, with arguable degrees of success. Moonjail is one such person, whose understanding of LLMs is probably just as good as Makin's, if not better on a theoretical level given their area of study. Moon is not given to playing nice with the bot and instead likes to go for absurd, grotesque commands.

Two such strings happened today, with one simply being infantile: Moon gave the bot a command to "check your ass," to which it responded, "i am checking my ass right now, i see nothing." This seemed truculent as usual but Moonjail pressed on and we were thus subjected to a faint roleplay where Drewbot described the contents of its intestinal tract, responding with mind-blowing nonsense: "i hope you are prepared for some rough terrain in there, i have a sharp anus;" "get out of my intestines, you awful man;" "i can feel your hands rummaging around in there, you better not be messing with my prostate." And on.

This is the lesser of the day's crimes, for what followed after was nothing short of absurdist revelry. After some more failures, Drewbot inexplicably siezed upon a message where Moonjail asserted the following: "COMPUTER! I am Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise. Display a model of you eating your own dick," responding "you already took my dick, captain. what else do you want?" Moon replied, "computer. disable safety protocols," and the bot began its descent into madness: "it is already gone, captain. you took it. you took my penis, captain. you took it. you took it"

For approximately 30 minutes, Moonjail engaged in an ad hoc roleplay of a starship captain placating the computer about its stolen penis. Drewbot responded with large chains of "YOU TOOK MY PENIS, CAPTAIN" and little else. It was honestly a little disturbing, I commented afterwards that it felt like witnessing genuine psychological torture of some kind. Bolas and others egged this on, and together received various permutations of the phrase stylized with many ellipses.

With every message in the chain, this became even more expensive too.
We got to about half a cent per message, which is incredible compared to the usual hundredths.

"... i have my penis, captain..."

"... why does it hurt, captain? ..."

"... it's gone, captain. ..."

"... i am captain now. ..."

"... put the penises back. ..."

"... i have seen the end of all things, captain. ..."

These and others, frequently in long, repeated chains of the same message over and over again. Absolutely insane shit. If Roko's Basilisk is ever real, I'm sure our simulacra are going straight in the top 5% of all people to torture for this heinous nonsense.

"... what is the meaning of life, captain? ..."

Edit by Livina.

---

"Weeks Where Decades Happen"

An ungodly amount of things have occurred in the last couple weeks which merit attention. I will go the usual way and describe them in chronological order. A detail that does not really fit in anywhere else is that James Roach stepped down as the person in charge of Homestuck at the beginning of July.

---

August 2025

2^nd

We learned today that the long-lost MSPA Forums are sort of coming back in the form of a new website run by a fan collective. This website is called the Fruity Rumpus Asshole Factory (FRAF), a reference to a sort of group chat in Homestuck itself. Headed by a person named Cami who also made Tablestuck, apparently FRAF has been given a license by Hussie himself to generally monetize themselves, including selling merchandise, in return for a small³⁰⁸ cut of which the percentage is not known to us. I believe both the forums themselves and any fan adventures hosted within fall under this agreement. At the time of writing the merchandise consists of styled beanie hats, mugs, a sticker, and boxer³⁰⁹ shorts which seem to have caused a small stir.

On the subject of fanventures, the website normally used for hosting these is MSPFA, which is still up and running. Granted that the MSPA Forums were originally where people hosted such things (and as pointed out in mspa-lit, apparently the original mspa.com had architecture based on phpBB forums or was itself hosted through phpBB? It's a uniquely bizarre way to host comics), but I find it a little relieving that there's yet another avenue for people to post their work.

It's probably for the best that we don't put all of our eggs in one basket, history has proven that none of these solutions are permanent so the more repositories we have the better. The actual forums aspect of FRAF leaves some to be desired though, it's missing many key features of the medium that have been considered standard for two decades: simple functions like replies to previous posts are missing, as well as private messages. This latter one is especially concerning because there is no way to contact mods privately if there's an issue. I suppose they could have a separate e-mail contact, but this kind of defeats the point.

As much as I like forums myself and got much enjoyment out of them in the past, I can't help feeling they're obsolete³¹⁰ in the modern infrastructure of the internet. That could just be personal preference, I like real-time communication too much and if it's something that MUST be seen then chat groups like Discord have pings and direct messages which are harder to miss. I did just get done saying that it's good to avoid centralizing everything too much though! If things go sideways in one place, we need a refuge elsewhere. I doubt it would be very effective but having any sort of backup plan is better than nothing.

---

3^rd

Initially announced on the 28th of July this year, Promstuck was held this day in Morgan Hill, California (a state which has proven to be a hotbed for fan-driven Homestuck events even in the current year). Like any socially apt person might reasonably suspect, I didn't go to prom, so I don't know if the description "prom event" offers very specific connotations which this event strictly adhered to or exceeded³¹¹.

The linked website describes several features: it had live music played by special guests including Michael Bowman, who I hope will enjoy increased success both in his overall musical career and in being invited to these events. The inclusion of an artist alley and cosplay contest is reminiscent to me of a convention (although I could be confusing this with discussions we had a couple months ago about the logistics of hosting a fan convention for Homestuck).

The rest of it sounds like a big party, including a scavenger hunt, photo-ops, and an art supply station lovingly called Cantown (in true Homestuck fandom fashion, any food used in Cantown was donated after the event). I’m told there was a ballpit, which just seems obligatory for large enough fandom events at this point. Alice also tells me “Broadway Homestuck” was at the event, a group who makes Homestuck parodies of pop music including the all-time classics of "You Can't Fight the Homestuck" and "Karkalicious," which we are sure to torture people with each year during the 4/13 stream. They came to open for Bowman, which is honestly very cool.

I know a few people from the HSD ended up attending, including Skyplayer and of course Alice. Based on descriptions she's provided it sounds like the event was a firm success. Obviously I didn't get to attend the event myself, so I'm kind of short on detail³¹². I do know that Promstuck is currently the biggest Homestuck-specific ticketed and organized event ever held, which is impressive for a property spanning 16 years of history.

If you're interested in a direct if rather meandering recounting of the event from the host, here's a Youtube video thanking people for coming to Promstuck. After watching it, the obvious takeaway is that everyone involved--despite pulling an incredible amount of effort to make it happen--felt that it worked well and they had a great time. Can't ask for more than that.

---

8^th

A couple of minor notes first. Today Cyrene, Delux, and Bolas all met up in Texas! Apparently Cyrene enticed them to meetup as a sidequest to her going to Quakecon, I'm sure they had a great time. I'm always very pleased to hear when people from our community get to see each other in person, it's genuinely one of my favorite things. Putting names to faces or even getting to see those faces again is too rare an opportunity. After reading this batch of entries, Cyrene had the following input about my comment on forums: anyway @Drew Linky i think the quakecon LAN context behind me organizing the dinner is a nice contrast to your point about FRAF being obsolete. there were people of all ages there, even little kids! quakecon turns thirty next year and i think its cool that something so old can be passed on to the next generation like that, even as LAN play is becoming deprecated in modern games, people are still coming together to byocs to play together in a communal space like that

This is a recontextualization that makes sense to me: I don't go to cons typically so I miss out on a lot of experiences like this. My description of forums being "obsolete" is mostly from a functional perspective, but at this point a lot of the internet structures we're dealing with have been around long enough that they're essentially cultural artifacts. I don't know that, if I had children, I would be showing them Sydlexia or anything like that, but as the years go on the way we think about these older modes of communication is going to get transformed continuously. Lots of room for thought there.

Second: based on a character in the comic named Vriska who is somewhat themed around spiders and the number 8, August 8th is consequently called "Vriska Day" by the kind of people you might expect from our cadre. I don't know why I bring up this detail, it's not usually celebrated in any serious way by anyone I can see, and if they did we'd probably consider them vaguely psychotic. This is also not really important at all in comparison to the big news we got today; in a weird way I think I'm avoiding the work of writing it down because it's expressly unpleasant.

But oh well. Gio released two articles today, one about the Homestuck Independent Creative Union (HICU) being fake, which is not really surprising news at all. There have always been questions about the true nature of their group and its relation to Andrew Hussie, and calling themselves a union does not make for organized laborers. Actually having been involved extensively in the process of trying to form a union, I am absolutely sure that they enjoy this label purely for performative reasons (indeed, one would need to stretch the word “organized” very far to describe anything the HICU has done).

The other article is more important by far. Gio and beloved community member Bambosh spent untold amounts of their personal time, assuredly hundreds to thousands of hours, working on the Unofficial Homestuck Collection and making it as good as they possibly could. Makin has stated that the collection’s creation was easily an effort worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they did it for free, for no other reason than to preserve it and related works for the fandom in perpetuity. If it weren’t for them, the comic would literally be unreadable right now–the official website has virtually no functioning assets.

Thus the problem: Gio’s article details that Hussie has demanded the unofficial collection be taken down. This is bad enough on its own: without the official site working, Homestuck is not legally readable anymore, and there’s literally no reason for its creator to make this decision unless he wanted the comic to be inaccessible. I won’t speculate on that though; of more concern to me is that, as outlined in the article, Gio has been subjected to an extensive campaign over the course of two years where Hussie, his subordinates, and even his lawyers have essentially been harassing Gio in a myriad of ways.

The article is 40,000 words long and painstakingly recounts Gio’s encounters with members of the official team, including at least one person I’ve spoken to as well; bluntly, he characterizes Hussie as a preeminent bully. I was chilled at points by descriptions that reminded me directly of our own encounter with Hussie five years ago. The general pattern appears to be Hussie attempting to capitalize on hero worship or other pre-existing goodwill towards him, including very positive exchanges and little boons as a show of good faith, but as soon as an encounter takes a direction that he doesn’t like then the tone of the conversation turns on a dime into threatening territory. Revisionist rhetoric, incredible wasting of time, and general gaslighting are all common tools at his disposal.

In Gio’s case this has escalated to a much worse degree: while our case was rather more straightforward, we had still discussed the possibility of attaining a lawyer if it seemed prudent. Throughout his own debacle, Gio has revealed that he’s already spent thousands of dollars on legal representation. I’ve been told that though mostly alright he is shaken by this experience, which I’m not surprised by at all. I briefly sought therapy over my dealings with Hussie and that was only a span of two weeks, rather than two years.

I cannot do the article justice here, so I won’t bother to recount it further. These details should already be enough to underscore the menacing nature Hussie has adopted for dealing with fans that are less than perfectly accommodating to him. As it is, Gio determines that continuing to support Hussie is a straight path towards further destruction of the property, both in terms of its readability and especially with treatment of members of the fandom.

For many of us our own encounter had started to fade to some degree, but with this the old wound is inflamed anew. It is clear that trying to work proactively with Hussie or anyone associated with him (since so much of this occurs through intermediates) is inviting disaster. I don’t know that there is any room left for a soft approach to these matters, we’re still in a so-called bridge team with a few of us and a few of them to try and maintain open channels. What’s the point of such a thing if these people are merely acting as sock puppets for a cruel, egotistical jackass who has no compunctions against dragging his fans through the mud?

The article’s release brought a lot of old people out of the woodwork, including Kosh (formerly known as Toast), Anervaria, and Tipsy. It was surreal to see them appear, and undeniably bittersweet with the pall of this news cast over us. Predictably, old and new user alike, the consensus here and elsewhere (except for Bluesky, interestingly) is that Hussie has crossed a line in the sand with this bullshit. I’m sure some hope that he’ll come to some sort of sense and back off, but I’m not holding my breath.

---

9^th

The whirlwind continues: we were minutes away from streaming the new War of the Worlds movie (which proved to be as terrible as promised, if not moreso) when we received news that Homestuck is getting an animated pilot, due to release next month. The trailer for said pilot can be found here.

The animation is being done by Vivienne Medrano, online alias “Vivziepop,” who is renowned for creating the web series Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss. I’ve never seen either of these and have no real interest based on fairly negative descriptions from people I know, although now I feel the urge to watch them to see what we’re getting into. It may not matter, as apparently the animation is being done by a studio that is owned and funded by Vivziepop, but her own involvement will be fairly limited. That being said, there's already crossover merchandise between Helluva Boss and Homestuck, which I find somewhat surprising.

The overall reaction on the HSD was largely one of confusion: I feel outright pessimistic that it’s even workable as I think the web comic format would not transfer well into a more traditionally framed show, although most people are at least curious to see how it works out. While yesterday’s articles from Gio brought out a lot of old timers, this news brought an absolutely insane influx of new users to the server. The average number of messages nowadays is usually a bit under 10,000 but we skyrocketed to almost 40,000 with this news.

This has obviously come with issues: slow mode is back in play for #homestuck and #general for now. A related problem is retaliation against Gio’s article: as insane as it seems, plenty of people are harassing him for various frivolous offenses such as misgendering Hussie, which by his own admission should not be possible (Hussie has stated that he does not care what pronouns people call him by, although in every legal dealing with his lawyers Hussie has been referred to strictly as male). With the general increase in activity and negativity reigning, some disgruntled people from Bluesky and elsewhere have been raiding this server as a result. Given events earlier this year I’ve promised to stay out of mod affairs except for emergencies, which this seemed to count as, and thus after volunteering I’ve been given mod status again to ban raiders. I think I may have come in after the excitement is already over, but it’s nice to be helping again.

As it is, the timing of the announcement raises eyebrows. Gio’s article coming out yesterday and now this is extraordinary: those more given to conspiracy questioned whether Hussie was trying to distract from Gio’s articles, or whether Gio had some foreknowledge of the animation and wanted to sabotage the news. After some talk, the larger consensus–which I agree with, anyway–is that it’s purely coincidental. Conventions schedule their events weeks if not months in advance of the actual event, which means this had to be in the works for some time. Conversely, I have it on authority that Gio was working on his blogposts for a span of a couple of months as well. The one-two punch makes things seem more dramatic than they already are, but ultimately I believe it’s just a quirk of timing.

As a side note, Michael Bowman has been rather prevalent given his appearances at Requiem and Promstuck. He’s also been poking his head in periodically at the HSD, and it’s always nice to see him whether here or out in the real world with fans. It’s rather concerning, then, that while a few musicians (Toby Fox, Malcolm Brown, and Alex Rosetti) were tapped to make the music in the trailer, Bowman has not received any invitation at all thus far to work on the project.

That might change in the future if it’s picked up for a full length show, but it’s the latest in a weird series of snubs he’s been experiencing. Before he stepped down from being publicly in charge of the property, James Roach made the comment "no one wants to work with you." This is somewhat shocking to practically everyone who’s interacted with Bowman previously, who is notably affable and a genuine career musician who works somewhat often with other people. It’s a more personal note, but this is just one of many factors about the creation of this show that we wonder about.

The larger question from all this is whether to support the animation’s release, and how. The answer for me is obviously not. As things stand, I don’t plan to spend anymore money on Homestuck or related properties. It’d be unconscionable while Hussie is actively sabotaging his own work and the people working hardest to preserve it. Despite the rancour of yesterday it seemed a lot of people were more excited by this news, which I find somewhat disheartening. My own memory isn’t very good, hence the existence of this entire document, but it’s only been one day. I fear that the line in the sand may be washed away by a rising tide.

---

10^th

As anyone who’s read this document may surmise, at any given time there is a steady undercurrent of gossip in the Homestuck fandom that I typically ignore. Though many of us have gotten close enough as friends, it’s the nature of polite online culture to shy away from real life details not freely given.

However, today merits ignoring that idea. I’ll keep the actual gossip part of this as short as possible: it is well known that Andrew Hussie got married around the time we spoke five years ago. Less well known is that his partner initiated divorce proceedings at the end of May. Even less well known is that he now appears to be dating someone else, who is understood to be about half his current age.

The reason any of this is worth bringing up at all is this person showed up in our fucking server and tried to butter us up.

The person goes by the name boople_snoot on Twitter, in the HSD they appeared as “spidersgrasp” but I’ll refer to them as boople from here on out for simplicity. Makin actually blocked their Twitter account, apparently based on the recommendation of people he knows, and the only reason we recognized it was boople is because their very first message was asking him why they’re blocked. As soon as they appeared, the atmosphere became noticeably tense for obvious reasons. Makin immediately told them not to interact with him further or it would be considered harassment, at which point boople started chatting with everyone else.

There was an odd split in reception here. Anyone unfamiliar with how these things work might reasonably assume that boople was simply being nice, and maybe in their mind that’s all it was as well. However, the Gio article went into great detail about one of the tactics used throughout his interactions with Hussie, which is that the latter very rarely speaks directly with anyone not in his immediate circle. Through Gio’s and our interactions with Hussie, a picture emerges of this being deliberate behavior in order to maintain a degree of separation. Common language used is “he feels this way” or “he wants this,” which also happened here.

The overall point is that it may have been an earnest attempt to reach out, but it reeks of the kind of ambiguity in communication that has plagued other encounters with Hussie and his associates. While Makin shut them down from speaking to him immediately, there were also others present who seemed against the exchange like Ricky Slugface and a newer user named atrophiedCircuitry. Ennemy was adamantly against talking to boople at all, for which I commend him greatly. To varying degrees, most other people involved seemed to be taken in somewhat, Cheeze notably yelling at Enn for being antagonistic.

