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Pardon me but what mid-late 90s were you people inhabiting because in my mid-late 90s text parsers had been extinct for nearly a decade Anyway despite all the odds against such a thing Homestuck is still attracting new readers to this day. The community may never be what it was in 2012 but having lived through what the community was like I'm 2012 I will go ahead and say that's not altogether a bad thing. Imo the absolute worst time and place to be a fan is 2019-present on twitter.
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Jul 27, 2023 19:36
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I mean, Hussie isn’t exactly doing anything to build a community. He unceremoniously nuked the forums, didn’t create a replacement, and didn’t even bother with a discord. And you know, that’s his prerogative. Marinating in Homestuck for a decade of your life may not warm you up to the idea of maintaining an official community site of any stripe. And it’s not like fans don’t build organic communities of their own. The lack of anything new regarding Homestuck besides rare sightings of Hiveswap Act 3 at a convention every one or two years like a cryptid doesn’t help. Do you think we’ll actually see a completed Homestuck 2?
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Jul 27, 2023 19:44
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Pants Donkey posted:Do you think we’ll actually see a completed Homestuck 2? Definitely not. I think fan response being so mixed (and in some cases hostile) was deeply discouraging to the HS2 creators.
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Jul 27, 2023 19:46
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Plom Bar posted:Imo the absolute worst time and place to be a fan is 2019-present on twitter. This is true of anything that has metastasized into a twitter or facebook group. The website gravity is squeezing everything into poo poo for ad revenue.
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Jul 27, 2023 19:46
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Plom Bar posted:Pardon me but what mid-late 90s were you people inhabiting because in my mid-late 90s text parsers had been extinct for nearly a decade I may have worded that badly, I meant the mid 90's specifically for point and click adventures, text parsers died earlier. I mostly remember in the 90s we had one of those Kings Quest games where you had to hit a yeti with a pie and I feel like I stopped seeing those kinds of games by, like, 1999 when Lucasarts and Sierra stopped making them.
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Jul 27, 2023 20:16
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Pants Donkey posted:Do you think we’ll actually see a completed Homestuck 2? quote:Imo the absolute worst time and place to be a fan is 2019-present on twitter. The worst place in terms of decay, absolutely. The worst place in terms of intra-fan loathing, Tumblr continues to be the champ.
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Jul 27, 2023 20:25
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Arsenic Lupin posted:I was a Patreon supporter (yeah, I'm a sucker) and they told us that HS2 was absolutely continuing, and that the difference was that it wouldn't be published until complete. Take that for what it's worth.
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Jul 27, 2023 20:29
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Pants Donkey posted:Well using the previous Homestuck Kickstarter for precedence, we can expect Homestuck 2 to finish in roughly 2050.
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Jul 27, 2023 20:45
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I lurk a few tumblrs still and their anonymous posters seem like some of the most psychotic people online short of channers or something
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Jul 28, 2023 13:54
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For those wanting actual proof that Hussie is done with Homestuck, the What Pumpkin site has it at the top of the page from like two years ago.
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Jul 28, 2023 14:04
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If kids are still interested in old style forums you can definitely send them over to Gaiaonline, which is still going. It is unfortunately pretty monetized but the site's basic functionality can still be enjoyed without spending any money
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Jul 28, 2023 19:31
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YggiDee posted:I may have worded that badly, I meant the mid 90's specifically for point and click adventures, text parsers died earlier. I mostly remember in the 90s we had one of those Kings Quest games where you had to hit a yeti with a pie and I feel like I stopped seeing those kinds of games by, like, 1999 when Lucasarts and Sierra stopped making them.
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Jul 28, 2023 22:50
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Pants Donkey posted:For those wanting actual proof that Hussie is done with Homestuck, the What Pumpkin site has it at the top of the page from like two years ago. This was known, but also after Sarah Z posted her retrospective Hussie seemed perfectly content and comfortable talking to her in an apparently official capacity for several weeks, which would have been after this announcement was posted. Mind you, I can't fully discount the possibility that the correspondence he had with Sarah Z was more of his usual clownshittery. Which is not me saying he's a genius puppetmaster playing 7th dimension chess, more that I have no trouble imagining that he's the kind of guy that would fancy himself as such and compose himself accordingly.
