Elf Meets Trolls

Finally watching the Homestuck Recap and trying to catch up. (It is 8pm on Apr 13 for me, as I write this. I want to post something for Homestuck Day that's not just 'hey I am aware it's Homestuck Day.') I have not given up on this blog, but as you can see, it is not at the top of my "do this now" priority lists.

(Since I last did serious blogging here, I have created two (tiny) solo TTRPGs, watched BNHA and Untamed and read ridiculous amounts of fic for both, and gotten a Real Job. With. Like. Union benefits. Also my father died in the early Covid era (not of Covid) and this made the whole lockdown thing much easier to handle because I had no interest in being social for at least six months after that.) (And every week, my Google calender says "Reminder: Homestuck liveblogging!" which has served as a weird touchstone for normality throughout the hellscape years.)

GENERAL NOTES: I want ZERO SPOILERS. NONE. I have a friend (@chibipaw) to help me by reading my inbox, but that just means "she will delete stuff that has spoilers" and I won't see it. I have a broad definition of spoilers. Like. I do not want to hear "oh you'll see that one again" or "wait'll you see what happens when they meet." I was not happy to be told that the people chatting with Our Protagonists were the trolls I'd heard so much about. Don't assume "everyone knows that"; I have managed to block out an incredible amount of knowledge about this fandom.

I am here for the tentabulges. Eventually. I will be reading all the depraved fic. Eventually. I ship them all. Eventually.

…I may ship them all before eventually.

Lemme see if I got this:

It's John's 13th birthday. It has been John's 13th birthday for longer than John has been alive.

His neighborhood got blown up. But he's safe (…for some values of "safe") in the Medium, where things are weird.

Kernelsprites. More than one of them.

Rose is playing with the server version of Sburb

Dave is arguing with trolls

Jade is doing something with a dreamscape something or other

Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey

Wayward Vagabond yay

Midnight crew. Midnight crew song. (Not actually part of the story.) (I want Midnight Crew song fanfic.)

Prospit. Derse. Multiple peoples with the same initials in different settings.

Chess war something (I have kinda stopped paying attention to the recap.)

Multiple strange worlds: Land of Wind and Shade; Land of Light and Rain; Land of Heat & Clockwork, all of which I want custom dragons for. This is complexified by the fact that Flight Rising expanded its color scheme while I was reading Homestuck, and also there are now swarms of new dragon types so I will have to rethink my plans for LOWAS and LOHAC dragons. I don't think I've seen Jade's realm yet.

Trolls with initials that are all "lower case letter followed by capital letter," with meanings that maybe attach to zodiac signs. (PLZ NO SPOILERS I already know too much.)

Flash has died but I have the Unofficial Homestuck Collection and also there's something kinda-sorta like Flash support in Firefox now although I may not have all the features I used in the past.

I have lost both my place in the story and my awareness of context so WHO CARES HERE WE GO.

…Is this too long? Should I bump the actual liveblogging to next post? Should I put it under a read-more tag? I have lost all sense of how I normally pace these things.

gC gives John (eB) a map. An FL4 map. Because that was a thing when Homestuck was written. FL4 files are no longer viable ways to give information. However, given what I know of HS trolls, that would not prevent them from using it.

(Huh my HSLB folder already has a "Google LOWAS.png" file which means this is probably ground I have already covered. Oh well.)

GOOGLE LOWAS

John goes to gate on top of mountain, sees pretty swirly colors that are LOLAR, and crashes into Rose's room. Talks to Dave on Rose's computer.

…Yeah, this looks familiar. Huh.

Look this is the last pic from my regular liveblogging days:

if someone could give me a link for that page, I'd be grateful. In the meantime, I'll go through from where I am and try to catch up. I probably backed up some deliberately but I am now entirely lost.

John is chatting with two Daves. One in orange. One in red. There are timeline issues. I think.

John goes poking through Rose's room. (The wone with MEOWMEOWMEOW all over the walls. Rose: Not the sane one.) He grabs some books with his captchalogue. Or into his sylladex. Dammit, I have forgotten the terminology attached to my favorite feature of this game. Story. Webcomic. Whateverthefuck this is.

Gets the codes from the books.

…and then we're back to… Dave in Derse? Dave and Rose in Derse? Back to John, getting his birthday gift from Rose: some kind of purple-black stuffed rabbit. More bunnies in boxes for John. John is happy with all the bunnies in boxes.

(Huh I already had a 'Chaos Dunk' image too, but not the animated gif. Apparently years of ignoring this have not changed my ideas about which images are interesting & worth sharing.)