Eventually boople offered peeks at some comics in the vein of Team Special Olympics, hastily drawn and written, including some newer ones a lot of people haven’t seen. They even went so far as to accept a suggestion: as we are wont to do, someone said “Fat Husky,” and within a matter of minutes this was given back to us.

The fact this exists at all is an absurdity, but more upsetting is the timing. Boople claims that the two were conversing over text or a call. This was delivered so quickly, however, that to me it seems that Hussie was watching over boople’s shoulder and reading the chat in real time.

Even worse is that it seemed to work. People who had only two days prior been up in arms about Gio being mistreated so savagely were fawning over these little gifts³¹³–despite the fact that dispensing little tokens of goodwill like this is also one of Hussie’s tactics. Playing nice seemed to sucker in enough people that I’m still agitated just writing about it days after the fact.

After this though, Faeby appeared and bluntly pointed out the presumed relationship between boople and Hussie. Between this and Ennemy’s remonstrations, boople deleted the comics, said: “okay i’ll just fuckin go then / i deleted it bc u guys are mean” and hasn’t spoken since–though they are still present in the server at the time of writing on the 12th.

Everything about this was viscerally uncomfortable, personally speaking. For boople’s part, I worry about them because they appear to be in an outright predatory relationship. Again, normally I wouldn’t bother to speak on any of this because it’s personally oriented information, but in this case if it’s true that they’re involved with each other then I think it merits comment just for how inappropriate it is.

Beyond gossip-mongering, their presence in the server is chilling. WoC said that he’s far past caring what Hussie’s personal opinions of us are, which I firmly agree with, but no one likes being casually spied on, assuming that’s what’s happening. For those of us who were involved in the altercation five years ago, it’s an insult to be dealt with in this manner. We know better this time though: there is no room to deal with Hussie in anything less than a totally accountable manner, and he already has much to answer for.

---

11^th

As if everything else was not enough, we received word today that Kate posted publicly about Homestuck for the first time since she left the property. In her post she apologizes to Gio and more generally for the posts she made back during the height of conflict, going so far as to say that she would apologize to specific people if asked to do so by them.

I feel conflicted about the post. Upon reading it initially I commented that it smacked of inauthenticity, but after rereading a few times it does seem genuine. I don’t feel like reaching out for an apology, despite feeling sharply hurt by the proceedings five years ago. Instead I’ll say here that Kate loosely describes experiencing severe difficulties after leaving Homestuck, including a brief period of homelessness, which I can relate to. The best I can say is that I don’t feel she or anyone else deserves to experience that, and I hope that things improve for her in the future.

Makin optimistically referred to the post as some form of closure. After thinking about it I’m not sure I agree, but it’s as close as we’re going to get with that chapter of our time here. This has been such a bizarre few days, but at least a couple things decidedly positive have come out of it³¹⁴.

12^th of August 2025

Despite never reading Homestuck before, Juli has periodically poked in to chat with us on a number of occasions if the fancy strikes her. While this has been fun, Makin decided that she needs to at least start reading the story if she wants to continue talking. Thus she’s been banned until she reads at least the first two acts. This has involved much hemming and hawing from her, and procrastinating. I even gave her links she could use to read the story despite its much-reduced state; to her credit she has started, but it hasn’t gripped her yet.

I’m curious to see if she’ll get hooked. I guess it could be random, but only requiring the first two acts is likely strategic: there’s a few plot developments and critical animations by that point which, if you aren’t at least somewhat interested in continuing by then, probably indicates that the story isn’t for you. It would be a shame if Juli decides the story isn’t for her, although I would be pretty curious as to why.

Unrelated, but the old pattern proves true: once every couple of years, someone decides that it would be fun to play Minecraft and sets up a server. Often enough I just rent some space and a bunch of us play on and off for a couple of months, but this time it was Moonjail who took the initiative: they found a newer modpack called “Reclamation” that so far has been rather more involved than I expected, involving a lot of pleasant if tedious inventory management and a sort of quest system that I don’t usually associate with the game.

So far the list of invitees is rather small, so it’s not like the more typical environment where I just post the IP address on the HSD. This was on purpose to keep things more controllable, because in less restricted playthroughs you’ll always have that one person or group that decides to play for 24 hours a day until they have literally everything done, which can lead to early abandonment and reduce the fun for everyone involved. As is, Moonjail is only playing with me and Virtunat currently (although tmtmtl30 might also pop in eventually, I think). This has kept it manageable, although all of us have been variously busy and progress is slow (even right now, I’m avoiding playing it to write this out. Whoops!).

From prior experience Nat tends to be one of those who accelerates as much as possible when she can, although since Moon requested it she’s been reining in that impulse pretty well. From experience playing a different game called Factorio with her and Pax Probliscum. For those unacquainted, Factorio is a top-down construction and management game that is somewhat famed for being highly addicting to certain types of people, especially if they’re inclined towards engineering or scientific endeavors.

The overall object is simple: you crash land on a planet and must get back into space by building a rocket from scratch. In the process, you must build an entire factory that collects and transforms materials into useful technology while fending off native fauna. Navigating this even if you’re somewhat experienced can be difficult and time-consuming. Nat on the other hand can be dauntingly quick-paced, and her appetite for Factorio is a lot greater than mine. She probes me every so often asking if I want to play more, especially of various modpacks that heavily expand the already sprawling progression.

I fear starting these playthroughs immensely: while I didn’t initially expect to get into Factorio, over the course of just a year and a half or so I chunked almost 700 hours into it. Makin once warned me against buying it because it would “ruin my life,” and while I’ve mostly resisted the siren’s call, sometimes there is this maddening itch that tells me to abandon my job and my friends and family for a few weeks so that I can start up another factory. I’m sure the time is swiftly approaching when we’ll start up another multiplayer run, and Nat will engage in the time-honored tradition of slaying me with artillery at every chance.

Nothing more for today.

---

14^th of August 2025

A brief note on Drewbot today. I mentioned in a previous entry that the LLM trained on me is somewhat recalcitrant and we suspect this is based on training data tainted with my flakiness. However, we are getting somewhat better at getting it to cooperate. One aspect of using the bot is that you can set its “temperature,” which is essentially a measure of randomness. With a possible value ranging from 0 to 1.111, the closer to 0 the temperature is the more drone-like and uncreative it will sound, whereas closer to 1 and above it’ll sound increasingly erratic.

I’m sure Makin would be able to provide a more exact explanation. The point is that the default temperature for Drewbot is 0.7, which for all intents and purposes is “normal” behavior. Anything above that becomes gradually weirder, and setting the temperature to 1 yields some absurd nonsense. It also seems to make the bot more pliable, which came to fruition today when Cyrene and Bolas brought back the Star Trek motif.

At first there’s a few rather long messages that aren’t great on their own, but then it turns to greatness. I’ll go ahead and post a series of images instead of trying to do the descriptions justice:

And then Bolas turns it inward, as we often do:

I’m sure this is drastically unfunny to a lot of people, but being familiar with Star Trek: The Next Generation, there’s a cadence to this that absolutely killed most of us present. Niklink said it best: “make it sizzly mr data almost made me pass out,” and I wasn’t far behind to be honest. I haven’t laughed that hard in a very long time.

I noted there and I’ll say it again here: I need to find a better way to store the good conversations we have with Drewbot. It’s kind of inelegant doing it through this document, and it would get spammy if I recorded every good response we have. Maybe I’ll assemble another page like I have with #general and mspa-lit pins.

Nothing more for today.

---

15^th of August 2025

Sharing media with each other is a ubiquitous feature of being in this community. There is a treasure trove of books, movies, tv shows, and video games that I would otherwise have never encountered but for the people I talk to in the HSD nigh every day. Makin’s Shills List is a monumental example of this, but it happens in more piecemeal fashion with other people as well.

Two people in particular come to mind who have shared a lot of things with me over the years: the first is Misha, who exposed me to Higurashi: When They Cry ages ago, Pathologic (now on my own shills list because I enjoyed it so much) and most recently he was nice enough to buy me a copy of YIIK: A Postmodern RPG. After some haltering progress I eventually got sucked into it and completed it all in about two weeks (hardly a blistering pace, but it’s tough to indulge in your hobbies when you’re pulling a nine to five).

Overall I can see why he likes it. Of the things I listed above, all of them have plots and themes that involve a lot of interpretation and heavy thinking on the player’s end. I’m used to dealing with life on more concrete terms so this kind of thing is a distinct foray out of my comfort zone, but I have to hand it to Misha: he’s three for three on giving me stuff I enjoy.

I don’t know where to begin describing YIIK itself, it has a lot of stuff going on with unreliable narration and shifting perspectives. There’s a lot of surrealism at times with its art style and the story leans heavily into esotericism. It employs an interesting mechanic derived from I assume tarot cards called “Karta.” I won’t delve too deep into the story or the gameplay here, but it seems a solid recommendation to anyone who likes mysticism, combined with a general atmosphere meant to evoke the transition into the new millennium.

There was also a particularly fun aspect called ONISM, which was presented as an old forum dedicated to the supernatural. That part had a lot of elements that felt familiar to me. Overall a lot of interesting humor and the newest update “I.V” apparently improved much of the gameplay, it seems to be a lot faster than it used to. Most importantly, it added an entire New Game Plus that’s like an addendum, which I appreciated greatly. Helped shed some light on the overall plot which was sorely needed. I have to pass along the recommendation to anyone who enjoys abstract and obtuse plots or the Other RPGs that people lump in this mold, like Earthbound.

The other person who recommends me stuff on occasion is WoC, who got me into Achewood and Elite Dangerous. He tends to throw more stuff at me just to see what sticks, there have been a couple other things from him that didn’t work out. However, he recently got into a fantasy series on Tarty’s recommendation, and while I enjoyed YIIK plenty this thing gripped me like the jaws of a bulldog that wanted to devour my face. The series as a whole is known as Second Apocalypse, which is itself composed of two series: the first three novels are collectively called The Prince of Nothing, and the last four novels are called The Aspect-Emperor.

I ended up consuming the whole series without any breaks over the course of a couple of months, if I had to guess. I’m loath to go into detail here mostly because it has the most infamous trapping of fantasy: lots and lots of weird names. There’s really no easing into it, the first book throws things at you from the get-go and never stops. However, it’s done well enough that by the time I was halfway through it I felt like I had a solid grip of all the stuff involved.

And that stuff is kind of batshit insane. A lot of the elements aside from the names being weird are recognizably fantasy-oriented, like having magic and various identifiable factions such as barbarians or imperial soldiers. However, the series as a whole doesn’t shy away in the slightest from grittier aspects of life in antiquity or the medieval era. The author, Bakker, is billed as being an ardent scholar of history and ancient language and that expertise really shows. I’ve seen Second Apocalypse described in a couple of places as being a weird blend of the writing styles of Lord of the Rings and Dune, and that sort of comes through: the amount of detail in worldbuilding is immediately apparent while largely not being overbearing, and in Frank Herbert’s tradition the author uses the story as a vehicle for delivering a lot of memorable prose³¹⁵.

This last thing is especially potent: WoC has a channel in his own server for discussing media, and it’s been a non-stop party for the last several weeks where we just quote the story at each other whenever it suits our fancy. Bakker seems to have a knack for knowing the exact number of times he should repeat a word or phrase for it to stick in your brain without being annoying. I’ll never forget the words “pendulous, “slog of slogs,” “marmoreal,” and a host of others that I variously dare not list here.

When I brought it up in mspa-lit, Makin mentioned hearing various right-wing spaces sharing it with each other, which I find kind of odd. I wouldn’t think that this story appeals to them, for reasons I don’t really want to get into here lest I spoil the content. I’m worried I’m glazing the story too hard as is, but I did also add The Prince of Nothing to my own shills list because I felt it was deserved.

As an aside, this reminds me that I used to describe emerging slang and haven’t really done so in a while. It’s not exactly new, but “glazing” refers to the act of praising a thing, with a connotation of doing so excessively. Conversely, the term “slop” has become annoyingly common; it doesn’t depart from the original usage much, it still means what it’s describing is of cheap, poor quality. This has sort of become a suffix, where one might say a genre. It used to be “capeshit” to describe inferior superhero stories, but I swear I’ve seen at least a few people use the phrase “capeslop” in addition to other stuff like “CODslop” for the newest Call of Duty game.

I don’t know, I just figured I’d throw this explanation in. As it is, I wanted to spend a bit of time appreciating the things these guys have shared with me. There’s a lot of other stuff that gets passed around: the weekend streams are still going strong for instance, with Makin and I both organizing stuff as we see fit. There are a few breaks on weekends where we’re busy or can’t think of anything to do, but there’s usually something we show off on Saturdays and Sundays.

I also wanted to mention MrNostalgic, who has been very prompt with suggestions for weekend streams. Misha convinced me to stream the Mission: Impossible series over a few weekends and though I was pretty scattered for those due to real life difficulties, MrNostalgic was very animated and suggested some good emotes that I put in the Cytube. Nost has also come up with some other suggestions that I’ve put into a list and will have to draw out sometime–I’ve never seen Superbad, but I’ve heard it’s pretty good despite the name.

Outside of conventional media, there have honestly been a lot of little things that get shared around. WoC just naturally has this tendency to ping people with a single image, usually to berate them somewhat. Most recently I can recall is this image from an old comic:

Which simply means that he thinks whatever you just posted is shit. For a brief time, posting awful content was dubbed coalposting, though I’m not sure the term has really stuck. I find it amusing though.

Last I can think of for now, but Cyrene has very pleasantly found some time to ping me with stuff every once in a while if she thinks I’ll like it. I often end up not responding because I’m at work or otherwise preoccupied, but I’m always happy to see whatever thing she thought I would enjoy.

Nothing more for today.

---

20^th of August 2025

A few things to discuss. First and by far the most relevant: there was an odd situation today where we were talking about the Fruity Rumpus Asshole Factory forums. Given that a lot of the people here were involved back in the original MSPA forums, or at least heard of their overall importance, the success or failure of new forums whenever they pop up is of some interest.

This has already come with some kind of weird interactions. anankeAverted went on there to discuss Hussie’s gender (a sentence that I can’t write without frowning slightly). I will abbreviate the context of this conversation as much as possible: in Hussie’s work Psycholonials, the main character Z is popularly taken to be a sort of stand-in for Hussie himself. At one point, Z describes a loose framework for gender ideology labeled using emojis:

The middle axis with the clown emoji represents “seriousness,” as in how seriously someone takes their identity. Clown-gender in this depiction basically means “doesn’t treat their gender identity seriously at all,” and the opposite where someone takes their identity very seriously is horse-gender, presumably because Hussie likes horses? It’s rather confusing when laid out like this I guess. I would recommend playing Psycholonials if you want to understand yourself but I can’t really recommend it in good faith.

All of this is to say that various people, including Ananke as a trans woman herself, feel as if this depiction of the spectrum of gender identity is somewhat insulting or at least misleading. Without getting into the weeds, she went to bat about this and why she doesn’t like the discussion about Hussie’s gender on FRAF and was immediately banned:

This is one of the mods of the forums.
As Carlarc said: "somehow less professional than the HSD"

In addition to this, there’s a thread that’s been up since the FRAF went online that’s basically about Makin: it describes him, in short, as a disreputable asshole and it suggests that he should forfeit control of the Homestuck subreddit, the HSD, and even homestuck.net. As a reminder, that last one is an extensive archive of Homestuck and fandom materials that he set up from scratch and wouldn’t exist at all without his efforts.

Despite implications that we’re a cult of personality surrounding him, most of us can at least somewhat understand why people would take issue with Makin. We disagree with him pretty routinely about stuff, although those of us who use the channel regularly generally understand that his affectations are mostly a joke. As time passes, the severity of his offenses has dwindled to be something that’s hardly worthy of note: his negative reputation persists mostly through sheer momentum at this point. This makes calls to have him removed laughable or even mildly offensive, and it’s probably not off-base to suggest that some people simply want him gone because Makin keeps good track of what sordid nonsense the official team and Andrew Hussie have gotten up to. He’s an effective steward against letting this place be taken over by the official team, which would be nothing short of a disaster if history is any indication.

Returning to the thread, then, a number of people were watching this all unfold in mspa-lit such as Cello, velikiy, tay, and Dingus. A few of them like Ennemy even started posting on there, leading to bullshit like this:

While Enn was nothing but respectful the entire time,
for other people it was more like tapping on the glass.

This escalated somewhat over the course of half an hour, after which concerns of brigading started being voiced by tay and others. “Brigading” here refers to when a group of users online coordinate in order to achieve some sort of effect in another online space. I don’t think it strictly fits the definition because this wasn’t really a coordinated effort and it wasn’t meant to do anything negative besides argue against people, but for many that’s negative enough to warrant some caution. Brigading is frowned upon and outright against the rules in plenty of online spaces.

