ROAD TO RUIN, NO PAPER TRAIL

The intestines of the furnace by Stéphane Gaudry, 2012

who was she

by Shen Lieyi 

Kurt Nimmo.

Oh de Laval (Thai/Polish, 1990) - Untitled (2025)

Soo Joo Park and Molly Bair wearing Iris van Herpen inside the CERN Large Hadron Collider

all drow women know is contemplate they skull, tend to mushrooms, express violence, adjust armor, plot future, and be bothered by the sun.

playing around with a couple new procreate art brushes + settings + kim and Harry are there

Though the pop culture references are all over the map, in terms of its sense of time and place, the comic is pretty firmly situated in the mid to late 1990s; in fact, it's so precisely situated that you can map the beta kids and Alternian trolls to two distinct cohorts of that first generation of unsupervised children on the Internet, to an accuracy of plus or minus just a couple of years. A big part of why it can be hard to pin down exactly when the comic is meant to be taking place is because for all intents and purposes it's simultaneously 2009 and 1997.

Hussie's cohort of unsupervised children on the Internet is represented not by the beta kids, but by the (Alternian) trolls. The trolls are the IRC Generation to the beta kids' ICQ generation; this is reflected in everything from the palpable ghost of pre-World Wide Web BBS culture that informs their understanding of their analogue of the Internet, to the fact that they still think leetspeak is cool, while the beta kids find it quaint, and it's particularly apparent in the differences in how they use chat software compared to the beta kids.

Yeah, you could write a whole analysis just based on how the Alternian trolls inhabit a milieu where some level of coding knowledge is part of the basic buy-in to be permitted to exist in online spaces at all, while the beta kids regard it as esoteric wizard shit, and how that directly reflects one of the least bridgeable generation gaps between mid 1990s versus late 1990s online youth culture.

To put it briefly, Homestuck isn't an allegory for the rise and fall of 1990s online youth culture in the same way that The Lord of the Rings isn't an allegory for the First World War.