This section has NEW RELEVANCE since I am now into Untamed fandom and gifts of rabbits are emotionally meaningful in ways that they were not when I started reading Homestuck. If John loves receiving bunnies, does that make him a Hanguang-Jun analogue? I will have to explore this idea.

John leaves a salamander for Rose in thanks.

There are pesterlog conversations of which I understand almost nothing. Timey-wimey shenanigans. Gonna hope I can pick up the gist of it later because I am not rereading the whole damn thing up to now to get context for these, which I kind of had before but have long lost.

There is a jam session with Dave and Rose in Derse, with 5 musical options. These are selectable by having Dave press buttons. Or by clicking on them directly in the new app.

These open in separate tabs in the Homestuck Collection. Right. The other reason to work my way through Homestuck: The music is awesome.

Of these, I like Derse Dreamers best.

Huh. the Collection and the website have DIFFERENT CONTENT wtf. Website: Page 1720. Altered from the original - the sound button is at the top because Flash support is now all wonky. Fine. But the second picture here isn't in the collection. (I am fine with this. I don't like the second picture. But it means, sigh, I really will be needing to go back and forth between the Collection app & the website. Ghah.)

Plz throw thoughts at me so I will be inspired to keep doing this.

So this is... the end of Year 13?

OH HEY THERE IS A RECAP PAGE. Yay. It is here: https://www.homestuck.com/story/1674

Even if I don't remember this person's name yet.

But he has John's present & Sburb game. And this is maybe the origin of the caution tape that shows up in the post-apoc wasteland with My Blorbo Wandering Vagabond.

(So I go to save out the picture of him, because I do that, and discover past pictures of him labeled "AR with (thing)" so apparently his name is AR. Or his initials are AR. Fine. I will figure this out. Eventually.)

Right. He is attached to Parcel Mistress.

Who has become 100x more interesting to me, since my father has passed away. He was a mail carrier. (A rather long time ago. He switched from mail carrier to janitor at the post office sometime in... the 80s, I think?)

So maybe this is the cosplay I need to put together. Except I'm very not sure about doing a bare-midriff anything, which is what this seems to be. Hrm.

Meanwhile, John is fighting salamanders. I remember... a video game thing? Maybe a flash game with a map?

Anyway. John defeats fire, rescues salamanders, gets a blank tablet to play timey-wimey games with.

Rose is hanging out in aqua-pink-yellowland, whose name I used to know (and can remember by checking Flight Rising but I haven't done that yet).

I think the font changed? I don't think the original looked like that.

Anyway. I checked FR. I have a dragon named LoLaR - so, yeah, Land of Light and Rain. Here's the dragon:

Next up is WV becoming the Mayor of Exile Town. And Dave getting a birdsword sprite. And Jade's Sburb shenanigans.

HOW THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO TAKE THAT?

(Also. AR is apparently Authority Regulator. Or at least, the clownversion is. I think future apoc-desert AR has a different name.)

AHA I have reached "Parcel Mistress meets the Black Queen." Yay. This is definitely familiar territory, and close to where I left off.

(Only. There are troll conversations. Which definitely make less sense this time around, because I have forgotten the context.)

(BUT THAT IS OKAY. Because apparently there are timey-wimey shenanigans and dream-self things and all that. It's allowed to be confusing.)

Old Homestuck link: https://www.homestuck.com/mspa?s=6&p=003702

New Homestuck link: https://www.homestuck.com/story/3702

See the ending number?

But. Those are not the same content, because the Old Homestuck Link was me talking about Rose alchemizing things, not Dave doing whateverthefuck Dave is doing with a sword.

So I'm trying to find my place in the Homestuck Collection browser/app thingie, and I know I'm somewhere in Part 4, but I remember very little of what's going on (as is normal when you walk way from canon for half a dozen years or so), so... it may take me a bit.

Argh.

Jade is captchaloguing a guitar. I think. I'm not reading; I'm flipping through trying to find my place.

Jade has several captchalogue moduses. (Modi? Mododes?)

I still love the sylladex shenanigans.

DO YOU PEOPLE EVEN KNOW WHO THIS IS?

So I figured I should Do Something for Homestuck today.

I have a weekly reminder in my google calendar, to do Homestuck blogging on Wednesdays.

Yes, every Wednesday. For the past several years. I don't remove it because I do intend to finish Homestuck.

Someday.

Even after the Death of Flash.

See, I was prepared. I downloaded the unofficial Homestuck collection before the death of Flash.

And I Put it...somewhere. Probably. (Look, there was a lot of "DOWNLOAD ALL THIS FLASH STUFF NOW OR LOSE IT FOREVER" going on. I downloaded a lot of stuff. And put it somewhere.

I have two 4tb storage drives (one built into the desktop computer, one external), plus my last several laptops, plus a couple of smaller external drives. I have no idea what I was using when Flash died.