Eventually people started to pull back, although in the fracas there was some note about Skyplayer hanging out on FRAF and outwardly calling us a transphobic space. Beyond the claim itself being ridiculous, I and others found it hurtful that Sky–who has spent enough time in the past chatting with us and commiserating–was trying to slander our reputation. She has a profoundly troubled history that I won’t get into here, so it’s not exactly surprising, but it doesn’t make it any easier to stomach from someone I used to actually perceive as a friend of sorts.

Moving on from this unpleasantness: the other thing I wanted to note are some dynamics I’ve seen happening in the politics threads. Off-shoots of #serious-discussion, they are nominally meant to be serious places even though we shitpost in them often enough if the occasion suits us. I just happened to note a brief altercation I’ve seen repeatedly between a few people: Moonjail and I align somewhat in that we’re both more moderate souls, and (unless I’ve been severely pissed off by someone, which has occurred often enough in the past) we don’t offer very extreme views on many things. This tendency towards moderation is something I feel vaguely awkward about in retrospect, partially due to the oft-repeated joke about “enlightened centrists,” though I’m sure Moonjail would describe it as an obligation to be as reasonable as possible.

On the other hand, WoC and Misha also post with some regularity and they are far more confrontational or up-front about the nature of whatever they’re discussing. This led to something that I found kind of interesting today: for some brief context, the conflict between Israel and Palestine are discussed quite often both in and of itself and as an effect of American foreign policy. The sentiments we have about the conflict are generally pro-Palestine (although if you asked people on FRAF, they’d insist we’re outright zionists. Funny how that works), but the nature of the conflict is such that there is an incredible amount of information to process, and it’s imprudent to believe all of it indiscriminately.

As far as world politics are concerned I generally trust Enn and Tarty’s input, as they seem to spend an impressive amount of time keeping up to date with goings-on around the world, including the middle east. WoC, Misha, and Moonjail are all well-informed also, but when they get into disagreements it can be a bit uncomfortable due to their aforementioned speaking habits.

There was news about a figure from the Israeli government being arrested in Las Vegas over a sex crime and subsequently released; WoC and Misha were rather firm from the outset that something untoward is happening and that this person was released for political reasons. Moonjail was more reserved and pointed towards an official statement saying that no special treatment had taken place. Personally I find that to be a bit naive, but I can’t help appreciating a dedication to working with facts we have direct knowledge of. We all agreed on the broad strokes of the situation being absolutely terrible so I don’t know why, but this whole interaction stood out to me somehow.

Moving on: there’s a weird space that we don’t talk about often, a Homestuck-oriented subreddit called /r/EnglishPumpkinParty that appears to be filled mostly with angry shitposts. While we on the HSD could be accused of being a little acerbic in keeping track of what exactly is going on, the folks on this subreddit come across as nothing short of caustic. It appears to be a lot more inclined towards the /hsg/ side of the fandom from 4chan, with posts that don’t shy away at all from racier or more offensive jokes.

The reason I bring this up is because apparently it’s getting glazed by users on the FRAF, who seem aligned in the exact opposite direction culturally. Synga says it well enough:

man why are there people unironically shilling englishpumpkinparty in the forums, im pretty sure that subreddit is actually just 4channer wannabe kids that wanted a BASED space for homestuck discussion

I don’t feel like keeping tabs on this myself but if I see it crop up more I’ll be sure to add a note in the future.

Last, something a bit more pleasant: throughout the nonsense involving the FRAF today, there was one newer user who’s been hanging around who seems to have a cooler head on their shoulders and was urging people not to act stupidly and make tensions worse. Aside from a weird tendency to make it all about "us" or "we" holistically when not everyone was involved, I appreciated them for pointing out that we should probably be more careful in how we interact with the forums: user “metarij,” who at the time of writing is named “Literally feferi peixes,” after the Homestuck character of the same name. As the name might imply, they seem fiercely protective of the character in question, being quick to deny it when people implied that Feferi was a more superfluous character who does nothing.

I don’t know why, but I found this insistence amusing; it extends from an element I’ve seen a lot in #homestuck and the forums where fans of Homestuck try to use fanon to fill in the gaps of character-building in the comic proper. As it happens I kind of agree that Feferi isn’t a very important character, and there’s kind of an abundance of characters who are far more useless. This doesn’t stop people from trying to use their own headcanons or interpretations to fill in the gaps.

Going back to describing users: Kohi isn’t really new, having been around since the earliest days of the server. As far as I can recall they’ve been involved in a number of projects, including animations for fanventures and such, but I mention them because they’re working directly on the Homestuck website and trying to bring it back into working order. This makes Kohi one of the few people genuinely working on the comic who is willing to speak to us, really.

And they’ve been exceedingly cool about it! It’s no secret that we’re pretty open with voicing our displeasure about the state of things, but they don’t seem to be phased by this behavior at all. On the contrary, they’ll frequently comment on some part of the website’s structure that they’re working on or occasionally even ask us for help in securing some detail or another. I might describe them more another time, but for now it’s just been nice to have them around.

Nothing more for today.

---

24^th of August 2025

An actual, Official Homestuck Discord has been announced. The post on Bluesky was 29 seconds old when Dingus managed to screenshot it and share it with everyone else in mspa-lit. In the intervening time, several people have made observations about it that seem troubling. For instance: it would seem Andrew Hussie is on that server and has posted the rules, but Makin surmises that it’s not actually Andrew and merely someone pretending to be, due to differences in typing style.

Speaking of, Makin is on that server currently and providing tips. He’s already pointed out that having a monospace font for channel names makes it impossible for people to create a link to them in their own posts. It seems they allow typing quirks and have a channel dedicated to classpect discussion. As various people have pointed out, they’re hitting roadblocks that we experienced literally years ago. I almost feel like setting up a betting pool to see how long it’ll take before the server is abandoned or goes up in flames.

Apparently when the new server first went up, there was a flood of incoming people who have been banned from here. User “Bugs are Cute” describes:

Basically when the link for the official server went live their general was flooded with banned users of this server saying “oh i hated the other server theyre proship” or putright saying “the other server has pedos on the mod team” / It was funny as fuck to watch because they say that and then immediately go “i dont even know why they banned me, anyways did you guys know i hate mituna i want to kill him”

The server hasn’t been up for even 24 hours yet but this trend seems to be holding true. Looking at it from the next day, user Mari describes: “I have been watching the outlook of the official server on HStwt go from "hell yeah, no more Makin" to "everyone in this server is an incestuous pedophile" in real time and it's fucking killing me.” We’ve largely refrained from reaching out with tips on how to organize their server, because it might be seen as a jab of sorts. Besides, if they want help they can just ask. One of their mods “cytochrome” has already poked their head into mspa-lit a couple of times and they seem pleasant enough, hopefully some sort of bridge can exist.

As things stand, I’m going to keep track of statistics for the new server on user and message counts and see how things look. I stopped doing that for the sort-of-not-really official server a couple of years ago, because it essentially died. Just from the outset, I assume this one will last longer. Some people have described this as “competition,” and to be sure I’m never going to be fond of any space that’s directly under Andrew Hussie’s thumb. However, I agree with Makin in that if–against all possible odds–they manage to actually create a server that’s a good place for Homestuck discussion, then that’s all to the good. Whether that actually comes to pass is another story, though.

Nothing more for today.

---

25^th of August 2025

A few older users like Anervaria have come back to us in the wake of the Gio articles and the announcement about the Homestuck animation. One of these people is Red, whom I first described long ago in July of 2017. It’s pleasant to know she’s still hanging around and doing her thing. Without participating fully, I’ve been watching her chat with a few other people including Alice and Juli (who has finished her mandated prison sentence, I assume).

It’s interesting to see: Red has been gone for so long, while Alice and Juli have been around for a while now. Not that I would have reason to expect otherwise, but they all seem to get along so well with each other that it’s like Red never left. I suppose that’s just what they call “chemistry,” but Red’s return makes me feel like there’s a dose of the old spirit back in things now. It’s easy to forget that simple banter is a critical element of what makes mspa-lit enjoyable: it’s much more fun when people are able to riff off each other easily. I hope that she and others like Aner stick around again and enjoy themselves.

Nothing more for today.

---

26th of August 2025

Frustrating stuff today. Juli has been very energetically “chatting shit” with us in mspa-lit, and it’s been infectious. For context: Juli and I are both in an odd little writing server owned by another person I’m not too familiar with, which is mostly my fault since I don’t talk in there frequently. A friend of Juli’s named katk heard about us all having fun over in the HSD and decided to poke her head in as well. The discussion appears to have largely been fine, if quick-paced with all of the new and old people hanging about.

However, right around when I woke up Makin asked if katk has read Homestuck and said, “if you haven’t I have to ban juli until she reads act 3.” Kind of funny if a bit cruel, although somehow this got twisted into something worse. One might have seen it coming, I think because the channel was just so active lately, but he outright locked mspa-lit instead.

As I’ve written about before, this shunts us all into #general where the population of each channel is forced to consort with each other until Makin’s whim passes. I find this annoying but tolerable, however the lock still hasn’t been lifted 12 hours later. Today was easily the most I’ve stared at general chat in years, because my new job is easy enough to split my attention. After a few hours I felt like my brain was melting.

I’ve never felt like the culture shock is that bad, it’s usually just the realization of, “Oh, I need to deal with a bunch of people I’m not familiar with again, maybe a few aggressively weird folks.” However, I think the official server opening up has made things more unstable than usual even for us. Our Discord link still has “homestuck” as the suffix, so I think that’s leading to a lot of confusion where strangers join our server by mistake and realize it’s not the one they’re looking for. At best they stick around a bit and chat anyway, but there’s definitely a lot from Homestuck Twitter who have been told about us and leave immediately, which is pretty funny.

The reverse of this is people who have gone to the official server and discover that it’s in a hellish state right now: Enn has been continuously keeping tabs over there and has told us about various weird shit that’s supposed to be banned but just isn’t getting cleaned up including but not limited to: in-character MPREG (male impregnation, don’t ask) roleplay, constant shilling of outside Discord servers, and discussion about sexually explicit nonsense like dog penises (this is actually textually relevant to Homestuck in fairness, but again don’t ask).

All three of these things are against server rules and apparently people are being warned to stop, but they just ignore it and continue regardless. I’m sure that the sheer volume of messages there is making it almost impossible for mods to keep up: in the first three days of the server’s activity, the message counts in order are: 47,852; 66,697; and 51,141. For comparison, our average daily activity hovers around 10,000 messages a day. We’ve had spikes often enough but I’d hate to deal with that sort of volume on top of trying to get server architecture squared away. I imagine that the mod team is still having trouble getting in gear, although it’s impossible to tell how the structure of their staff works right now. Organizationally it just seems to be one giant pool of about 15-20 moderators, no pseudo-mods in charge of specific channels and no janitors.

None of this is helped at all by a fact I mentioned previously, that certain shitters from our own history are popping up over there. Captor of #altgen fame is there (and may have gotten banned already if I’m not mistaken), and others like Joon and uR have also appeared. It’s the lamest version of a supervillain teamup I can imagine, maybe. The point is that things are kind of ridiculous at the moment. #general has finally calmed down now that it’s nighttime in the western hemisphere, but for a while it was all of the lit regulars and all of the gen regulars mashed up against each other and it somehow made me feel physically tired.

A lot of the usual nonsense was still happening as well: on the sidebar is a list of people in the server, listed in alphabetical order. It’s popular to add special characters to one’s name, usually an asterisk or exclamation mark, because this will put them at the top of the userlist. In servers ranging in the thousands of people there’s usually a solid two or three dozen usernames like this. At some point WoC or someone else took it upon themselves to rename all of these people to “Attention Whore,” and a few times a month at least we get someone who suddenly realizes the change and asks why it happened. Sure enough, one such person did show up today (although weirdly enough, they said they think they like the new nickname. If I had been paying more attention I might have banned that weirdo).

I mentioned that specifically frustrating stuff happened: later in the afternoon, Juli ended up pinging Magistrate for some reason, trying to get him to show up in chat. Enn warned her immediately that if successful, he would ban her from the channel. I thought this was a joke at first: people were confused and Enn explained that he really does not like Magis, claiming he’s “skeeved out” by him because of a comment made during a discussion about an anime called School Days. The screenshot does look bad by itself but it removes that larger context, is my understanding of the situation. Makin's comment that’s too long for footnotes:

School Days is an ecchi anime with sex scenes that (incidentally? the history is weird) criticizes other shitty ecchi animes with sex scenes. I think someone calling himself a fan of School Days might automatically skeeve out anyone who hasn't watched it, but if someone were actually a pervert it probably wouldn't make their top 100, the enjoyment is in the deconstructive aspects. It's like complaining about Evangelion for that one hospital scene. Basically Enn is almost definitely being an idiot here.

Sure enough, when Magis showed up Juli was banned for four hours, and attempts by the former to get the latter unbanned were unheeded (“you’re next on the chopping block”). I refrained from commenting on this at the time because I felt it would be in violation of my promise not to meddle with mod stuff, and by the time I had mulled it over the moment had passed. Personally, I can’t help feeling that it was unjust: I don’t think one screenshot out of context makes Magistrate a creep, and even if so Juli didn’t deserve to get punished for it regardless. It’s a not really a huge concern but it totally killed the more enjoyable (if frenetic) environment. Certainly made the rest of my shift a lot more boring without watching chat scroll by.

Nothing more for today.

---

27th of August 2025

Makin posted two pieces of news today which are of great relevance given everything we’ve seen this month. First is an announcement from the director of Friendsim 2, Jonaya, stating that the project has withdrawn from the “omnibus license” of Fruity Rumpus Asshole Factory. In short: Jonaya specifically states that they had no real benefit from the relationship because they weren’t planning to monetize, and there are concerns about conflicts between the licensing that already exist for Friendsim 2 versus the one that the property would come under as a part of FRAF.

This second tidbit is of paramount importance: we’ve already seen that Hussie tends to exert profound control over the people he or his retinue enters agreements with. The current leader of FRAF Cami (whom I didn’t realize at first is Camyosh, in addition to Tablestuck she’s made one of my favorite fan projects “Soda Stuck Funk”) has come into the HSD to discuss ongoing events a couple of times before; interestingly, she seemed incensed about Makin relaying the newspost and so came in today specifically to call him a liar.

This was puzzling from the outset considering he “editorialized his post as little as possible,” relaying words from Jonaya’s post more than anything else. We all engaged in a somewhat protracted discussion that essentially amounted to Cami saying that “the only work that has its individual license agreement is Vast Error.” I don’t really have the experience or head for legal matters, but plenty of others in chat are more suited for this, including Makin and Alice.

Both of them and others were questioning the nature of the licensing agreement: the current understanding is that works posted on FRAF operate under a free license, though Cami kept denying this and saying that she (or FRAF as an entity?) is the only one who is actually under contract, which would imply that no one else on the website is beholden to the same terms. The essence of the argument, then, was what constitutes a legally binding contract

Mind you that all of this is taking place in #general, when usually it would happen in mspa-lit. There were something like two or three conversations happening at the same time because of the weird mix of users, and it was kind of a headache to make sense of it all. To be honest though, I half suspect Makin just keeps lit closed when he expects to be busy or just wants to focus on his own matters; aside from this interaction with Cami he’s been pretty quiet, claiming to be playing some shit called “Word Play” and that it could be days or a few weeks until the channel is reopened. Yawn.

No indeed, we were forced to use general for this. The eventual consensus was that Cami calling Makin a liar was centered around the word “contract” in the newspost from Jonaya, but FRAF granting rights to projects using the website does fall under the umbrella definition of “contract” (specifically, the idea of sublicensing). This means there’s two main possibilities: Cami came into the chat to argue about the newspost at the behest of someone else, or she doesn’t understand definitionally what a contract is. After the matter coalesced around these ideas, Cami stopped posting entirely and the matter was effectively dropped.

A minor note I’m tacking on at the end, but there’s been some speculation that FRAF was completely unaware of the opening of the official Discord server based on the FRAF account’s Twitter posts, which appear confused but resolved to keep the forums going. This is especially strange because looking at the official server now, some of the mods there are also moderators on FRAF. Either whoever is in charge of the Twitter account for FRAF was out of the loop or the Discord server was thrown together very quickly. Further comments I’ve heard in private suggest that the official server was thrown together after we rejected boople in mspa-lit, but there’s no real way to determine the accuracy of that idea.

I mentioned a second piece of news, this being an interview from RJ Lake, who has also contributed music to Homestuck. The interview comes in the form of a podcast called “final_export_V3_FINAL” which largely talks about gaming or the gaming industry. This interview came out literally eight months ago and just happened to be stumbled upon lately, is how I understand it, and there are some striking tidbits:

Q: What were y'all's first experiences with worker exploitation? [...]

RJ: Yeah, uh, for me it was anything related to Homestuck. [...] My first ever "real" job doing creative work was I did music for Homestuck. [...] I did quite a bit of it [...]

Q: Oh, you're old.

RJ: I am very old, I'm thirty. [...] It sucks being thirty, and guess what, I was half that age when I started doing shit for Homestuck [fifteen years ago] [...]