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Jul 29, 2023 01:14
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The Sarah Z thing so, so bizarre. I genuinely don't know what anyone was thinking and it would seem that some of the people involved weren't thinking and were just plowing forward based on what they thought Sarah said, without actually watching any of her video before hand.
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Jul 29, 2023 18:35
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I honestly just found it to be a very frustrating video. Some pretty hosed up things clearly happened, and Sarah Z was too busy trying to own these small business losers for the horrifying crime of “sent a youtuber a vague legal threat” to actually get more of the story. Instead, she gives Hussie a clown voiceover and ignores 90% of the emails’ contents, since they don’t have anything to do with the important “people I was rude about online weren’t nice to me” story.
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Jul 29, 2023 21:55
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That's just big joel's normal speaking voice.
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Jul 29, 2023 22:08
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Plom Bar posted:This was known, but also after Sarah Z posted her retrospective Hussie seemed perfectly content and comfortable talking to her in an apparently official capacity for several weeks, which would have been after this announcement was posted. And he still owns the IP and the companies working on whatever products are hypothetically being produced. So while he may not be creatively involved with Homestuck for the foreseeable future, he still has to sign off on stuff and handle PR (or more wisely, hire someone else to handle PR).
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Jul 30, 2023 02:21
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The problem is Hussie keeps acting like that even when people are asking the, entirely reasonable, question of why Kickstarter backers haven't been updated for years on end.
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Jul 30, 2023 06:26
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Pants Donkey posted:Someone asked for evidence, so that was just and fyi. Wait then what did Viz buy? Just the publishing rights? Also, this popped up in my recommended and was a good commentary on Homestuck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Btv68SAk-oM Kazy fucked around with this message at 13:54 on Jul 31, 2023 |
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Jul 31, 2023 13:52
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I thought Viz just had merchandising/merch rights. If they were calling the shots I imagine things would have been handled more coherently if not necessarily “better.”
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Jul 31, 2023 14:17
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Iirc Viz don't own HS^2 (not listed in the copyright) or any of the game IP.
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Aug 6, 2023 06:51
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I believe Hussie tried to have Viz fund HS^2, but they didn't want to. This, combined with the fact that it went ahead anyway (just unrelatedly to Viz in any capacity) would indicate that they primarily have (and care about) publishing rights for Homestuck, the Epilogues and potentially other assorted MSPA stuff (what with the website move and all). Speaking of the website move, a fun fact - there are a bunch of old php files still accessible on the old website because the old website is very haphazardly arranged. Travel back in time to 2008 by visiting /images/test_index.php !
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Aug 6, 2023 10:36
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Slashed Out posted:I believe Hussie tried to have Viz fund HS^2, but they didn't want to. Every site on Hussie's Cool People list is gone except for Perry Bible Fellowship. Definitely an artifact of a lost era!
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Aug 6, 2023 22:24
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Yeah, I checked all of those as well. I know some are still active in one way or another like Tauhid Bondia.
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Aug 7, 2023 00:36
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Somehow, we're still stuck home.
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Aug 21, 2023 02:28
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rko posted:I actually just finished the sequels and epilogues (and a lot of the thread) for the first time after coming to the original series in the hilarious year of 2021. I’m disappointed to have waited so long to catch up because of the bad reputation—I honestly liked all of it, with the exception of some HS^2 choices that, frankly, I would’ve just kept reading past if more had existed. I also read it late (when it was pretty close to ending, I think during the last long pause in updates before the final stretch), and feel pretty much the same. Taken by itself, it's really good. It's a shame that it has the sort of reputation it does, because I think a lot of people who avoid it would actually enjoy it. I think it's at its weakest near the end when it becomes more purely about the character relationships (not that this is all bad, there's some good stuff there, but it doesn't really play to the series' strengths), but it still stays funny throughout. My opinion of the switch to the second group of kids is pretty positive, while I know most readers consider that a major turning point for the worse. I think Hussie's biggest talent was with creating character voices. That's always been the thing that stood out to me the most. Content written by other Homestuck authors can be pretty good with this, but it's always missing something in a way that makes the new characters less compelling. (This is solely about "mainline" Homestuck; I haven't read most of the side stuff, like the games or anything beyond the beginning of ^2)
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Aug 28, 2023 23:36
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Hussie is really excellent at characterisation, yeah. I think this is the core of what makes Homestuck continually compelling, underneath the attractive layer of metaphysics and animation and mysteries. Near the end I think some character voices start to wobble, but for most of the comic's run it's amazingly strong. He talked in an old Formspring answer about how you can "cheat" with character voice by just making up some simple rule about how the character always/never talks, then following that rule, and people will say, wow, that's good characterisation! I think about that a lot. The typing quirks are kind of a manifestation of this, but he does it in other ways too, it often actually is good characterisation, and I think the way in which he describes it as "cheating" is quite funny and indicative of his unique view on art. Kind of like Caliborn cheating at drawing circles by drawing them one square at a time.
