used to be rey

Here’s a wonderful and accurate representation of that night.

And when the progress bar reached 100%, and when the page FINALLY loaded on 10/25/11, it was chaos. This was 2011, a primetime peak point and growth period of Homestuck fan density, meaning hiatus memes were popping up faster than furious fanfictions and fanarts theorizing about what was going to happen next. On tumblr, you couldn’t avoid Homestuck even if you tried, which meant a lot of curious people were constantly starting to read HS to see what the fuss was about (is homestuck an anime? and all similar memes popped up at this time because it was just as pervasive as Supernatural, Doctor Who, and Sherlock fandoms, so it was hard to figure out it was an obscure webcomic,) and was a direct precursor to the huge amount of liveblogs that started up after EOA5. MSPA crashed, as it had started to during the last few big [S] updates. Hussie had already bought new servers in advance, but even when allegedly thousands of dollars were spent it couldn’t handle the accidental DDOS attack of Homestuck fans. People were up all night waiting for this upd8, the curiosity was killing me. I know at some point he was receiving at least 1 million unique visitors per day to his site [correction: according to Hussie’s tumblr, upwards of 2 million during this time], and even though Hussie had foreseen such traffic and thusly hosted [S] Cascade on Newgrounds, a dedicated video streaming site, Newgrounds was similarly unprepared for the sheer amount of people frantically mashing the play and refresh buttons, and also crashed. Immediately. 

MSPA and Newgrounds crashed definitively for at least two nights in a row, I remember not being able to see the entire update until three days later, even though I kept checking back and refreshing. For a lucky few, the loading bar would stop at 23-30%, where they would then frantically troubleshoot on the MSPA forums and of course, tumblr. For an even luckier few, they could see a tiny bit of the upd8 (spoiler: Jade died) before the whole thing froze, and then when they refreshed and refreshed just like a million other people the whole site disappeared.

Andrew Hussie has gone on record to say this was one of the few times he thought Homestuck wasn’t worth it, because the sheer unbelievable cost (was it $10,000?) [correction: according to Hussie’s tumblr, it looked like it was going to cost $100,000 to keep [S] Cascade up for several days] of servers and the chaos of no one able to see the upd8 and crashing nearly every site after.

He was tweeting during the whole debacle, stating he was reluctant to put it up on Youtube because of all the moving elements of the flash, and style, and how youtube degraded the quality of the file size, and how he tried to scratch out buffer time and pauses by putting periods of silence between each section of the 14 minute upd8, the longest upd8 yet. Just as you thought it would end, it just kept going with NEW plot twists and climaxes. It remains to this day a legendarily good EOA, which didn’t help the hype when you could only watch 1/16 of it in the least. 

So after Newgrounds patooted, he didn’t put it on youtube and instead put up the entire flash file on Megaupload, where it could be downloaded in it’s entirety to be watched. UNFORTUNATELY, Megaupload also crashed very quickly, which Hussie felt much headache over. But before that happened I managed to get the file, since I happened to be up very early that night! Next it was on dropbox, which didn’t crash but had “link unavailable” on and off. 

At this point a meme was born. Tumblr also crashed for a few hours in this time period, which I think was in part due to the amount of frantic posting going on, and at least two other sites I can’t recall crashed as well, even definitely Twitter and even Youtube for a few hours (I experienced the crash and heard about it but don’t know if it was definitely due to Homestuck, but judging by the timing and the amount of mirrors…. I did see a few livestreaming chat functions get so many people talking they froze and crashed) I am positive at least one streaming site crashed when people who tried to livestream the upd8. I went from one site and video to another trying to get at it, but each one fell into a loading buffer and then subsequently became unwatchable. Many people who were not Homestuck were confused on why all the major sites were suddenly crashing, which was kind of really hilarious because though everyone expected at least two sites to crash, the internet coincidentally went down on that day in the exact order of the HS fandom moving from site to site trying to watch the upd8. 

Update: Livestream, the site, confirmed to have also crashed. It was hard to keep track, but I know there were a few more livestream, download, and sharing sites that went down as well.

Update2: How could I forget? We crashed a number of prominent torrent sites for at least hours. At bare minimum 2, but I remember something like 4 or more links going dead at any given time. This is partially due to how the entire fandom would crosspost links across Tumblr, the MSPA forums, and Twitter.  I have no idea how long the dubious sites stayed crashed, but it was definitely b/c of [S] Cascade. This is why we need to record things. 

Spoilers were flying everywhere, people didn’t understand everything that had happened, and by the time the timeline of events in and out of [S] Cascade was all straightened out, people became even MORE hype. Like this whole thing lasted at least four days, and on top of that, the upd8 was good. Fandom exploded. Almost every super popular homestuck youtube video kind of was born of the excitement right after this upd8, leading into the weirdly ubiquitous 2012-2013 Homestuck fandom phase. But the rest is another story, and [S] Cascade was a humbling and hilarious experience. 

[S] Collide and Act 7 were hosted on youtube (shortly after an official Homestuck youtube was made), after huge hiatuses, so active fandom was a lot smaller and Youtube could handle what strain that was left. 

he’s a little confused but he’s got the spirit

angsty bonus:

me rewatching star trek in the year 2019:

Proof:

A sequel