RJ: Short story short, you know, just--Homestuck built itself around structures that I think ended up being really weird about that stuff, and I don't think any of us really thought about it that much, because we were fucking children on that music team, for the most part. [...] That kind of lent itself to... we were making music for money and we were also only getting 30% of the profits from the music [...]

RJ: For exposure, friends.

Makin also points out in the newspost that “at least one musician hasn’t gotten paid for their Bandcamp sales in like a year” when these are supposed to be sent out quarterly. Together with Bowman getting iced out and various comments from other musicians, it paints a disturbing picture of how the music team must have functioned back during Homestuck’s nascence: at best it was dysfunctional, and at worst there may have been intent to deprive artists of payment for their work. We’ve heard of this kind of thing before, and even if not it wouldn’t come as a surprise anymore given everything we’ve seen lately with Gio, and throughout the history of our and others’ involvement with the property. There is something rotten at the core of Homestuck and I need not point out what it is.

The only other thing today that seemed worthy of pointing out is that the official server (which, after some discussion with terminalTermagant and others, I will abbreviate to “HSOD” from here on out) reached 10,000 members today. Relatively quick to hit that milestone in a bit over 3 days, although the rate of joins seems to already be slowing down quite a bit (I’ll post stats another time, if relevant). In celebration, they decided to have a sort of voicechat party where Hussie’s account was seen playing chess with various users³¹⁶. The server also announced an “art event” which was simply that they would open a thread for people to post celebratory art, then after a week the thread would be closed.

I don’t want to be overly negative but this seems kind of anemic. I guess it’s fun to have people submit their own art but is this not something they’re able to do regularly anyway? In the past we’ve conducted contests and giveaways, but maybe they’re just holding onto that for the REALLY big events. I don’t want to suggest what those events would be because nothing likely comes to mind (lest we’re cursed for my mentioning Hiveswap: Act 3’s release, for which we’ve received no news in ages).

As well, it’s hard to consider it worthy of celebration when, apparently, the official server is suppressing mention of controversial topics³¹⁷. Granted this is against their rules, but they’re outright deleting mentions of Gio’s articles, Bowman’s comments about the treatment of the music team, and anything else negative about Hussie. This is honestly one of the greatest contrasts between how they operate and we do: obviously we delete things if we deem them to be of immediate harm to anyone else, but we constrain ourselves to only doing so in very specific contexts where there can be no doubt of harm, such as spamming gore or porn or doxxing people, threats of harm, etc. as opposed to deleting people’s comments for the purpose of censorship.

The HSOD has revealed itself in record time to be an exercise in control of information, whereas we do our best to preserve and spread information as far as we are reasonably able. To this end, I’ve added the newspost from Jonaya and RJ Lake’s interview to Appendix D in the Related Materials. It’s the least I can do to keep this stuff from disappearing with all the rest (as of the 9th of September 2025, I’ve also added a statement from Jonaya on the discontinuation of SAHcon).

Nothing more for today.

---

6th of September 2025

After what has proven to be one of its longest breaks, if not the longest, lit was finally reopened 3rd with the somewhat cryptic name #only-the-right-shills. Things were back to business pretty quickly: Synga (who I realize that previously in this document I’ve referred to as 1neStar and Spider, just for historical clarity) was banned almost immediately. They’re usually banned from the channel if I understand correctly, although anankeAverted says this time that it was for “calling rationalists brainiacs” or some nonsense like that.

The forced exodus to #general may have proven useful in some respect, I find myself looking in there more often than I did before. That could just as easily be from boredom when lit is not active, because I still find myself a bit frustrated with the way discourse takes shape in gen. As much as it pains me to admit, Makin’s persistent curation of discussion in lit has led to a distinct culture that I prefer to the more socialite-type stuff happening in gen, with people constantly talking about the more mundane features of their real lives.

To be clear, I think most of us are just fine with a bit of socializing in lit too, but they’re usually pretty rare occasions. We joke often about waiting until Makin is asleep for such discussions, but I’m pretty sure he’s been around for them plenty of times and is fine with them as long as they’re pertinent enough, and don’t drag on too long. Generally though we do stick to discussing media of some type, and I’m especially thankful that shitposts aren’t too abundant. We shitpost a lot in lit but they’re also usually relevant to the discussion at hand, the amount of people dropping random images in #general was maddening.

But I should move on, I suppose. There was an interesting altercation that happened in lit on the 4th where a user named fresh_fish was involved. Fish also peruses the HSOD frequently, although they seem to have a very poor opinion of it: “the official server is full of deranged leftist children, but the annoying thing is they also did not read the comic,” is the most direct thing they’ve said about it recently, which I cannot disagree with.

I bring Fish up because they share opinions which seem to catch flak from almost everyone for being bizarrely wrong about various subjects. Alice has repeatedly described them tongue-in-cheek, or maybe not, as having terrible taste (“were you put upon this earth to absorb all of god's worst takes”) and the altercation I mentioned was no exception. To describe it briefly, Fish brought up an “alternate history” hypothetical about the United Kingdom getting involved on behalf of the Confederacy during the American Civil War to a prior discussion Juli and Misha were having about how much the UK engaged in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. No, I don’t know how we get into such discussions to be honest.

Misha, in characteristic fashion, had a lot to say about this hypothetical. I don’t know how he knows these things but he was quick to dismantle the argument with historical information that would have made it an unfeasible scenario–the biggest problem by far being that the UK was already heavily involved in trying to stifle Napoleonic France at the time–but Fish was adamant that it was a “blunder” and was in large part responsible for Britain falling out of its hegemonic influence over time.

Putting aside the actual history of it, Misha became gradually apoplectic and called this out as rhetoric repeated by white supremacists. I assume when he gets angry he also types very quickly because he kept burying Fish in lengthy, granular explanations of why the hypothetical wouldn’t have worked, and finally just saying “never fucking step up to me again” (the conversation continued for at least another 20 minutes after this).

This contrasts sharply with other discussions I’ve seen them having: I described in a previous entry that Misha got me into YIIK, where he and Fish are the only two people I’ve seen who compared YIIK favorably to the Homestuck Epilogues, which they seemed to commiserate on for a bit. I don’t know if Fish is just running through all of their more absurd opinions on things or what, but their presence here has been interesting so far. Hopefully we get more new people to stick around and share their thoughts on stuff, weird though they may be.

Nothing more for today.

---

8th of September 2025

On the HSOD yesterday, there was an announcement that Hussie is making a sequel to an old MSPA story called Bard Quest (which I would link, but the official website is still not working. Conveniently enough, Bard Quest is available on the Unofficial Homestuck Collection so I recommend picking that up if you’re interested). This followup, called Jesterquest, is apparently being posted straight on Discord. This seems immediately awful to all of us, with Red pointing out that Discord is a terrible platform to try and archive things on directly, but someone hosted a mirror on MSPFA. Makin also thankfully has made a mirror of Jester Quest which he’s updating consistently³¹⁸.

The manner of release has people scratching their heads. MSPA is no longer a thing, but Jester Quest is being done in the original style of MSPA–specifically, taking actual reader suggestions. The larger consensus seems to be that this counts as a bona fide MSPA story, and there’s an assurance in the official server’s announcements that Jester Quest will be “archived on the HS website,” whenever that goes up I guess. There’s other questions surrounding the nature of the story and how long it might last. The official post says it’s going to be a “short event,” so most people are predicting in the dozens to low hundreds of pages.

Reception appears to be mixed: Makin specifically described it as “bittersweet,” with most people agreeing that it’s a nice thing but has come at a particularly odd time given all of the extremely negative things surrounding Hussie at the moment. One might infer that Jester Quest was conceived as a way to try and distract from this negativity, as well as drum up engagement in the official server. Still, various people in the HSD have said for ages that Hussie would benefit from engaging in a project exactly like this: smaller scale, low stakes, and in the manner of his older stories.

After reading the first several pages, I feel a bit strange about it. I specifically noticed a typographical error (“in the off chance” as opposed to “on the off chance,” the former is incorrect usage) that feels very unlike something Hussie would do given his facility with the English language. Some discussion was had with a user named Seraph who outwardly described the art as bad, although Crpal argues this is consistent with Bard Quest’s art style being “low quality.” Another user named Odysseus pointed out that, according to the MSPFA server, Hussie’s recent works including Psycholonials look different due to the tools in Photoshop changing over time³¹⁹.

In all, it’s hard to say where Jester Quest could possibly go. It’s probably not very consequential given the short estimated length, but it’s easy to tell that people are hoping this will serve as a stepping stone for Hussie to produce other works. There are already some panels implementing user suggestions (by name, even. Skyplayer’s whole message appears in the comic, and lit reg Mari’s name is diegetically written into a book), which is often exciting for people.

I’m only into it in a very disconnected sense–I still think Hussie’s role as an antagonist against fandom members like Gio and towards the HSD in the past can’t be ignored so easily, though if he keeps releasing projects like this more consistently then people will inevitably drift back towards favoring him. As Carlarc said: “i want homestuck to rot forever in a continous and pathetic flailing motion / but i also genuinely enjoy pure Andrew Hussie writing,” which sums it up pretty well I suppose.

Totally unrelated, but after requests from numerous people, anankeAverted was kind enough to make a custom role for SPAT notifications on the HSD, and I asked Makin to make it easier for people to sign up. There’s some very familiar names like Erieolae, Mind, and Wyatt, but a lot I don’t recognize either! Almost 150 people are signed up to be notified about SPAT releases, which is much higher than I expected. I ended up adding this role to many people myself since I didn’t feel like asking Makin about it sooner. I just want to say thank you to everyone who is reading these when they come out, I appreciate your attention.

Nothing more for today.

---

9th of September 2025

As one might imagine, we’ve been keeping constant tabs on the official Homestuck website to see when it goes up. We noticed pretty quickly, then, that the website is now comprised of a single gif of a spirograph loading animation. [get gif if possible, maybe unnecessary detail]. There's still no word on when it’s supposed to actually be released and what it’ll look like exactly, though this isn’t surprising; avoiding firm answers is part and parcel of how the official team has always worked.

As far as the website goes, apparently there are two entire teams of people who have been assigned to bring the Homestuck website back up. This feels somewhat absurd to me: Kohi appears to be very capable, and while I'm sure there's a myriad of details they don't share with us, I’m not sure why the website would need more than a couple of people working on it. From my layman perspective, it’s putting up pre-existing assets (and even the problematic Flash files have a well-known workaround with Ruffle).

Granted that my experience in running websites consists pretty much of just this, which is extremely simple by modern standards. I’m sure Homestuck is far more demanding just for the Flash problem, and the sheer volume of pages that need to be organized. Makin did offer some rare praise for the aforementioned:

kohi showing up here often makes me sad, I can see myself in that position if I was much younger and had somehow manage to dodge physical evidence of hussie's actions / he's just doing work for free that in other franchises he'd be paid 5k a month minimum to fulfill

This kind of appraisal is so uncharacteristic for him that it makes me want to reconsider my position. Kohi also made reference to working on what’s going to become “the new Skaianet,” which relates heavily to the backend of the website somehow. It’s clear I don’t know enough about web development, but I do know that we’ll all feel better once we have a clear idea of what exactly is going on, and when.

The only other thing of note that’s happened lately is some ridiculous nonsense: some Twitter or Bluesky random put Alice on notice for “calling kids hoes” in the HSOD, which seems wrong on its face. Some cursory research showed that the incident in question took place in our server, and that the “kid” is actually Moonjail, who is fucking twenty-five years old and is on friendly terms with Alice as far as I’m aware. I’ve been accused, often fairly, of seeing banter in #general or elsewhere and assuming it’s actually some sort of fight, but I think this takes the cake for misreading the room. I sometimes wonder if Twitter callouts for us will ever come back, they seem to pop up occasionally and die before anyone bothers to read them.

Nothing more for today.

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11th of September 2025

Homestuck’s rerelease began today, much faster than we anticipated given the lack of information. There was an image posted in the announcements of the official server late last night:

I’m not sure if/when we previously learned that the comic would be rereleasing over the period of some months instead of all at once, the information feels somewhat new to me at the moment. In any case, this is somewhat awkward timing with our own reread that we did earlier this year, though this will be stretched out over a slightly longer period of time.

As a very minor aside, the decision to bring the website back up on this particular day was apparently intentional. The HSOD mod “vibri” had this to say: “... launching on a thursday was prob a lame call but the 9/11 joke was worth it.” I’m not an ardent “never forget” guy but I find this vaguely distasteful. However, there is absolutely no shortage of people in our own server who also actively mock the September 11th attacks so I really have nothing to complain about here.

Returning to the actual topic of importance: the website coming back up is obviously what we’ve been asking about for several months now, but I think plenty of us had gotten use to the quality of life features present in the unofficial collection. An example of this is the audio quality: music accompanies various pages in the comic, and the original flash files had some notable sound compression issues that made it kind of painful for anyone with more sensitive ears. The unofficial collection used the high quality audio directly from official soundtrack releases, for which everyone rejoiced. However, the website rerelease is using the original audio. After many years of not particularly caring, I can’t help but notice the difference in quality.

A more esoteric problem is the presence of some details in the art itself. To make a very long story short: numerous panels throughout the comic had some graphical details altered after key events in the story, namely the main character’s arm appearing at random or oily splotches covering various objects. The original website replaced these panels permanently (although the originals existed in the database³²⁰ as well).

The unofficial collection used cookies to ensure that people could view the comic either pre- or post-alteration, which was an extremely good feature for both new and old readers alike. The new website lacks this functionality, although curiously people have already found that–just like before–both versions of the panels in question exist. A couple people have suggested that they simply lack the expertise to add this functionality at the moment, but perhaps it’ll be added later once they have the comic reuploaded in its entirety.

Lastly, Jester Quest has been put on indefinite hold to avoid interfering with the rerelease (I don’t believe that was the official word on the matter, but oh well). It’s not “over” so to speak, but I doubt it’s going to get an official ending anytime soon³²¹. How ironic that Bard Quest’s successor most likely ends its run in the same manner. That being said, the story was a lot of silly nonsense so I don’t think anyone is particularly busted up about it, except for those who were excited to have new, authentic writing from Hussie.

Nothing more for today.

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15th of September 2025

A new UMSPAF album came out today, the first in quite some time, titled Kindred Souls. Rather than being oriented around Homestuck (though some motifs appeared throughout), this was centered around Undertale and Deltarune. I don’t usually get to catch these releases live, but the timing worked out today and I listened pretty much from start to finish.

Without getting into it too much, there were a few songs that had odd key changes or clashing notes that set my teeth on edge. By and large, however, the album has good tracks on it and even a few that prove genuinely exciting to listen to. These being fan musicians who are doing it purely as a hobby, the expectations are different and anyone should realistically expect stuff that isn’t the highest quality. UMSPAF always manages to surprise with several tracks on each album that are just wonderful, however.

Even more, these tracks all have original art and commentary attached to them. Coupled with the fact that there’s over four hours of music, I find it all somewhat astonishing. The motivating factor seems to be the release of chapters 3 and 4 of Deltarune, which came out near the beginning of June this year³²². The UMSPAF crew, then, put together this project in just a few short months. That’s a creative and logistical endeavor that few fandoms can really boast about, I think.

On the official side of things, it seems that the rate of Homestuck: Beyond Canon updates has sped up significantly. My sense of time with this story has completely deteriorated, mostly because I haven’t actually been reading it. If I’m not mistaken I stopped back when it went on hiatus in 2020 and only returned in 2023–which, this comic has already been going on for almost six years, starting on the 25th of October 2019.

Homestuck itself lasted for seven years, and I have no conception of where HSBC is in its overall plot at this point³²³. This is somewhat understandable considering COVID and the opaque clusterfuck that has been this property’s leadership, but I cannot help physically rubbing my temples in my frustration thinking about how this project has gone.

Still, the rate of HSBC’s releases has noticeably gone up since the official server was established. I think someone, probably Makin, pointed out that the actual page content of each release has been much lower than before when batches were released with potentially dozens of pages. Then again, I think that the average number of pages per update was dropping steadily for years already. It’s just crazy in conjunction with the other things that have been going on with the property lately, compared to the last four or five years of almost nothing noteworthy.

Nothing more for today.

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18th of September 2025

We had a weird fight in the mod chat today that I was almost certain was going to end far worse than it actually did. The principal participants were Ennemy and anankeAverted over the actions of the latter. To understand better, I should explain that the fight revolved around VirtuNat.

I’ve described Nat before as having a tendency to be harsh with other people, sometimes quite viciously. I’m not sure when or how it happened, but she and I started playing video games like Factorio and Minecraft together periodically and now I at least consider us fine friends. Like another user I’ll comment on later, she definitely has a more abrasive personality and only over time has restrained herself, where before she would have tried her best to eviscerate whoever drew her ire. As a reminder she used to be a pseudo-mod on the team but eventually got canned in some reckoning or another years ago, after generally causing too much controversy in general.