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Aug 28, 2023 23:47
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The best proof of that, IMHO, is Problem Sleuth - no dialogue, yet you still know lots about each character's personality. We've never heard Ace Dick talk, but we could probably make a drat good guess how he sounds.
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Aug 28, 2023 23:56
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Android Blues posted:
Everything Hussie has ever said about the creative process makes me realise that he doesn't actually understand how art works, but he's still accidentally just kind of a genius.
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Aug 29, 2023 00:06
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cptn_dr posted:Everything Hussie has ever said about the creative process makes me realise that he doesn't actually understand how art works, but he's still accidentally just kind of a genius. I think his perspective on art is immensely singular, for sure. I'd say he understands it really well, insofar as like, any creative develops their own understanding of art that focuses on some things to the exclusion of others. There are definitely blind spots and baffling statements here and there, but also really useful insights. He has this sort of 19th century transcendentalist writer approach to just making up theories about narrative form and being like, source, I made this up based on my understanding of mythopoeia and it seems right to me. Which, honestly? Not so different from what Joseph Campbell was doing, and every mainstream writer has at least some respect for that guy.
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Aug 29, 2023 00:15
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Yeah, that's probably a lot more accurate than saying he doesn't understand it. Singular is a much better word to use. And don't get me wrong, I find his approach fascinating , I bought all the hard copy volumes of the comic mainly so I could read his commentary.
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Aug 29, 2023 00:24
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Android Blues posted:Not so different from what Joseph Campbell was doing, and every mainstream writer has at least some respect for that guy.
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Aug 29, 2023 00:36
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Ytlaya posted:(This is solely about "mainline" Homestuck; I haven't read most of the side stuff, like the games or anything beyond the beginning of ^2) It’s pretty interesting stuff, imo, as is Psycholonials, but it’s very easy to see why none of it is popular, as it’s entirely moody post-Obama leftist angst/bitter self-criticism. HS^2 seemed like it had stuff to say (and at some point had to actually redeem the characters who had heel turns), so I think it’s annoying it got shut down as it was really taking off, but so it goes. cptn_dr posted:Everything Hussie has ever said about the creative process makes me realise that he doesn't actually understand how art works, but he's still accidentally just kind of a genius. I think it’s probably more that they’re bad at communicating the process—have you read those blogposts or emails? It also doesn’t help that a ton of what they say about writing Homestuck is wrapped up in layers of irony even when they’re not doing orange-faced Andrew Hussie The Character bits. On the other hand, they’re all just neat writing tricks. Hussie’s right that 95% of characterization is voice/diction, that readers love filling in the gaps of a half-shown pattern, that serialization is always a process of retconing the story into place, that if you keep repeating the joke it gets funny again, etc. Lot to learn from Homestuck, honestly!
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Aug 29, 2023 01:31
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Ironically (or then again, maybe not) I think Hussie's biggest failing as an author is that even after writing a bunch of really good words about irony, they're still totally irony-poisoned and can't get closer to "being sincere with the reader" than about three layers of detachment behind a pair of sunglasses. Or at least they were about ten years ago when they dropped off the face of the internet. Hard to say what a person is like after they stopped existing.