(I also now have a Flash-usable browser.) (...but I forget which one it is and I keep having to search to find it.)

So. Homestuckery. Collection, because I can't count on the MSPaintAdventure page working right in my normal browser. (Opera. Which may have Flash support now or something? I don't know. And I was having problems dealing with the website & Tumblr posting anyway, which is why I stopped.)

...where did I put the collection? Check downloads folder. Nothing named Homestuck there. Check "Fandomstuff" folder. Nothing named Homestuck in there, either. Fine. Open up Agent Ransack because Windows' native search function became useless after WinXP (damn, I miss XP's search SO MUCH), search my main drive, search the storage drive, search the external drive... AHA THERE IT IS. External drive. In the "Fandomstuffs/Homestuck" folder.

Oh that's why it's sitting in the folder. 80 mb core program + 3.8gb "asset pack." Hadn't decided where/how to deal with installing.

I guess today is the day to add 4gb of content to my install/storage drive.

(...I need to get an online storage thing.) (I also need a faster internet connection.)

Anyway. I'm gonna install that, figure out where I left off, and start liveblogging, and we'll see how far I get today.

I'm partway through Part IV. That's halfway, right? (Stop laughing.)

I need to get through this because I think I want a Fate Accelerated Edition Homestuck game. (If there already is one... just let me know. But don't bother linking me to it yet.)

Reminder notes:

I don't want spoilers. At all. I have already absorbed several bits of Homestuck terminology and such by osmosis; I do not want them explained.

This is a pro-shipper liveblog, which is to say, I come from the part of fandom that believes all ships are plausible (at least in crackfic) and I am likely to mention the possibility of many ships that people find problematic. I am not likely to actually write fic for any of them, because my WIP list is srsly not short, and by the time I get around to actually writing Homestuck things (if I do), it's likely to all be focused on WV. (Ooh I remembered his name. Yay.)

I am waiting to get to the tentibulges.

Do not tell me whether or not tentibulges happen in canon. Again, no spoilers. I do not want to know what details are canon vs fanon vs crack theory.

Their algorithm is identifying a lot of content that isn’t photos with nudity, isn’t photos, doesn’t have nudity, doesn’t have IMAGES...

They even flagged reblogs of their own text post.

So I’m not going to trust that this blog is “safe.” I’m also not going to trust that there’ll be an audience here, or that I’ll still be interested in participating in Tumblr at all. 

I want to continue this. (I know, I know; I’ve said that before.) I have a weekly reminder on my calendar that pops up and tells me it’s time to blog for this, every week, and I leave it on because I want to get back to this.

Also @chibipaw tells me I’d love Hiveswap and the hiveswap friendsim thing, and I’d like to try those.

I also, because of the current Tumblr shenanigans, want to make sure this is backed up (it kind of is; I’m using TumblThree) and export it to somewhere else (which it isn’t). 

I’m thinking of posting to AO3, with each post being a chapter - they’d be short - and each Act being a fic, and the set being a series.

I haven’t decided what to do about Asks - do they become mini-chapters interspersed with the others? Do I make a separate “story” for those? Ignore them entirely? I know I’d at least leave some of them out; I wouldn’t copy over the ones that don’t make sense outside of a tumblr context.

Then there’s the issue of image hosting. A lot of people at AO3 use Tumblr for image hosting, but we have reasons to believe that’s not a good long-term option. Should I transfer them all to Imgur? (Ugh; that’s a lot of work.) Leave them as Tumblr links and hope? I do have them all on my hard drive; if the links went dead, I could replace them. 

I’m wondering if it’d be easier for me to continue at Dreamwidth--their image hosting is weak, but at least the posting options include autosave so I wouldn’t have to worry about a flicker of the computer killing my posts.

Ooh wow thank you! 

Homestuck cosplayers have disappointed me by not appearing in front of me at the conventions I attended, and announcing themselves as Homestuck cosplayers whose amazing talents I would recognize if I’d stop futzing around with Dresen Files ebooks and just finish reading Homestuck so I could get all the jokes. I am aware that this would require them to be telepathic; the whole damn universe continues to disappoint me with its lack of telepathy and time control.

Amazing lovely picture!

(AAARRGH I have switched from Firefox to Opera and there is no XKit for Opera, so I can’t add tags to asks except by editing them after publishing.)

Post-heavy-story-flash-shenanigans, we’re back to the main story. Or the other part of the story. Anyway, the kids. Rose is gonna alchemize some stuff. Starting with a hubtop.

Howcome I can’t buy a bright green laptop with an atom logo on the outside? (I know; licensing issues. Still. Someone makes skins like this, right?)