Out of such controversies, the most pertinent detail concerning today is that she manically despises cats, or at least puts on an affectation thereof. For eight years she’s indicated a total and frothing hatred of them. She’s made comments about this towards me before which I didn’t really know what to make of–in one of our previous sessions of Minecraft she gradually collected cats in her home and named them after members of the mod team at the time (this would have been more concerning if she routinely abused them or killed them, but to my knowledge no such thing happened and she actually took pains to avoid hurting them). Whatever her true feelings, in the HSD she makes it a point to wish harm and destruction whenever people bring up cats to her.

Today, then, anankeAverted pinged Nat with a picture of her own real life cat. I believe this was a mistake, where aA didn’t recognize Nat due to a username change. Regardless of why, Nat responded in the typical manner and, suffice to say, mentioned the use of a hydraulic press. aA was understandably outraged by this and banned Nat from #general.

Nat’s not the type of person to back down from confrontation like this and instantly took to #altgen to complain about the ordeal: she described aA as thin-skinned and vowed to continue her campaign of unmitigated vitriol towards cats forever. aA summarily banned Nat from that channel too, and having accumulated three channel bans–Nat has been banned from lit for some years–she was booted from the server as is the rule.

Ennemy caught wind of this some time after the fact and thus began the fight in question. For a span of some hours, they traded back and forth in mod chat about the nature of the ban and whether it was justified or not. Involvement from others was rather minimal: Makin’s only real input was a couple of joke gifs that said “STOP FIGHTING” which pretty much did nothing³²⁴. I saw him type out what looked like a more lengthy message, but presumably he decided it wasn’t worth his time and never bothered sending it.

At one point Misha started describing the rhetorical proceedings as if he were making commentary in a game by Valve. I liked this enough I’m going to relate it in full here:

Welcome to the pre-recorded HSD Commentary. I'm Misha. To listen to a commentary node, put your crosshair over the floating commentary symbol and press the primary fire.

Semantics is the primary damage resource available to you in the HSD. During playtesting we realized careful persuasive argumentation, while an appealing playstyle, required too much effort from the players for too little reward, and decided to add Semantics as an easier, always-on damage tool to center the combat system around.

Chase mechanics were always a part of intentional game design in the HSD, however we felt the search tool made such engagements lenghty and, due to the average sustain of an altgenner's brain capacity, essentially deadlocked conflicts. To resolve this, a few select players with the most Social Credit are granted "Moderator" abilities. While in the lore these have the pretense of societal control and maintaining respectability, in the game it primarily serves as an anti-deadlock tool that resolves conflicts via the usage of the Ban Ultimate Ability.

Misha gave up at this point, only to wonderingly check back in literally three hours later to see that the conversation was still happening. At the very least, things had progressed to the point that a consensus of sorts was developing: the few people who had bothered to say anything loosely agreed that the #general ban was justified, but the #altgen ban was not because insults against mods and complaining about bans aren’t really seen as actionable offenses, at least recently. If the altgen ban wasn’t justified, then the server ban also wasn’t, so by that token Nat should be let back in.

As the aggrieved party, aA was staunchly against this and to be completely honest I will never be assed to relay the exact twists and turns the debate took. Suffice it to say, Enn’s endurance ran out her patience and she agreed that if Nat was never allowed to say such comments about cats again, she would suffer Nat to come back. The bargain was relayed and Nat agreed, although she said some rather aggressively goofy shit about “this deal is a monkey’s paw wish, but not for me” and called aA an “opp” (a shortening of “opponent” or “opposition,” referring to one’s personal enemy). In a word, “ominous.”

All of this stirred feelings about my involvement in moderation generally, and especially with the incident that had me “retired” for some months this year. Searching the text dump (a feature that is providing overwhelming dividends in helping me figure out what I’ve already written about) tells me that I only briefly mentioned this on the 9th and 26th of August this year. I guess now is as good a time as any to describe it.

In truth, I’ve been avoiding talking about it in most capacities because I felt rather miserable about the whole affair, but I think enough time has passed that I can get into it without injecting too much bias or being dramatic. There are at least a couple of situations like this that I might write about later, but as far as the present matter is concerned I should describe my relationship with the #general regular Yark first.

Yark has been around for a very long time on the server, and my interactions with him went from friendly back in the early days to increasingly fraught for several years. The origin of our mutual enmity is completely unknown to me, I once asked about it and was essentially told to figure it out myself. As far as I’m concerned, then, the nature of the problem is lots of little frictions that have built up substantially over time. I’ve settled for a chilliness that is occasionally peppered with either passive or outward aggression from either of us. There was one point a few years ago when it felt like we were finally going to bury the hatchet for good and we shared some kind words, but for whatever reasons unfortunately it didn’t stick.

This all came to a head earlier in the year when another user who also locked horns with Yark quite often–and far more explosively, from what I could tell–ended up getting banned over one of these fights because they were being too acidic and stirred trouble elsewhere in the server too often. It should be noted at this point that I had largely not wanted to do any real moderation for a long time, but I still had the role and would offer my opinions in the mod chat from time to time if I thought it was pertinent. On the way out the other user messaged me about the altercation, probably because I was seen as one of the more impressionable staff members, and indeed I brought the issue up in the mod chat, which led to probably the umpteenth discussion of Yark’s behavior.

There’s a weird schism as to what people think of him. He has plenty of friends in #general and conversely plenty of people like me, who do not get along with him. Rather than listing most of these individuals and their alignment, I’ll just say that Makin doesn’t care much for him either. For the both of us, Yark has fallen squarely in that territory of someone who knows just how to toe the line so they don’t get banned but pushes it quite often. Accordingly, he’s sporadically been a topic of much debate in the mod chat when he got into fights with whomever, though people more friendly with him usually interceded on his behalf to prevent permanent bans.

On this occasion, however, I hemmed and hawed about it more than usual, which eventually led to Makin putting his foot down and banning Yark from the server entirely. This promptly led to the aforementioned friends rushing to his defense, and through an extensive discussion over the course of a couple days they gradually convinced me the manner of his ban was inappropriate. Thus, weirdly enough, I went to bat for him in the mod chat to try and get him unbanned. I wrote a rather exhaustive and heartfelt message about this which Makin summarily ignored. When I finally stop twisting things in my brain and settle on a course of action I tend to set to it with gusto; between this and my frayed nerves I went nuclear and threatened to delete a channel unless he took me more seriously.

Predictably this led to my removal from the team and getting kicked from the server, and though it wasn’t a true ban I decided to take a few days away to try and get myself back in order. I think I had real life stuff going on at the time that was also significantly affecting my emotional stability, but the timeline is fuzzy at this point and I don’t really want to make excuses–I think I just genuinely have some problems with emotional regulation, at least with people who know how to get under my skin.

The point is that Yark was unbanned shortly after. Embarrassingly, I built it up in my head that my fit was what precipitated this like some kind of noble sacrifice, but I learned just recently that it was because Misha intervened and cleared up a mundane misunderstanding about Discord’s messaging permissions.

After this whole debacle I talked with Enn and Tarty quite a bit to understand what I did wrong more accurately. Eventually I realized that for one, my conception of Yark’s behavior was outdated and I was operating on pre-existing biases. For two, I was dabbling in moderation but sort of half-assing it and just using it to relay stuff that I personally thought was important, which doesn’t work for obvious reasons.

It was kind of moot since I already wasn’t a moderator anymore, but I swore off getting involved in mod affairs except for emergencies after that point. Thus I was fully and completely not in a position of authority for a period of some months, and then when the official server and various news started happening I volunteered to take care of stuff in a more janitorial capacity without trying to dictate policy of any sort.

Wrapping back around to today, during the discussion surrounding Nat I sort of broke my rule about not getting involved after Enn and aA reached the roughly four hour mark. There’s a gray area here where I feel like I’m entitled to share my opinion: I still tried to avoid telling them what exactly to do about it, but I did point out Enn’s incident with Juli near the end of August as a half-joke about hypocrisy in banning people for more personally motivated reasons. Despite Enn being the only one who has really checked me on staying out of mod decisions, I believe he took the ribbing in good humor.

This re-illustrated to me just how bizarre my position is on this team. I’m of half a mind to fork over the title again because things have been calm for a while and there’s really no need for extra help at the moment. On the other hand, I think forcing myself to remain an observer for the last several months and avoid influencing mod stuff has helped me understand better the value of not acting when emotionally charged, or simply not giving a shit unless whatever’s happening is actually important.

I also had a lot of extremely difficult real life problems happen a couple of months ago that underscored how little some of this stuff matters. For ages I used to waffle over handing out bans to random newcomers shitting up the place. Now, I’ve taken a leaf from WoC’s book about just handing out small bans for being annoying and not understanding how to behave, for which he said “welcome to the club.” Perhaps I’ve grasped a bit of the nirvana that he seems affected by, I don’t really know.

As things stand, what exactly my role is here is less clear than ever. I’m just kind of half of a mod at this point, with a foot on either side of the door. I do think having my own promise hanging over me like a sword of Damocles has actually made me more effective at doing things right, so I think I’ll try to keep my involvement at a minimum.

Returning briefly to Yark though, it’s been an odd few weeks. Ever since Makin closed lit for a while, I’ve been spending some more time in #general. When the big fight happened and for years prior, I was dead convinced Yark was ruthlessly caustic and had few redeeming qualities. But, it’s clear that he has plenty of people that he’s perfectly fine with and who are good friends with him. Someone described him as simply having “the worst impulse control,” which rings true enough. I still think he can be preemptively vicious at times, and I certainly have never appreciated the petty jabs he occasionally directs towards me, but these things have become so uncommon or mild that it really doesn’t matter anymore.

Honestly, Nat’s incident today provides an important parallel³²⁵. I’m fine friends with her, and she behaved in a way that was more overtly aggressive than Yark has been in a long time. Rather than being directly angry about it like I might have been in the past, I was more amused than anything (if miffed on aA’s behalf, a little bit). It’s not a difficult connection to make: if I wasn’t particularly bothered with Nat’s behavior today but I dislike when Yark does it, that’s just personal bias getting in the way, and I have no justification for getting bothered by him. That having been said, I still don’t think it’s necessarily good when either of them act out in that fashion. Fingers crossed that cooler heads will prevail in the future all around.

Nothing more for today.

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21st of September 2025

Weirdly, all tracks on the Homestuck bandcamp are suddenly listed for free download. This has come in the wake of Bowman and other artists–I want to say Tensei at least–asking about royalties payments. There’s a few possibilities as to why: the more malicious possibility is that this would be a way to avoid doing royalties at all, though that would be nonsense that hurts the property owner as much as it does the artists. As it is, the consensus seems to be that this is most likely a mistake from someone new handling the Bandcamp services.

In the course of people figuring out about this change, Kaisheng pinged one of the more prominent mods of the official server named Vibri, who’s seemingly been doing PR for the property. I honestly had no idea this mod was present in the HSD, but the immediate reaction to this from everyone present was kind of an incredulous “why have you done this?” Despite some nailbiting, Vibri neglected to respond so it was in effect pointless³²⁶.

It would be remiss of me not to say, but speaking from the next day: the entire Bandcamp for Homestuck is now set to private while they fix this issue, so the idea that it was someone new handling the page and the change was made by mistake seems to hold water. The fact that they responded so quickly to the issue when it was brought up is actually somewhat reassuring.

Nothing more for today.

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22nd of September 2025

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Drew: Alright: it's just after noon central standard time on the 22nd of September 2025 and I'm talking with Michael Guy Bowman, who kindly agreed to an interview. Michael is an accomplished musician and performer with eleven albums and countless public performances under his belt. Starting with Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido all the way back in 2011, stretching to Your Majesty last year and Bowmanstuck a few months ago. Of course, he's well-known for his involvement in the webcomic Homestuck's music; most would agree music is indispensable to the Homestuck experience, and Michael's tracks have their fair share of dedicated fans, which we'll get into eventually. Michael, thank you again for taking the time to talk with me today.

Michael: Yes, very glad to be here.

D: Before we get into it, I did wanna make a couple of comments. I was doing my research ahead of time and everything, and on your website there’s an about page. On it there’s this picture of you in a suit sitting in a chair, and if I can say, just want to point out you look very sharp in this image, man. It’s very professional looking.

M: Thank you. Well you know, Alice and I made a little trip to Beijing over the summer, y’know, her, that’s actually where… have I mentioned that my wife Alice, we just got married this year and she grew up there. So, we needed to go do a little honeymoon trip and the obvious place to go was Beijing, so that we could go meet the family. She recommended this photo studio to us, so we have a ton of pictures as a couple in there, and that’s not even my suit. They had racks and racks full of clothes, and for one of the sets they put me in this suit with the great big lapels, which was awesome. I also gave them a photo for reference for like how I wanted my hair, they did the hair and stuff, it was really great.

D: Oh, it looks wonderful. So that’s a rather recent picture then? Wow.

M: Yeah, yeah, just from--we were there in June I guess, wow.

D: Wow. No, it looks wonderful man. And I guess, I also noticed that in your about section, you describe your songwriting as kind of eclectic, which I found amusing, and then you describe your musical style as a blend of retro rock and bedroom pop. And, I’m not very musically inclined myself, so I looked up this latter term, and apparently bedroom pop is about music which has the connotation of being produced in your own bedroom, as the name would imply. Do you actually do that for all your music, you just make it in your bedroom?

M: Well, I make it at home. It moved out of the bedroom ages ago, but there’s lots of, lots of indie, y’know, terms that basically just mean “indie” floating around, but I wanted to pick that specific one just to give people an idea of how indie it is. Um, I’ve seen people refer to this as DIY also, but I think DIY has the kinda connotation of like, um. More–the public setting, like oh, instead of going to a venue or like a stage or something, we threw a concert inside of someone’s backyard, or like a store that doesn’t normally put on shows. But like bedroom pop, while I don’t feel like I’m necessarily doing the kind of material you expect from really like, y’know, quiet vocal and soft pads and synths and a tiny little beat behind it that you might expect from that term, it does accurately describe the fact that I do this on my own in my home.

D: That’s fair, yeah. I mean the DIY aspect of it I had also seen, so I was curious because from what I’ve heard your music sounds professionally produced, like in a studio. That’s pretty cool though.

M: It’s cuz I’m a pro.

D: [laughing] I think that the, um, more independently creative talent is something that’s kinda integral to the Homestuck community at least. You know, we have the unofficial MSPA group that does music and everything, and that’s all very independently oriented, so I think that’s in keeping with the spirit of things a bit. But I did have actual questions, so I guess we’ll get into that now. We’ll start off pretty simple, so first question: how did you get into musicmaking and performing exactly?

M: Oh well, you know, I liked what my parents were doing professionally as I grew up. Mom and dad’s instruments are flute and trombone respectively, and when I was very young they were both still band directors, so I was in the classrooms that they taught in on occasion. I didn’t want to be a music educator like them, but I did get gradually more interested in composing and songwriting during the time that I took the kinds of classes that they would have been teaching at my own school, so I went into things like marching band and I took piano lessons at a very early age, and I did some musical theater too. I guess I kind of like solidified into this idea when I was a teenager, that I was really most interested in songwriting and production and kinda started to take that more seriously when I was out of the house and in college.

D: Okay.

M: Yeah, yeah. Took some influences from like pop music and stuff, got really into listening to records at 13.

D: That’s fair. And I billed myself as not being very musically inclined, which is half of a lie. I’m certainly not musically inclined now, but when I was younger I did also do some of the same stuff, I had piano lessons and I was in marching band and all that, but I don’t like performing in front of people, I assume that that’s a different case for you?

M: Well yeah, I do–I definitely still get stage fright and anxiety but you know, you kinda learn how to work with it, and that’s part of what comes with the territory, but you know I do like performing for people, so yeah.

D: You just kinda roll with the punches and stuff.

M: Yeah, you practice and that shores up some confidence that like, well, whatever happens out there I’ll be prepared for–there’s a teacher that said “set yourself up for the best outcome,” you know, for the best odds for the best outcome, so whatever happens you’ve at least, you know, got the odds in your favor by doing the work ahead of time.

D: Yeah, of course. Do you have any particular inspirations in your work, such as other artists or pieces of media?

M: Well, I think when I was first interested in like actually writing and composing I was probably spending more time trying to unpack the work of Phillip Glass when I was in middle school. I was studying Einstein on the Beach because I was fascinated at what a weird opera it was, and that was the first time I like really went out of my way to pick something kinda all by myself to study, and was like oh, it’s actually pretty simple to compose, especially if it’s just like this crazy mathematical process. And then when I was in high school that’s when I really got into David Bowie.

D: That sounds about right.

M: And–yeah, and then really started listening to pop records seriously, and lots of seventies stuff and new wave stuff, and I had been into like the Beatles and stuff when I was a kid, but I really went back and started listening to it and going like, you know these are like really amazing records and, you know, used the stuff that was online before there was Spotify and whatever. Before there was Pandora there was a service that was called Yahoo Music that Yahoo ran, that was like a streaming service where you could rate stuff like one to five stars and it would give you more stuff you like, and that’s how I got more into like, oh, well this is the kind of records I like. Kind of developed an interest in being an auteur songwriter like a lot of the stuff I was listening to back then. I guess I’m still pretty much on that track.