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Aug 29, 2023 02:13
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Psycholonials came out in 2021, and if you don’t get suckered into reading the whole thing as an extended autobiography about writing Homestuck (it’s an autobiography about voting for Bernie Sanders lol), I think it makes Hussie’s deal clear—though it was just as clear with Dirk, Caliborn, Vriska, etc., as it is with Psycholonial’s Z. Which is all to say that Hussie understands The Power Of Committing To The Bit, of taking the ironypilled cartoon character that used to be yourself and careening about in a reality show you build around your life. And I think their conclusion is basically correct: you can’t really build anything sincerely good on a foundation of bullshit. (It’s funny, because the Detective Pony fanfic actually goes into some depth on this, particularly all the Greek-language bits I can’t remember clearly enough to namedrop. Good read!) Now, the fact that Hussie still can’t communicate any of that straightforwardly is the part that even they agree is tragically funny. Part of why I’d like to read the end of HS^2 is to know how they would redeem Dirk—none of Hussie’s other author-avatar figures have ever been given that opportunity, as Zhen’s retreat in Psycholonial’s ending feels like blackpilled self-critique to me. I wouldn’t be surprised for Hussie to pop back up sometime in the next year, in any case. Pretty clear they’re done with public-facing social media, but I don’t think they’re the type of person to stop working or shut up. But who can say!
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Aug 29, 2023 03:18
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Oh, hell, no. Ask any woman writer what she thinks of Joseph Campbell. I mean, my opinion on Joseph Campbell is that he was hashing together bits of Jung into occasional insight, and he was often sexist - but he's also totally inescapable in any kind of mass media writing. Screenwriting especially, almost every structure in modern film and TV is based on Campbell somehow. If you go into that space like, actually, I think we scrap the Hero's Journey arc on this one, you stop being mainstream. His sexism was of the kind endemic to the theorists he was pulling from, and it wobbled between descriptive and prescriptive - sometimes he was saying "this is what tends to happen in stories" and sometimes "this is what must happen in stories". The former's fine and is the approach taken by much of feminist lit crit. The latter's bad, and much of it was influenced by the psychoanalytic milieu he was referencing, which often stated sexist ideas as essential truths. So that's one woman writer's opinion on Campbell!
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Aug 29, 2023 10:01
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Android Blues posted:I mean, my opinion on Joseph Campbell is that he was hashing together bits of Jung into occasional insight, and he was often sexist - but he's also totally inescapable in any kind of mass media writing. Screenwriting especially, almost every structure in modern film and TV is based on Campbell somehow. If you go into that space like, actually, I think we scrap the Hero's Journey arc on this one, you stop being mainstream. I don't think (and I am usually wrong about predicting Homestuck) Dirk is intended to be redeemed. I think he's not going to get the big destroyed-by-the-mighty-sword-of-Dave ending he dreams of.
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Aug 31, 2023 03:44
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Arsenic Lupin posted:I don't think (and I am usually wrong about predicting Homestuck) Dirk is intended to be redeemed. I think he's not going to get the big destroyed-by-the-mighty-sword-of-Dave ending he dreams of. Maybe not redeemed, but saved from the megalomaniacal transdimensional suicidal villain thing he’s got going on, certainly. Like you said, given that he’s the self-appointed bad guy and wants to be beheaded for it, pretty easy to bet his goal will be denied. And if he’s not dead, I don’t think he’ll just get stuffed in the fridge like Gamzee, so you basically have to at least show him getting started on some manner of redemption. (Plus, HS^2 already previewed this with the somewhat amusing Jane-and-Jasprose interlude bits, which might have previously been backer-only.) Plus, just from a Doylist perspective, nobody involved in the epilogues or sequel projects really strike me as the sort of people who’d cheerfully join Hussie in burying Homestuck and its cast. I’ve read their fanfics and talked to a few of them, and like, there’s no world where Hussie convinced all these sincere Homestuck fans to turn half the cast into monsters without some indication that it would head towards a new ending that was at least as happy as the old one. Sadly, the entire thing disappeared up its own rear end. So it goes. But I don’t think “HS^2 would’ve had a happy ending for the main protagonists of Homestuck” is a wild theory. E: I wrote a whole post “yes, and”-ing Scrree using 500 words, but I’ve already said enough in this old dead thread probably rko fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Sep 1, 2023 |
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Aug 31, 2023 06:35
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Less 'vanished up it's own rear end' and more 'harassed into submission' afaik? like I don't know all of the inside baseball, but as someone who was catching updates when they went live it seemed to me that the team got effectively coerced into dissolving the project by the intensity of the animosity being directed towards them.
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Sep 1, 2023 03:08
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Scrree posted:Less 'vanished up it's own rear end' and more 'harassed into submission' afaik? like I don't know all of the inside baseball, but as someone who was catching updates when they went live it seemed to me that the team got effectively coerced into dissolving the project by the intensity of the animosity being directed towards them. Including a lot of vile anti-trans stuff IIRC.
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