Untitled

As of today, it Homestuck has been over for a decade. It’s weird to think about, isn’t it?

One day, you’re closing your laptop after watching Act 7. And, now, you’re re-opening it once again to see this message.

I actually wasn’t there to see Homestuck end or begin, for that matter. I only got into it around the early 2020s for that matter! But even then, I think it is a story that’ll never leave me.

—

I had always envied what others were so lucky to experience. And I still do. Such a large fanbase, such a vast quantity of fan projects, merch, albums, among other things. I was unfortunately born too late to be there. And, when I got into the fandom, I presumed that that was it.

By that time, Good Smile had bought out FFBF and had consequently shuttered the site, leaving its small amount of deadstock to shatter through the cosmos’s of Paradox Space. And with that, one of the last few pillars of Homestuck were gone. It wasn’t about the merch itself (for the most part), really, but more so what it represented. The fact that MSPA WAS so big that they could produce and sell whatever seemed like an unbelievable farce.

Homestuck.com was broken. And Whatpumpkin.com lead to this message…

“In early 2020, Hussie officially left What Pumpkin to work on new projects unrelated to Homestuck. In the time since, they completed a new project called Psycholonials. The final chapter of this visual novel was just posted today, and is available on Steam and mobile platforms. While Hussie still retains ownership of the Homestuck IP, they decided last year to fully discontinue their creative involvement in any future Homestuck projects, and instead plans to continue independently developing more projects like Psycholonials.”

At the time of reading, it was early 2023. No new projects had shown themselves. The general consensus was that Homestuck was dead. The only thing that was really going on at the time was the Requiem Cafe and some teasers for Hiveswap Act 3, although the first only proved fruitful for those who could attend and the second wouldn’t come out for another three years. It did feel like the first signs of… something happening, but it was so doom and gloom at the time that no one really expected much.

—

But of course, as soon as Beyond Canon reared its head in late 2023, things began to chug along. You know the rest.

And now, here we are.

• 6 MSPAs. (7 if you want to count Psycholonials, which I don’t but is apparently being added to the MSPA site…?)

• 3 Merch stores

• An active continuation

• An official half-con meetup in NYC

• An animated TV Pilot

• And more stuff on the way.

The fandom has grown quite a bit. I think it’s a little nicer too.

—

Initially, walking into Homestuck felt like entering a ghost town. Remnants of what used to be still remain, scattered across sheltered stores, and little outposts of people were residing in dilapidated buildings. But now, I feel like it’s a bit different.

The buildings have been fixed up, some stores — though starting out small — are reopening, the promise for growth doesn’t seem like such an insane thing to expect.

Anyways I started a new game as Shadowheart to continue my true passion of rare dialogue hunting and like all of the origin characters have main character syndrome but it’s turned up with Shadowheart in my opinion.

It was a crazy run because when we got to the final fight, the whole party died except for me. Because i was illithid and being a monk / rouge i was able to travel ~200m of flight (with 3 bonus action dashes and 2 action dashes) and in fight prep out whole party had as much bombs on us as possible, so i dropped all of it (it doesn’t cost any action/bonus to drop items) and blew up the final boss with my last and only remaining action.

All this to say that running builds is the way to go if you keep hitting walls your runs.

I've spotted a huge decline over the last two years. What's upsetting is how so many of our current third years have declined since their first year. I did a seminar with them the other day, on the topic of the environmental impacts of different diets. One guy told me confidently that there would be no additional agricultural lands if we all went vegetarian.

"Cool," I said. "What's your source for that?"

"I'm sure I read it," he said.

"Fair," said I, "go and look it up. Find an academic source, let's assess it to see if it's robust."

The first thing he did was go to Google, and then read the AI summary.

"That's not a source," I said. "Find me a source."

Five minutes later, he happily tells me that a Guardian article says so, and mentions the World Economic Forum.

"Okay," I said. "Neither of those are academic sources, and the WEF is secondary anyway. Go to Google Scholar, and find a journal article."

Ten minutes later, he tells me he can only find articles that say it's a very complex issue in spite of pop cultural received wisdom, and we don't actually know.

A THIRD YEAR. This man has a dissertation due in THREE MONTHS. This is a skill we taught him in first year, and it's all dribbled out of his ears in the quest for easy summaries from an autocomplete algorithm. And I dearly wish I could say he's an exception, but Jesus Christ, that would be a lie.

I'm currently writing a lecture for the second years for their research methods module, and I normally wouldn't need to do this. But I'm having to re-introduce them to the basic concepts of how to actually analyse findings rather than lazily take whatever they seem to say at face value. I'm trying to find a good paper that had Surprising findings, because I want to show them a research question and a set of results and then get them to speculate and research on why they found something so different, but that's a difficult thing to search for.

My boyfriend's family is really close. And since he's close to his family, I'm close to his family. The first christmas we spent together they had already included me in their annual gingerbread house portrait of the whole family.

When my boyfriend's little brother told us that he's got a girlfriend now, my first thought was "ooh, new people coming in??" like that's just the natural course of events that happens. I have to mentally restrain myself and remind myself that first teenage relationships tend to end in first teenage heartbreaks, and that's entirely his own personal matter that little bro is going to have to handle on his own.

Dude I have 15 aunts and uncles on my dad's side and at least 40 cousins

Tally Hall song title: memories of non existent days

Lemon Demon song title: I know where Mr Krabs hid the bodies

song title: I’ve never seen

a pencil before