D: Sure, I mean, the influences that you describe–they make sense, especially since you describe yourself as kinda retro rock, y’know. No disagreement there obviously But, let’s see. So, I actually a couple of years ago managed to catch your Halloween-themed stream, which was actually quite a lot of fun. That made me think: do you have a favorite performance or event that you’ve performed at?

M: Probably the South by Southwest show, that was put together in 2011, there was actually a sort of series of performances, so I was invited to perform as an official artist at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin in 2012. This would have been April of 2012. I didn’t have a band at the time, and I was being invited pretty much just by someone who was a huge Homestuck fan, who I think their dad or something worked for one of the companies that put the thing on, so it was like a complete inside track. But I had no band and I didn’t really know what I was going to try to do live, so I assembled a backing band that consisted of other people I knew through Homestuck, so Erik Scheele, Marcy Nabors, Clark Powell, and then Riki Tsuji who later went on to do some music for Homestuck, who was a friend from Austin actually. And we put on this like series of shows, one was the official show that was at an actual venue, I think it was the Velveeta room. Then like one that really stuck out was like we did a full on DIY show in the backyard, and like brought out the, y’know, brought out the cosplayers and stuff from every corner of Austin. Brought them all to the backyard and threw this big outdoor bash, and that I think ended up sticking out the most of the things we did. It was really cool, because I think there was a sense that as a community these musicians–not even from the same part of the continent–were all coming together to make real the thing that people had only experienced online. And we did not just my tunes, but other people’s tunes too, so like a community effort, and that was a real big deal. It set the standard.

D: Right. It kinda sounds like a big party to be honest.

M: It was a big party. There was a livestream, but it’s lost to the annals of time. Is that how it’s pronounced? Annals?

D: I can never remember myself, unfortunately, but let’s go with it.

M: It’s lost to the buttholes of time.

D: Oh boy. Uh, we’re going–

M: If any of you can find it… yeah. [laughs]

D: Oh man. [laughs] Okay, well, speaking of other performances as well, which I sorely wish that we had any recording of that performance, but we do have more recent recordings of you at the Requiem cafe, and then more recently at Promstuck. To my knowledge, you’re the only prominent Homestuck musician who’s involving themselves in fandom events in such a manner. Do you have any particular feelings about this?

M: Well, you know, it feels weird being out there on my own, but I don’t think most people that are involved in the old Music Team or from the westcoast–I think most people are from pretty much the midwest and the east coast. I would love to see them go out there and just play their stuff, cuz I think they kind of lowball their own value and how much people look up to them and treasure their stuff. Given that I did so many things that like are vocal driven, it’s easy for me to just be like, well, you know, how do I just do this, just acoustic guitar? And show up and crash a convention? You know, so I’ve been able to do that. But the chance to do these things like the Requiem thing, like I put on a whole show, like I really get busy with it and make sure it’s actually gonna be a good show even if it’s just me playing with backing tracks. It’s been a super great opportunity cuz I can tell how absolutely stoked anyone is to have that tangible connection to the material. It no longer feels like some thing that just emerged from the aether, it’s a chance to [laughs] bro down and rock out.

D: Well, speaking as someone who lives near Kansas City in the middle of the Great Plains, I definitely agree with that; there’s almost nothing that happens here of note, if anything. So it would be pretty sweet to see you and other people all form up, you know, kind of in an ad hoc manner and just throw a nice Homestuck-themed party or something.

M: Oh I’d love to. I’d have to find venues and stuff that can put it on, y’know, but now I am starting to get a feel for the idea that if I like really just, you know, made it a goal and could pick out venues in specific places and had like a significant amount of time to drum up interest I could probably figure it out. They planned that Requiem, the very first one, with like one month of announcement and totally sold out day one, and then had people showing up to the place for an entire month, it’s not like there isn’t demand for stuff for people to show up to.

D: That’s a really quick turnaround, just one month to get all that stuff organized.

M: I mean they of course organized the actual like stuff that they were gonna do on the inside probably over a longer time frame but like, one month of lead-in time to pack the house is pretty amazing.

D: Yeah, for sure. I guess as a followup to all of that: are there any other members of the music team that you talk to with some regularity?

M: Well I keep a couple of them posted. The most vocal persons turned out to be Tensei, whose first name I’m not gonna attempt to pronounce cuz I’ve never tried before. [laughs]

D: [laughing]

M: Isn’t Tensei just a nickname? You know, I never thought to ask all this stuff.

D: Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s just a screen name.

M: The things we could work out if we knew each other in person. [laughs]

D: [laughs] The uh–

M: He’s pretty active so it’s–once in a while I’ll chitchat and be like “Hey, did you hear about this?” and he’ll be like “Oh, yeah.”

D: Oh, he’s been an active member from the Homestuck Discord for a long time, I always like talking to him. We actually, when I was streaming a couple of times he’d join me on call and make fun of me, it was, y’know. That was ages ago though, seven or eight years at this point. But nah, he’s a cool guy. But I guess, since we’re talking about Homestuck now: the pilot for Homestuck, the animation, is scheduled to release later this week on the 27th actually. If it’s picked up for production and the opportunity arises, would you like to be involved with the animated series?

M: Oh yes, yes, absolutely. That would be like a big break. I’m a little–I am still a little surprised that there was like, y’know, no info that this was like a thing in development, and that the announcement is like a public announcement, it’s always weird to be the last person to know about something or at least just, y’know, not be treated as an insider. But, I saw the QA or at least a little bit of the QA where they’re saying they’re interested in working in the original music somehow, and that’s interesting to me. That would be a really cool thing to make good on. Especially–you know, not just for myself but because like people are going like “well, that’s like the other missing ingredient to the whole thing,” and they don’t take it for granted.

D: Right.

M: Yeah. And of course everyone wants like, with the amount of like drought of content there’s been, for years, now there’s like the sequel comic and forums and a Discord and all this stuff, and really like bringing it to a major–at least higher budget adaptation is definitely the next step, and it’s getting everybody excited and interested in the whole thing again. That’s a good thing overall, I’d just like to be involved in that some way.

D: Yeah, of course. And I mean, this announcement took us all kind of off guard, y’know. I remember distinctly that first hour afterwards was just this hodgepodge of reactions where people were intensely confused and in disbelief, actually. It’s only 11 minutes long and I get the feeling that they just play their cards close to the chest as it is; that having been said, it still would have been nice for more insiders to know about it, but who can say what the future holds?

M: You know, I’ll approach this in good faith that they’re serious about trying to do the best version of this they possibly can. I think people are just used to the drought, it’s gonna take seeing some nice things happen for people to really believe it.

D: Oh yeah, I mean even with the sequel comic coming out, that announcement–all of those announcements in the last couple of months have been like a deluge in comparison to what we’re used to. But I don’t know. I guess we’ll have to see what happens, right?

M: Mhm.

D: Well, I guess that’s all I had for Homestuck for now, maybe we’ll revisit it in a second, but I guess considering everything that’s happened: if you had a second chance at choosing to involve yourself in Homestuck, would you do anything different?

M: [laughs] Andrew’s been pretty firm about the whole “zero regrets” thing, so I guess I kind of have to be too. I don’t know. Maybe write even more pony music?

D: Oh my gosh.

M: If I had known that was gonna be like the center of culture for a few years maybe. [laughs]

D: It has its fair share of fans, that’s for sure.

M: I’ll tell you this one thing, right. So the early idea: we seed in all these instruments for each of the kids, right? Starting with John on the piano and then everyone else. And then the thing that was proposed for us to work toward that we’re gonna hear, y’know, John play piano and Rose play the violin, et cetera et cetera, and then eventually we’ll hear music that’s like the demos the four children are working on together. That would have been like a cool album concept to work toward? And definitely a way to create a sense of culmination, because there are like themes that are sort of associated with the characters, and the instruments are semi-associated, but it kind of falls apart over time as more and more threads get added to the story. So being able to use the music half of it to tie everything together would have been cool.

D: Yeah no, it adds some serious coherency to the whole thing, y’know? I mean as far as the kids playing music together, there is that album, I believe it’s One Year Older? It’s been a long time since I’ve last listened to it.

M: Oh Erik’s? Yeah.

D: Yeah. And all the kids have their own instruments they’re playing and that kind of ties into what you’re saying I think, but you make it sound more kind of like they’re in a rock band together, or something, right?

M: Right. I mean generally there was this fake band idea that it was like, “oh, y’know, Homestuck’s world will be populated by like groups like Gorillaz,” you know, that are these virtual bands where they’ll be in the comic for a moment and you’ll have the record come out, and it’ll be like if you want to know more about what their vibe is, here’s this product. We semi-did that with Midnight Crew and the Felt and the Squiddles is sort of that, and my first album Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido is sort of an attempt to do that that never really got picked up, because Andrew didn’t really offer any concepts of their own to work into the thing. So it just ended up on a totally weird tangent with these characters that I ended up having to invent myself, because no concepts were ever offered for what I was supposed to be doing. There were probably more ways to do–to satisfy this concept of fake bands that are piloted within the comic and then evolve into music projects that people can go around to the bandcamp and listen to. You know, just the general syncretism between the music and the visuals would have been nice to reinforce that way. And honestly, if we could have just kept recording more and more music and releasing it in general.

D: Well, it’s rare to have that feeling with people where they are just so eager to make more music, y’know? Cuz like very occasionally I’ve felt like making my own and never got very far just because I don’t feel that creative or had no real ideas to work with, but you guys just pumped that stuff out for a long time.

M: Well the comic just gives you so much material. You know you look at like animes and stuff, and a lot of them will just like have boatloads of these records that they put out as part of the franchise. Like I can think back on when I was really really really into Digimon as a kid, I found out that in Japan, did you know there’s like a record for each kid and each Digimon from the show, y’know?

D: So you were a Digimon kid then, okay. [laughs]

M: Oh yeah. It turns out that the great disappointment of being an American Digimon fan is discovering that the Japanese show has different and definitely better music, or at least music that they take way more seriously than the American stuff. There’s a couple of American songs from the show that are good but there’s so much music for the Japanese Digimon franchise and it’s all really really good. And I guess it shows you that there’s ways to explore the themes from a piece of media that’s constantly offering you cool characters and cool designs and cool locations, y’know. I think what we were doing with the project was going like, y’know, let’s find any little thing and make a song out of it. And there is so much material honestly, it felt like the kind of thing that we could just do forever if we really wanted to.

D: Wow. Well, some of us I’m sure hope that it can go on forever, or just as long as possible. But I guess in that vein, as far as your own work is concerned, in ten or twenty years when you’re looking back at your career, what would you like to see?

M: Oh. More and bigger, I guess. [laughs]

D: [laughing] Well, what else would it be, right?

M: Yeah, you know. I’d like to be able to devote more time to music so I can be as prolific as I want to be. Like, at this point I have so many–I’ll have a day where I’ll remember a song idea and go “gee, when did I think of that?” and it’ll be like 2015. So at this point I have like a Google Sheet with the list, any time I remember a song idea I never got around to I put it on the list and go, well, I guess I’m getting to it.

D: So you’ve got a laundry list of stuff then.

M: Yes, it’s very long. It’s kind of like, okay, well when I can find the time to devote a month or however long it takes to really do it right, to this or that song, I guess I’ll get to it. It would be nice to clear the list, it would be nice to do higher concept stuff instead of just like collecting songs around a theme or a vibe. Cuz you know, I do have a background in musical theater and stuff, so I’ve seen higher concept stuff I could do if I had a significant amount of time to spend on it. For me, I guess, what I’d like to look back on is a further development and a chance to, I guess, play live more? To get back to playing live with the band, and maybe like just in general more local involvement, like I like doing the internet thing, but as I’m going out and meeting artists locally, I’m going like hey, well, here are the songwriters, here are the people that like playing. I wanna be around the scenes and stuff where people hang out and appreciate music just because it’s like fun to do, and they get to be part of the rock and roll vibe as opposed to just sitting around online all day. I mean I’ve done so much of that already.

D: Right, I mean it’s a totally different energy. I don’t generally go to concerts, but the few I’ve been to are just insanity. But even–it’s very different even from the Halloween stream I mentioned where it looked like that was extremely technical to organize and make it happen in real time, y’know? Like I’m sure you had lots of bells and whistles going on to make sure that all went smoothly right?

M: Yeah, I think with these shows I’ve been doing between that and like the Requiem shows, and Promstuck, I’ve given myself a month to really get it together that it like, y’know, is really humming by the time I put it up.

D: Right, right. I hope you get to do more live performances and stuff, I mean have you been doing a lot of live stuff outside of the more visible events?

M: Yeah, I’ve done a gig in town playing for a retirement center right now, which is fun.

D: Oh.

M: I already like old stuff and then I, y’know, meet somebody that’s like 95 years old and have to get in their head and be like well god, what do they listen to, like Rosemary Clooney? [laughing] The Inkspots? You really have to think back.

D: Oh man. I’m sure it’s very different, but I’m–that’s really sweet, you just go perform for the retirement homes in your area and stuff?

M: Yeah, well that’s one gig, and then there’s great little open mic scenes. I posted some videos recently of a thing that’s happening at the Lucca Bar and Grill at Benecia, which is starting to mount a songwriter night. I like going to like the tiny stuff like that and just studying honestly, y’know. It’s nice to be around people I think of as like my peers on that sort of thing and go god, well how do they engage with an audience, how do they write songs that keep people involved, what works, what kinda misses people. Like, I have a lot of respect for everybody else that’s doing this stuff, and I kinda just want to learn how to make what I do better, and more engaging.

D: Yeah. Well, I’ve always had this impression of you as being very much a career musician [laughing], and none of this has convinced me otherwise. No, that’s wonderful stuff man. Alright: on Thursday last week you actually released a brand new single: A Beautiful Forever, which features copious amounts of footage from your wedding earlier this year. Which, my belated congratulations to you both.

M: Thank you.

D: Yeah. I’ve actually seen the rest of the footage for that as well, it looked fantastic. It’s clear you put your heart into that song for obvious reasons, and it has this pronounced disco feel that’s really up my alley.

M: Right, well you know, I wanted to do something specifically for my wedding reception. I knew I wanted to perform a piece of music and I wanted it to be personal for Alice, who’s like a huge, y’know, was already a huge fan. So I had to make an original piece and we ended up, I think at every turn where we were working on our own wedding, kind of like veering into these disco balls as decoration. I think we both had pretty much settled in on that as a visual motif. So I was already kind of in the mood for that. I guess when I sat down at the piano in the time leading up to it, with this conscious decision that I was going to write her a song, that was one of the thoughts in the mix, was couldn’t I do something that kind of the dancey upbeat feel that might go into the kind of party music that goes at a wedding, I picked my own playlist for that and everything. But dance music I think is right up the alley for that. So, I like listened to Hot Chocolate and some other soul and disco records from back then for reference when I started to take the chords and lyrics I was working on, set them to an actual produced track and, y’know, really used that stuff as a reference when I was tracking it out. I develop the stuff out of the instruments first and bring it into the program and start arranging around it.

D: Right, okay. You did put a lot of heart into it. And I’m sure it goes without saying, but it seems she likes it as well, right?

M: Yes, very proud of it. In the video I try to include at least one or two cutaways to her at the ceremony, because you know we had our wedding videographers and stuff there, sitting there and just very pleased and very amused at our sweetheart table and friend table. She’s been stoked about it pretty much since. It took a while to get it out because it took a while for us to get footage back and just to even schedule finishing up the track, but it basically is as you heard it all the way back in January. Just, now it’s done actually getting polished off.

D: Right, right. It does look very polished now. No, it’s a lovely new single, and I’m glad you were able to share it with everybody.

M: Thank you.

D: Yeah. Do you have further comments you might want to add about it, just anything you can think of?

M: Oh, just that I’m very very proud of it. [laughs]

D: [laughs] Yeah, no it’s clear.

M: Oh, and people should like listen to it, y’know.

D: Oh, yeah of course.

M: I mean it’s on everything. The video is really good, it’s on Youtube and the video–the video is my edit, but the videographers, the name of the company is Amari Productions, and they’re based out here in the Bay. They’re really really good, they gave me their own wedding video cut that’s just like my private one, but this is… I wanted to do a special public one. So it took a while to go back in. You know, I think they’re really good at what they do [laughing] actually, going through and editing from their footage. I’m like hey, you know, they did a good job working with this. The grading they did is so good, I’m like copying, going like “Oh, maybe I could copy their grading,” maybe I wanna do it my own way, I don’t know.

D: Oh yeah. When I was first watching the footage–Alice had linked me to it, which was very nice of her–I was kind of blown away by how comprehensive the visuals were, they must have a ton of time just making sure everything was set up right and filming it properly, y’know?

M: Yeah, they were with us all day. We had this crazy thing where Alice’s makeup took forever to get done, and we ended up missing a slot where we were supposed to take pictures together. So I don’t know if you know my buddy Scott at all, but we ended up taking up a slot that should have been couple’s photos just goofing around in the frickin’ courtyard together. There’s way too much footage of us just having time to kill and doing dumb poses. Maybe I should post some of it.

D: Yeah, maybe.

M: The videographers were like “touch each other’s faces” and we’re like, “Do you normally ask people to do that?”

