#sahcon

My piece for @sahcon's 2024 zine!! This is one of my favorites ever. I love it to pieces, i had sosooo much fun making this UGH the yaoi/yuri goes hard

iii rise from the ashes to announce THE SAHCON ZINE IS OFFICIALLY OUT!!! here's my piece ^_^

heres my piece from the sahcon zine 2024-2025!

Hey everyone – This is Jonaya here, one of the two main directors of Stuck at Home Con, and I have some bittersweet news to share with our community and followers. While this statement is the result of the collective decisions of myself, Cro, and the other key staff members, I also want it to be super clear that I’m writing this from my own POV and not as some written-by-committee response to y’all. I say this because I think it’s important that everyone knows how much this community means to us, and how much I believe that you’re deserving of transparency and honesty.

Not to bury the lede on this – after much internal discussion amongst the key staff, Cro and I have made the collective decision to end Stuck at Home Con after SAHCon 2025. We will leave up our socials, YouTube, and website in an archival form, but we will be formally closing as a convention.

I’ve been involved in SAHCon since 2020, when I was brought on as a panelist and quickly put into a staff role. Cro named me as his co-director in late 2020, and I’ve become increasingly involved in the general management and organization of the convention. Cro has been my friend for a long time, and we developed a specific way of approaching SAHCon where he would handle a lot of the “big picture” type ideas and side initiatives and I would handle a lot of the specific organization and day-to-day operations. It was a really good way to run things, and one I’ve found tremendous satisfaction in, but with both myself and Cro moving on to other things outside of the fandom and having less free time to work on the con, it’s definitely become a challenge to maintain.

From the beginning, our intention with SAHCon was to provide an open space where people who love Homestuck can come together to celebrate the comic they all love and all of the wonderful things that the fandom has made because of it. We’ve been proud to bring together fans from many walks of life and many sections of the fandom, and proud to help provide a place for that fandom to gather. We considered passing SAHCon along to someone else, but we feel like there’s simply too much of us and other staff who are also moving away from Homestuck wrapped up in the existence of Stuck at Home Con.

This wasn’t an easy decision to make – this convention means a tremendous amount to myself, Cro, and everyone else involved in it. We want to see SAHCon go out on a high note rather than stumble along as some shadow of its former self. We also want to encourage the community at large to continue to make amazing things happen – things like Promstuck (where I got engaged!), or the informal gatherings of fans that continue to happen all across the country. Online spaces like the Calibornia discord server show that what we did with SAHCon might have been special, but it’s in no way unique to us – so we hope to see more community initiatives like ours in the future! There is power in community, and we would rather choose to leave our legacy as a sign of what’s possible than try to continue to cling to that niche even as our founders move on to other things. So the con is closing, but we’ve still got one last chance to gather and celebrate! We’ll be hosting our Friday Showcase on October 24th and SAHCon itself will happen on October 25th! We look forward to seeing everyone there, and we know it’s gonna be great!

Before I close this out, I want to share a few very personal feelings on all of this…

Stuck at Home Con is probably the biggest fan thing I’ve ever been involved in, and it means a lot to me. The Homestuck community, where I met my fiancee and a good chunk of my best friends, means a lot to me. While Homestuck as a work of fiction might have lost its shine for me as an individual, nothing will ever take away the memories and experiences that I’ve had within this fandom.

I personally want to thank everyone who’s been involved in running SAHCon over the years – the panelists, artists, special guests, VR Chat developers, and musicians. And most of all, the con staff, who’ve come together every year to help keep things ticking and running smoothly. I want to thank Cro for being my friend and collaborator all these years, Mikky for running our artist alley, Stacy for being our regular DJ, and Jojo “Funk” McLovin for organizing the SAHCon albums every year. Everyone involved in this con has dedicated countless hours of their lives and an untold amount of passion to making this a positive, welcoming community.

And last of all, I want to thank everyone who’s ever attended SAHCon for being the very essence of what this con has always been about. There is no community without people, and all y’all have always been the driving force that kept us going for over six years.

Thank you, each and every one of you reading this, for being a part of what we built. Whether you’ve been here since the beginning or you’re just now getting into this fandom, I hope that you all go and create amazing things together.

-Jonaya Riley Director, Stuck at Home Con

here's what we got a look at in the panel today! :D

during the entire stream, a song by james roach from the Act 3 OST played in the background, which used similar sounds to the wii channel shop theme.

started off with some lovely background art of the area outside of fiamet's hive by xamag, followed by some character sprites of trolls done by dagmar! along with a still image of an imperial drone by paperseverywhere.

onhors's pants were reportedly a point of contention, as their design was difficult to stylize and simplify!

then we got a couple more lovely backgrounds by xamag of a mall, cridea's hive, some areas within the jadeblood caverns, and a spaceship with a giant heart in the inside?!

the team members commented that you can infer a lot about cridea's personality just from her room, which has a lot of cute animations in it in the actual game. they also mentioned that her design was reworked from its initial version and it's a lot cuter now!

apparently, we will be seeing a few "mall crawler jades" who were designed for this area. this is also where the new james roach track plays

this cavern entrance gate is a piece of adult-designed technology that has since fallen into disrepair over the sweeps. the team talked for a moment about how much adult-built architecture there may be abandoned all over alternia.

it was spoiled for us that joey is going to space!

the team talked a lot about how they would love to tell us the lore behind this heart, and many other alternian and hiveswapian things, but they must resist until the game is released.

after this they moved on to the QNA portion which i'll post separately :]

hope everyone is excited for the next installment of hiveswap!