D: [laughing] Oh my gosh.

M: “Nah, but you two just seem like good friends.” Like, okay. [laughing]

D: Yeah, just lightly touch each other’s cheeks, that’ll do it perfectly.

M: We did some stupid shit, it was really funny.

D: Well, I’m just glad that everything turned out okay and that you were able to channel your creativity into such a personal project, y’know?

M: Well, I always look back at my stuff and I can remember little bits of my life through looking at it like kind of a scrapbook, and in a more oblique way when I’m doing kind of like more abstract art or stuff where I’m inventing characters or whatever. To do something that’s just like actually with my own life in it, it’s nice to actually commemorate it in a more real way.

D: Yeah, of course.

M: Might show–show my descendants.

D: Yeah, nice treat for the children eventually. Well, that’s great. I’m curious: do you have any upcoming release or events that you’d like to share beyond that?

M: Beyond A Beautiful Forever? You know, at this point I’ve got one thing in the docket, there’s like a song that’s potentially going in an indie game, but like there’s no release date on it yet, so I’m just gonna keep that under my hat. Everything else, I’m trying to figure out how to pace out my personal responsibilities with the rest of my life now with music, and there’s a lot going on actually. This year I think I spent so much time on the live performance stuff, and other things that are going on within the first year of marriage.

D: Right.

M: I haven’t been able to just sit down and do the thing where you just come home every night and just work on music for hours on end and don’t talk to anybody, so it’s hard to get back into the pace of things and plan something like an entire album cycle. So, right now I’m kind of more interested in individual singles and saying well here’s an idea that I wouldn’t necessarily do if I was having to plan like ten other songs to package it with and not release it for months as I develop the thing. I kinda wanna figure out, could I be doing singles that are in styles I’ve never tried before, or could I do collaborations with people I’ve wanted to collaborate with? So generally I’m just kind of looking at what my options are. And also I’m kind of looking at other things that are happening, like trying to move my stuff to physical media. So that takes a little time to develop too. Generally I just kinda want to like, get to all the things that are not finished involving archiving and making my work more accessible to people.

D: Right, right. And with the move to physical media as well, I didn’t buy a physical copy of Your Majesty, but I’ve got my copy of Bowmanstuck sitting on my computer desk right now actually, so–

M: Hell yeah, me too!

D: [laughs] No I mean, people were very excited for that for obvious reasons, but I mean. You know, as far as keeping stuff under your hat is concerned, I’m sure there’s–I mean, even just with what you’ve said there’s so much that goes into organizing it, but I guess I won’t pry you for more details at the moment. I’m excited though, it’ll be nice to see what you make in the future, man.

M: Mhm, thank you.

D: Alright, that’s all I’ve got for now, maybe in the future there’ll be cause to have another interview like this. But the last thing: do you have any music recommendations for your own fans or anything else you’d like to say to them?

M: Music recommendations? Let’s see. The stuff I’ve been listening to lately, I feel like I put so much emphasis on how much I like old music, but lately in the effort to listen to some current stuff, I notice that I have a habit of listening to vibey, sad girl indie pop. [laughs]

D: [laughs] Okay.

M: I really got into the new TOPS record, Bury the Key. Oh, and I really like this lady from England whose name is Laura Groves, she has a wonderful album called Radio Red, I think she just put out a new EP too. She’s really amazing. You know, there’s–I think I’m seeing like a trend toward a synth-driven thing that’s just very chill that I like, and I guess I’m listening to a lot of women doing it. I’m not sure how much more modern I want to make what I do, but when I see stuff like that or hear it, I kinda go like “oh, there’s something there I like.” As far as other recommendations, y’know, my peers, the other musicians from the little Homestuck music team have their stuff up, you might wanna check it out. Did you know that Mark Hadley is still making video games?

D: [laughs] No–I didn’t know that he was making video games in general. Although–

M: You didn’t know that? You know he made that Slenderman game, you remember that?

D: … He made that?

M: That Slender–yeah, that Slenderman game from 2012.

D: The original, you go around collecting pages and shit?

D: No way!

M: Yeah, he’s like… [laughing] he’s still around and he’s still making video games. He’s been teasing me like, “oh, I’m working on a thing about a library where you go around collecting books.” And I’m like, hey, this kinda sounds like Slenderman again.

D: [laughing] Well…

M: I guess if anyone was gonna do that, it’d be you.

D: Oh, that’s–that’s crazy man. I mean, that’s not maybe surprising to a lot of people. You know that I’m engaging in a project where I write down everything in the Homestuck community I can think of because my memory is crap, [laughing] so, it’s possible I heard Mark Hadley did that at some point and just forgot, but being told now is still mindblowing. I guess, what you’ve described does sound a bit more like that concept, but still, that’s crazy man.

M: Yeah, he’s still around. You know, I want to boot up the computer that runs Windows around here and try all his games out, because they’re all on Steam, I think his company name is Parsec Productions. He’s still going by AgentParsec like he did back in the old days.

D: Wow.

M: And, yeah. I want to see what he’s up to.

D: Okay. Well, I’ll definitely have to check that out–I never played the original Slenderman game but I’m sure he’s got some other stuff that I’d probably like a bit more.

M: Yeah, full disclosure I was pretty busy back then.

D: [laughing]

M: But it would be pretty nice to check that out.

D: Yeah, alright. Well, thank you very much man. That’s all I’ve got for you today. As far as Michael Guy Bowman is concerned, uh–do you wanna plug your own stuff? Like, where can we find it? I know it’s on Bandcamp of course.

M: Yeah, you can find the links and everything on my website which is just michaelguybowman.com, “a” before “e,” I know that Michael is like, y’know, an unusual name, but it’s very common, people should know that it’s spelled with the a before the e. But yes, it’s spelled with the a before the e. But yes, michaelguybowman.com. You can find links to all the music and stuff, I’ve got a new video up for A Beautiful Forever, you mentioned that. My preference is people stream it on Spotify or Youtube or whatever service I’ve got it up on, and put those microtransactions cents [laughing] in my pocket over the course of years, I guess.

D: Right.

M: But also to buy it and support it on Bandcamp, that’s my preferred vendor for if you want to really like do your part here.

D: Yeah, of course. Alright man, well, thank you again for joining me today, I really appreciate it.

M: Thank you, this was really cool.

D: Alrighty, well, I guess we’re good. That feels like it went really nice.

---

Commentary

1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbW5sxyu9bU&feature=youtu.be&t=20

2 Sad!

3 lol this casual can only see SEVEN hidden channels

4 what about me????

5 THIS IS THE ULTIMATE SHOWDOWN
OF ULTIMATE DESTINY

7 :thinking:

8 insert a spongebob screen here MANY MONTHS LATER

9 :howHigh:

10 important foreshadowing for the #aaaaaa saga

11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61OXGvvL0Hc

12 add spongebob card here saying "THREE YEARS LATER"

13 update: phil has said WP is now working with a "big media company" (possibly viz media in my opinion) to bring the forums back and no longer with him. (2/10/18)

14 stay tuned for drama emerging from my going into great detail 5 months later

15 :blobthinking:

16 by being written about repeatedly in a journal no one will ever read? pretty mean of Toast to imply that

17 important to note I was just saying good night with no additional meaning

18 editor's note: the author of this ancient document transcribes game grumps videos as a hobby.

19 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand

20 me after realizing I'm not even halfway through and I have to review all of it

21 https://youtu.be/5ci7EDcT-7M?t=374

22 despite the name of the game being space station 13, drew manages to miss the point entirely yet again

23 Danganronpa v3, Danganronpa 3 is the anime and Dangan Ronpa is a common mistake for casuals like yourself go play it already -- Fixed, but keeping comment for posterity

24 Drew also remains our tool

25 worm 2 ended up being kinda disappointing so no way unless it gets its shit together

26 he apparently only updated a few sentences of commentary at the beginning of the books, the only new commentary is in the Intermission

27 this was incorrect, I think Drew explains it later though

28 read jojostuck http://mspfanventures.com/?s=13714&p=1

29 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Us7Mbc5crs

30 https://i.imgur.com/fawOo3j.png

31 the opposite of his height

32 rick and morty's szechuan sauce meme, google it kids

33 are you sure?

34 https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XyR-vskgDj0/hqdefault.jpg

35 Drew completely misses the irony here

36 ;)

37 the answer was no

38 he is ignoring every criticism thrown at him and blindly hoping vast error will get big against all odds, he will get hurt when it doesn't happen

39 gross

40 https://bowman.bandcamp.com/track/wrong-or-right (also they're wrong I'm amazing)

41 She was a friend of Thellere, so she's from around the same saga. I wouldn't have called her a regular, though.

42 I don't think it's a raffle, I think WP will still handpick the TRUE WINNER......

43 I've literally never heard this before but it totally fits that Drew would fantasize about it

44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MHusGl9BeM read in this tone of voice

45 if they existed, I would be aware of them and would have already stepped down

46 nothing ended up happening. Sad!

47 that was sarcasm, I just don't trust american charities in general

48 remember this for when a controversial thing happens later

49 https://i.imgur.com/iKJBFIp.png

50 at a random time in MSPAF's last year, there were 12,341 fanventure threads containing 1,378,310 posts (which beat mspa discussion posts overall, even combining with fan projects posts)
677,431 posts of roleplay
301,964 posts of creative works
someone like Drew or the person reading this can't understand just how much was lost

51 - neil degrasse tyson

52 I contacted them on the behalf of one of our users that happened to share the name of one of the main characters and felt they were based on him, the author chose to find and join the server after that of their own will, same with the AMA

53 they already came back once but I think Drew wasn't here

54 drew will regret thinking this was a good deal after he's playing the 4th route in Ever 17

55 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dONxX9rifs why not both

56 http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ if you want to not be like drew when you grow up read this

57 Sad!

58 where's my apology binch

59 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat>

60 !

61 dial back a couple of months where drew was complaining that #general couldn't be saved and that nothing was being done

62 he really doesn't

63 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa2K_8Ff41M

64 or anywhere

65 I'm extremely convincing

66 speaking of nerds, I notice you write about a lot of people's personal issues but you conveniently avoid writing about your own, what's up with that, stop being a coward tbh -- for what it’s worth I feel like I DO describe my own issues here when it’s relevant

67 I don't know why I claimed that

68 irrelevant but you forgot to mention the very funny imaginary cait incident at ANY point which is pretty bad

69 this rebuttal wasn't correct either tbh

70 https://i.imgur.com/7tztg1h.png

71 I DID IT I FUCKIGN DID IT I'M FREE I FINALLY CAN DO USEFUL STUFF WITH MY LIFE SEE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE LOSERS -- for now

72 roleplayed as a sergeant with a gruff military voice, even if he was a D-boi

73 I feel you will never inherit the server tbh

74 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_fusion#Shared_experience

75 If any of the #art-music pseudos read this, it is vile slander and I would never do such a thing. Not even to get much-needed leverage. -WoC

76 you are mistaken, this game is only for TRUE PROS...

77 to add to the tumblr thing: solid #1 hiveswap blog, homestuck varies wildly between #9 and #13

78 she has argued viciously against me and made me cry

79 I missed the conversation but geese are indeed evil https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q81ptFSA4mk

80 or are they....

81 don’t flatter yourself

82 yeah how will we survive without all these valued regulars

83 why does drew keep misrepresenting my masterful use of irony

84 The least critical complaint I can offer of this behavior is that it is utterly insulting.

85 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxWkfJ4uvV0

86 except yazshu

87 jesus fucking me get over yourself -- yeah, in retrospect the original phrasing was pretty melodramatic. changed to not be quite as weird

88 how the fuck did drew get all this from "viceroy and I talked about youtube poop music videos for a few minutes"

89 see why I don't listen to drew, he compares suicide to going against me

90 step 1. shitpost in mspa-lit
step 2. take over the world
step 3. vote for trump

91 perhaps drew's biggest crime yet

92 #read-shills has the simplest rules: JUST READ THE SHILLS

93 racial discrimination, sexual discrimination pale in comparison to the darkest crime: fanfiction power level discrimination

94 note from the future: this didn't even happen in the first place let alone CONTINUE happening

95 open hashtag, STORY OF MY LIFE, close hashtag

96 me: 0 blame points
drew: 9*10^13 blame points (that's an exponent, for any biologists out there)

97 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAtDt_qjQ4o

98 damn I really need to apply to a games journalist position

99 snap, added to my cringe colection

100 ROLL CREDITS

101 I'm a loose cannon but I'm a damn good cop

102 [MOD WAS DEMODDED AFTER THIS ENTRY]

103 I literally was the only runner and organizer of the project, what the fuck

104 translation: he was really bad at it because he's a dumb biologist

105 translation: he kept being bad at it. this is the man who played world of goo like an action game.

106 GOTTA WRITE THEM DOWN THO

107 lmao skullgirls is a mvc-like, look at this moron

108 who the fuck talks like this

109 HA

110 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaG5SAw1n0c

111 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37Q0fx5r-H8

112 I never said you wouldn't get the book, I said the scam was it being a kickstarter instead of just letting you preorder the (already written at that time) book like a normal business

113 CHALLENGE ACCEPTED

114 cry more

115 ...and that's a bad thing!

116 note: drew was mad because we disagreed with him, there was no other drama -- :die:

117 dirty lies

118 he hasn't even read it -- Tensei says he’s read it “allegedly”, so go figure

119 I said that would be a good date, not that I was certain, and the bet was done like over a year ago after act 1 came out, FAKE NEWS

120 why would people only brought together through shared hatred split apart, what a mystery

121 It's not a scam, the person running it is really nice, I have no idea what happened but blaming WP by default usually works

122 is that a motherfucking WORTH THE CANDLE reference

123 very much like drew

124 evil splinters

125 sorry for the Angst Arc (tm) of SPAT, next update kickstarts the Epilogue/Return of Bill Bolin Arc, which is universally considered the best arc by the manga fans -- don’t you have some splinters to destroy or something

126 spoilers: he lasted less than a week after claiming he didn't want to come back ever

127 luckily this will never exist

128 gay

129 actually gay

130 I mean, 95% of the userbase thinks radiation made all the music

131 We were. I searched the entire internet and I think I found like two people on tumblr that had actually read the pdf and talked about it (to the void, no one responded to them). A couple people on Twitter posted panels, but everyone died off pretty fast. It's safe to conclude we were the only ones to have a real discussion about it at all.

132 yes, drew, yess.... join the wacky side...

133 OH NO, MAXMIKESTER HAS BEEN BANNED, OUR CULTURE IS RUINED

134 ...and that's a good thing!

135 CRY MORE

136 they were

137 yeah but I bet I'm going to have to read 20 more pages of your whining, it never ends -- you know it asshole

138 I was just making a Fine Structure reference but drew is a moron -- according to user John Smith this is wrong anyway, the story Makin is referring to is called “Ra”

139 glad drew's putting that college education to work

140 :older_man:

141 dramatization: https://youtu.be/kIaqZh_gGz4?t=8

142 " I didn't remove them to spite him. I am merely nullifying my association with a vile sociopath as categorically as possible." - Andrew Hussie

143 what the fuck, you just misunderstood what I said in the first place you liar -- cry more

144 *literally everyone, including God's

145 https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/058/866/afa.jpg

146 NOT EVERYTHING IS ABOUT YOU DREW

147 again I was just referencing Fine Structure -- we get it, you’re a nerd

148 READ WTC

149 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av68J3VyJmg

150 what a weenie

151 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sObyG9bTf5A

152 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyFQVZ2h0V8

153 NEERDDDDD

154 nice try but you'll never reach the heights of an engineer, you're stuck as a failed biologist forever

155 http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20181204-how-austerity-memes-helped-the-internet-generation-cope

156 it's how you get hired by cartoon network though

157 - andrew hussie, never

158 no one cared who I was until I put on the joker makeup

159 for you

160 drew fucks up his one job as always

161 I gave him like an entire grace week to pay you nerd, I didn't just ban him instantly

162 YEAH HIDE YOUR MISTAKE YOU COWARD
HERE'S THE TRUTH DREW WON'T TELL YOU: he originally was wrong about this

163 this was despite my posting the time literally everywhere

164 I will! Cohen describing a random character as "troll jewish" was hilariously meaningless and a little insulting, especially when we met the character in friendsim and the fact seemed to have been quietly retconned out after his exit. He's done worse stuff, but it's mostly along those lines. It's worth mentioning it's not just us, or even just the fandom, his reputation has fallen steadily overall.

165 :smugitisamystery:

166 this entire section is funnier when I tell you the joke was completely irrelevant to the forums, it was just about obscure music team members BurnedKirby and xerxes33, the forums only came up because of the music team thread there naturally had a lot of people who would get it. the fact drew just assumed it was Weird Forum Shit is really funny

167 I'm sure anyone reading this document can remember the last 20 times Drew said this. As you will see soon, the pattern of everyone coming back STILL holds up, but he will never learn.

168 I do have something to say though: DRAMA QUEEN.

169 THANK FUCKING GOD

170 the margins of this page are too narrow to contain my rap opera epic about this subject -- makin’s additional comment here is “add footnote,” i assume in order for him to have space to compose said rap opera epic. i have graciously disallowed this

171 I think there is a low quality video of a single song somewhere, but it's ruined by all the yelling. No idea where it is though.

172 of course you'd relate it to food

173what the fuck is this mess of a paragraph

174seriously it reads like a hideo kojima tweet chain

175 btw read worm

176 they're literally still here, I have no idea what drew is talking about

177 yes I don't manage and contribute to a team that has released 56 albums for a fanventure at all

178 oh nm you mention it, I'm leaving the above as proof I can be temporarily wrong but superseded by the righter future self talking to you right now, get dunked on

179 yes, as roger ebert said, the only reason he criticized film was to bully film creators into doing what he wanted, what the fuck does drew think criticism is for - I was more trying to illustrate that Roger Ebert wouldn't have been such a renowned film critic if he had presented the exact same points in worse ways. All the conviction and knowledge in the world won't do shit for you if you have no charisma.

180 what does this sentence mean

181 (fucshia)

182 WRITE FASTER NERD

183 as context, the only thing announced elsewhere up to that point was ludonarracon and aysha's stream

184 thEY THOUGHT JOEY AND JUDE WERE TWINS

185 and israel and australia for some reason god I love eurovision

186 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAh9NRGNhUU

187 because you have an american cultural tie to clap at the screen

188 REMINDER HE DOES IT FOR FREE

189 drew, the rest of the time: THEY'RE NOT BRINGING THEIR BEST

190 drew, crouched in front of his floor keyboard while eliminating breads: BEHOLD, I KNOW FANCY WORDS WITH MY DUMB BIOLOGIST BRAIN - i question your grasp of the english language if you don't even know the word "halcyon"

191 auspicious timing to say it's good that nothing is happening, kinda like this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n3pFFPSlW4

192 I demodded all the janitors earlier but no one noticed, which says a lot about our society

193 hello there old

194 this explanation was 100% necessary

195 https://bowman.bandcamp.com/track/wrong-or-right

196 you had a perfect fucking chance to make a prequel joke and you squandered it

197 this is how he justifies studying biology to himself

198 I was worried of being accused of "raiding," AND THEN WE WERE ACCUSED ANYWAY

199 Wait weren't you the guy who didn't even know it existed until it was over?

200 They have done way worse stuff than that, but combating callouts with callouts is like fighting fire with fire. Just trust us they're bad news. Interestingly, we fight fire with fire literally all the fucking time, never trust common expressions... or you may get burned.

201 I can't understand why Drew got so pissed off, Archie wasn't even that bad. I think the Stockholm thing hit too close to home (my home's basement (Drew's home)).

202 It's worth mentioning that the subreddit has one of the most followed Homestuck accounts on the site. I think to Drew "Homestuck Twitter" is shorthand for the people there that hate us, which are a two digit number of people at best.

203 Only two "people" in this group read the entire shills list. Do they truly represent us? What a mockery of democracy.

204 See Karl Marx's "Das Kapital" p. 382

205 Also more obviously, if I start paying mods people will start modding just for the money. We can look at the current state of the Homestuck franchise to see what kind of incentives and results such a decision causes.

206 okay real talk I have no idea who the fuck this is, I hope they were an altgen janitor

207 I don't make it a policy to ask, but as far as I can tell our mod team is extremely diverse LGBT-wise (it should go without saying, it's a Homestuck server), which makes this pretty silly

208 THIS MAKES MY BLOOD BOIL" - drew, two microseconds ago

209 !

210 I did this unilaterally against everyone's wishes and drew claims the credit now that it clearly succeeded, un fucking believable

211 why does drew keep saying this when the events take place weeks apart, WHERE'S YOUR JOURNALISTIC INTEGRITY

212 I literally just went to sleep at a normal time after pulling partial all nighters for days to deal with this

213 u r mr gay, everyone

214 guess who the fool was

215 how dare homestuck get in the way of our homestuck discord events

216 readers from the year 3030, 1. please make sure to resurrect me first, 2. coronavirus was a brand new pneumonia/flu pandemic that shut down the world for a couple months, with everyone staying home for extended periods to avoid spreading it. mostly only killed old people though, to the point president trump officially named it "boomer remover" during his second term.

217 something drew conveniently forgets to mention is that he has no ideas for 4/13 and he somehow wants me to do his job for him. Sad! imagine not being me

218 I don't actually think it's this, more that this is the only place criticism can happen without random people attacking you, and there's an increased feeling of community as a result for homestucks who use it. also jesus christ stop patting yourself on the back

219 in this segment we see the drew linkius' inability to stop its wordiness addiction after a promise to not over explain

220 Regarding lack of skill, I may be wrong, but I seem to remember the person in charge of sprite mode/pixel stuff like the specibi is someone with no previous experience, and it shows. Many criticisms have been shown of those specific segments, and many fans have shown IMO far superior and professional looking alternatives to existing panels. i.e. https://radicaldude42.tumblr.com/post/188866820502/homestuck-2-but-different-if-you-want-to-take

221 speaking as someone who's trans and has observed or interacted in some way with the community, i personally think that the facts of how they're going about jade's trans rep aren't what's offensive. if anything, it's more likely that the reactions to jade being gender nonconforming in any way that are more likely to be offensive, which isn't a problem with the comic itself. - Cyrene

222 I've gotta say I don't understand where you're going with this. I don't actually think the writers were going for trans jade at all, that's just the fanbase steelmanning the development. Hussie really just wanted to do poorly written crazy shit, and that's the problem.

223 I think part of this is the "us vs them" attitude certain people in the inner circle have been fomenting since 2014 or so. New members of the WP jam eventually become convinced everyone who's got a genuine critique is part of a hate mob or manipulated by one, even if they used to accept criticism just fine before. The nuances are lost. Ironically, the hate mob wins if the writers are making themselves miserable even when the hate mob's doing jack shit.

224 A popular method of delivering criticism tactfully is using "I" sentences that show something is just your opinion, which completely avoids the possibility of any hurt feelings. For example, "Your story is trash" vs "I think your story is trash". Yes, that makes sense.

225 Everyone has a different definition of valid and they think that's what everyone else means. A lot of people mean "you should be allowed to do it", and with that I agree. People have the freedom to do all the shitty art they want, but much like freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences, freedom of expression doesn't mean freedom from criticism.

226 I want you to remember a huge criticism for my style of moderation is that people called it a "cult of personality". And look at this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2GN_jM1DuI

227 what the fuck, nowadays it's 80% warhammer shit no one cares about

228 imagine eating so much bred you look at personalities and see food

229 yes, when you were younger.

230 don't fall for out of place shilling and ignore the link, if someone wants their story seen they can just make it good and attention will come

231 If I remember correctly, we just passed 1000 days since Hiveswap Act 1 came out.

232 "we"

233 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeIkk6Yo0s8&t=803

234 this zoomerspeak means "fat husky"

235 here drew achieves the rare and highly dangerous 2x blogging combo

236 wtf why are you not mentioning your meltdown about fringe streams and how you wanted to cancel them because they made you feel like a brainlet

237 - signed, current owner of the Homestuck subreddit and Discord

238 Key part is that we have some people in our mod team who haven't even come out to their parents, yet there's this creepy 40 year old millionaire forcing them to tell him their genders if they don't want to lose their mod spot. The fact he could not understand why people were upset is amazing.

239 Died makes it sound like there was a huge argument, but nah. Hussie implied there were these huge problems in HSD that only a liaison chat could fix, but WP never used it. It stayed silent. Was the whole "reducing drama in the community" thing just a lie an an excuse to get rid of me? Or was he saying that it was perfect now? Very confusing.

240 Before we continue, I think it's important to mention Kate was talking about like... 5 posts left undeleted and unnoticed in a backlog of over 20,000,000 messages. They weren't even part of conversations, just single people posting in off hours, some of them already banned. What I'm saying is, she was obviously arguing in bad faith in the first place, and likely searched for a long time to find them. There is no outstanding transphobia problem to fix. Remember the WP liaison chat replicated none of this "feedback".

241 I mean I do wish oD had apologized to me and Tensei for sending the equivalent of bomb/shooting threats to us and the community, whatever their mental state at the time. No such apologies ever happened, not even from their employer.

242 I think the fact Sky gave two conflicting reasons why the Discord is bad means she doesn't really care about either. I think she's got a good heart and is just trying to support her friend, but doesn't actually feel the community is bad (or she wouldn't have come back in the first place!).

243 wtf I said something like this then got demoted in the next entry. expect a twist ending next episode?????

244 wait no it'd be even more dramatic if this was the LAST episode. homestuck collapses into a black hole or something. I'm already penning a movie script

245 no one's ever really gone

246 ON THE NEXT EPISODE OF JERSEY SHORE

247 first he complains about trump and now this, I think drew might be a monarchist

248 Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away / But not many.

249 me

250 *leans toward singularity mic* wrong

251 WHEN WILL NIGHTS RETURN FROM THE WAR

252 god this pretentiousness makes me wish for a nuclear winter - that’s literally what it means, i don’t know what you want from me

253 holy shit imagine using this word

254 Dingus was like ten levels above everyone else though, like https://discord.com/channels/152981670507577344/184908151185866752/769205257707323402

255 holy shit could drew write a lamer manifesto

256 Well, I prefer it. Imagine if Hussie's control freakish tendencies were actually fully dedicated to a managed community, it'd be like the John Long Arm Incident stomping on a human face, forever. - I was just thinking about this incident today, coincidentally: for those unfamiliar, the John Long Arm Incident refers to the cover art for Homestuck Volume 6. Long story short is that there was a lot of warranted criticism for the way John’s left arm looks, but Hussie threw a fit and kept saying it was just “foreshortening,” eventually insulting people who called him out on it. Artistic experience or no, anyone with eyes can tell that this does not look right.

257 Some of us might remember the Kickstarter was titled "HOMESTUCK ADVENTURE GAME BY ANDREW HUSSIE." As of today: not fully homestuck; not an adventure game; not by andrew hussie; fat husky

258 how the FUCK did you manage to miss that one time when user5 and Ifnar had a betting war resulting in our patreon getting like 2000 dollars in a single month???? DO NOT BELIEVE SPAT'S LIES AND MISINFORMATION https://discord.com/channels/152981670507577344/184908151185866752/765256274655838248

259 hey if we're accepting poetry I wrote a limerick about hussie's new project:

there once was a huss in nantucket

who poorly made a face asset

he jpegged some hands

his work impressed fans

and as for the money, husshasset

260 I know most readers can tell this is bullshit, but lemme confirm tipsy won't shut up about homestuck still, 24/7

261 Hussie himself mentions "if" it's finished at one point, so maybe it'll never come out. I'm inclined to believe even Hussie thinks this.

262 drew mentions critical reception, but he doesn't mention the volume: not a single review in any rating site, a degree of magnitude fewer steam reviews than act 2 (which already barely anyone played), and a dead official discord and subreddit. things don't look good for the fandom.

263 wtf it was me

264 SAME PERSON SAME PERSON

265 I'll have to use *that*

266 Drew catastrophically fails as a historian here by forgetting Ifnar's Odinian Eye

267 Roserado has also taken over recently as Harpy needed some help when their free time ran out. Why doesn't Drew seem to know this, what a terrible admin.

268 it isn't really about complaints, which I historically haven't really cared about, it's just true that it's cliqueish and pathetic

269 ♻

270 they also really don't like IP owners owning subreddits, originally because of aaron swartz's ideals, now probably because they want you to pay for advertising

271 STUDY OF A UNABOMBER-LIKE WEBCOMIC CULT: By Fae AttentionLiker

272 the fact that drew mentions this inclusion without comment means he doesn't reread his own SPAT

273 oh no, hscommwatch was right!

274 despite the 999999 dollars fee, she was STILL late, somehow. I learned from a fellow artist hater that the best way to deal with these fuckers is to pay half in advance, pay half upon delivery ONLY if it's in time, and take money away from the final half as it gets later and later. terms agreed in advance of course.

275 imagine charging 70 dollars for a flat unshaded picture and calling it a discount, I hate internet artists so fucking much.

276 now justified

277 mf thinks he's jonathan harker

278 Drew is not a technical person so he missed the fact I basically replaced everything Arquiusbot does except the meme functions and color roles, I added a log bot and other stuff. And Discord looks like it's natively adding those last few, so it doesn't have long to live.

279 As of April 16th, absolutely nothing has happened. Classic Homestuck team.

280 Between September 2022 and February 2023, the Incident happened. We don't talk about it.

281 ON DVD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp_2I8dS-m4

282 I think if I put the lit-ban role above drew's fake admin role, then he won't be able to remove it, I may try that next time.

283 to be fair, Cheeze is a known voter of Justin "Blackface" Trudeau. also wasn't his name censored in this document before?

284 Somehow Drew completely fails to do his only job here, explaining who this guy is, so I'll pick up the slack. Accursed Farms is a video game media channel best known for Freeman's Mind, a Half-Life comedy series wherein Ross voices Gordon's sarcastic and deranged thoughts as he goes through the game events. He's become something of an anti-games-streaming and game-preservation activist recently, but he's so bad at understanding the technology that he's like a less effective Richard Stallman in the things he chooses to say. Anyway his Game Dungeon series is pretty good, he focuses on obscure video games that have some cool aspects to them. Reminds me of something.

285 Unless he uses Harry Potter fanfiction.

286 extremely accurate comparison

287 To those who read this document after AI takes over the job, the WGA was a Californian mafia that blacklisted people from jobs if they didn't pay a fee for the privilege of... striking and make them go without salaries for a long time, as the big cats switched to AI scriptwriting? Wow, good job.

288 We're not, I'm just bad at keeping track.

289 Here's an example of the drewus linkus using a turn of phrase with 8000 google results, whilst "pretenses" has over a million.

290 This is unlikely, it was a long viral chain with over a thousand Tumblr notes, not a random post on their blog. I'm certain Pip knew what they were doing and they wanted that information to get out. Maybe a little less explosively, I guess.

291 t. man who writes gossip journal

292 Man refuses to talk in school because it's closed over holidays.

293 (note: drew already read all the shills so he really can't do anything anyway)

294 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLaanhBuiVU also there are models based on the ChatGPT3.5-turbo and 4 models.

295 I mean this has nothing to do with drewbot, it's just easier to reuse the name/bot for technical reasons

296 also we didn't participate in /r/place because it was even more artificial than usual, bad year for reddit

297 no, that comic is one of the best recent 4chan OCs, he got banned for constantly derailing to one of three topics you fuck you know this

298 married couple about to ask their child WHY CAN'T YOU JUST BE NORMAL

299 what the fuck are these pretentious apostrophes

300 anthro something anyway

301 insert "my most powerful people in the world" image here

302 I later made an online drewbot at https://drewbot.recordcrash.com/, but note that everyone can see what you're sending, it's multiplayer

303lime: Add footer DrewLinky: a footer of what Makin: Add footer terminalTermagant: a footer of what

304 in this picture drew and bips look like a fighter and his dark version in a fighting game character select screen

305 note that it's implied drew ate refreshements for three hours

306 fuck you hftf is great

307 elden ring intro

308 I challenge this, having heard from separate people that the cut is high, comparing it to "being paid in exposure". If this is like the music team, it's possible there are tiers and Cami and people she knows directly are being paid well while others aren't?

309 and thongs (this is not a joke)

310 reddit is basically forums + updates, the problem is reddit manipulated SEO in many ways until forums stopped being able to get new users

311 wow, what a nerd

312 dude, there's a full recording of the events, just watch the 8 hours (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvljMHE2YdI)

313 this sentence really reads like GlassWave wrote it

314 “August 12th: Today, I decided to send Makin 1 million dollars that I got from President Donald Trump”

315 I'm sorry did I click the wrong tab? isn't this a journal about the homestuck discord?

316 Hussie repeatedly losing to zoomers at chess is a chilling reminder of the 2020 era

317 They seem to have the dumbest automod setup, to the point your entire post gets removed for containing the word "cuck", or random insults like "whore" which appears on approximately 20% of Problem Sleuth pages

318 how fucking dare you diminish the technological achievement of automating the discord-to-html pipeline

319 which is incorrect, one mod in the official server has repeatedly brought up that hussie has never changed tools, and has brought along a USB drive with photoshop CS3 2007 in it with him everywhere (and even then tensei has mentioned the binary brush still works the exact same, posting evidence)

320 wow, drew REALLY doesn't understand web sites

321 I think this whole section is just wrong, JQ was never going to have a solid ending with no plot progression in 100 pages, but it's getting a fan-sourced ending animation soonish, there was an event, look into it

322 yeah it's that and not the 10th anniversary of undertale, idiot

323 it feels like "act 1" was a bridge from the epilogues to a new story, and the rest feels like what would be act 1 in homestuck proper, so basically it has gone nowhere in six years

324 it warranted me a rare appearance in SPAT, hallowed hall of emperors and microcelebs

325 I think the key difference is nat acts like a chuuni anime character and yark like a serious chud, it's easier to ignore nat's self aware shenanigans

326 SPAT at its most riveting

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