Music and Colo(u)rs and Mayhem

[flutingfrenzy]

Listen up, everyone, because I'm only gonna say this once: if you ever get the chance to go on a tour of a radio station, for the love of God, DO IT. I won a tour of the Minnesota Public Radio studios that took place this past Tuesday, and it. was. awesome. Partly in the "this is how your sausage is made" way, and partly because it was basically

Comments

[flutingfrenzy]

Yes, you do have to read the fic. You, personally, will love it, I promise. Definitely read the comments, too, because there are a lot of people RPing in them as Sburb-playing OCs, getting advice on their weird game problems from the author and each other. The only thing is that there are quite a few mechanical errors in the fic, and strangely, a lot of them are the type that non-native speakers tend to make - but there is no way this author isn't fluent in English.

Haha, the April 2nd update. Is it weird that my entire reaction to AH's death, Vriska's appearance, the LOSAZ(?) setting, everything, was completely eclipsed by "HOLY CRAP DID THE REAL ANDREW HUSSIE JUST USE HIS COMIC TO PROPOSE TO SOMEONE? Will he be okay when he finds out that Ryan North is already married?" But since the answers to my questions continue to elude me, I GUESS I can consider other angles too.
So, okay. I am honestly not surprised that Vriska is making an appearance. She was way too important to just be written out of the story, plus Hussie loves her, apparently in more ways than one. It's gonna be relevant; even the "April Fool's joke" two years ago (Dave prototypes Cal!) ended up being important to the plot. Not that I have any idea what's going on, but I'm sure it will make sense soon. Remember when this page came out? Good times.

I forget whether Already Dead Hussie had ever occurred to me or not, but there it is. If he's god tier (I know he says he's just cosplaying, but there is really nothing to be gained by believing him when he says that kind of thing), not only does that mean he's died multiple times, but that he won't necessarily stay dead now. Unless the death was considered heroic. Which...it probably was.

[evilhippo]

I'm definitely enjoying it so far! Man, I really need to keep better track of the fic in this fandom... I basically have to rely entirely on randomly stumbling across things.

I think there was a lot of speculation as to whether or not he'd actually proposed to someone, but supposedly his girlfriend denied it. Though Ryan North hasn't denied it.

Yeah, I think that death was definitely heroic... But does that matter if someone is already dead? (This plays right into my curiosity about the absolutely huge amount of stuff in the dream bubbles, and why it doesn't/whether it does count as its own separate universe. I'm kind of left wondering whose dreams they're actually meant to be... I mean, they're influenced by the players, but what with all the dead-ended timeline people (who can still do lifey things and influence living players/Dersites/etc.? That's sort of sticking awkwardly in my brain right now) and things, it makes me wonder if it isn't the game's dreams/Skaia's dreams or something.)

And actually... okay, this is going to be kind of crackpot, but let's say Hussie was Already-Dead-Tier or whatever, and because of the ambiguity of being god tier but already dead, his heroic death shunted him off into a sort of mystery/unresolved space in the same way that Vriska's clocksmash unresolved heroic/just death sent her off into narrative mysteryland. (Or it's more simple in that no one knows what happens to a dead author, since the author's no longer there to make the rules, and so he ends up in narrativemysteryland along with the one character whose death was similarly unresolved. Or I'd say God Tiers end up somewhere else when they die, except we've seen dead God Teir Karkat. So I don't know... I think I'm back to being just confused.)

[flutingfrenzy]

It must be really awkward to have to field questions about whether your boyfriend just proposed to you via his webcomic, especially if the answer is no. (Especially especially if the answer is yes but you want your family and friends to know before the whole internet does, and even more especially if the answer is yes, but to his married bro instead of you, but moving on...)

Not only do I not think crackpot theory is crackpot, I would totally be on board, leaning and waving energetically over the bow, if this weren't kind of a weird time to be introducing totally new existential planes in the story. On the other hand, the dead A1 trolls have apparently been living in what may or may not be spatial realms that are different from dream bubbles, so what the hell, I'll jump on board anyway. After all, AH is nothing if not a gamebreaker. Also the story is probably nowhere near over.

Man, you know what, I give up. Ever since the dead alt-timeline god-tier player dreambubbles became a thing, and then Terezi and Aranea had that amazing conversation about choices and reality (easily in the top five of my favorite pesterlogs), I'm pretty sure nothing is impossible in this story anymore.

I'm kind of left wondering whose dreams they're actually meant to be... I mean, they're influenced by the players, but what with all the dead-ended timeline people [...] it makes me wonder if it isn't the game's dreams/Skaia's dreams or something

What if there isnt a difference between the dreams of the players and the dreams of Skaia?

See? I can say stuff like that too!

[evilhippo]

I can't even imagine what it would be like to deal with this fandom as Hussie's girlfriend. She seems to still be alive and not going all vengeful evil mastermind on the rest of the world, though, so the girl's definitely tough. (-;

I'm sort of approaching the crackpot theory under the assumption that any new info we get is going to be of the "it's been like this all along, you just missed the clues" variety. I just... haven't spotted the rest of the clues yet. (-; We've been building up toward a proper explanation of player deaths for a while now, since apparently they work differently than any sort of real death... I think you might be on to something as far as Skaia and the players being one in the same, in a way. I mean, there's definitely a meta aspect to the people who get to play S___b, in that they recur across scratched sessions and exist in the dream bubbles across timelines. From what I remember, that isn't true of anyone/anything else in the universe. And what is with ectobiologizing two sets of players each time? Is the game necessarily unwinnable in its first iteration?

(Also a marginal case could be made for a sort of Skaia!Hivemind with the way memes internal to the groups of players propagate between them and events (though some of those, like the twist on "I warned you about stares", were probably just Doc Scratch messing with everyone). I'm not sure I'm onboard with that, partly because I'm not liking the idea of combining a sort of predestination with a hivemind sort of idea... the system gets uncomfortably rigid.)

Anyway! Yes! I loved that Terezi-and-Aranea conversation. I'm always a fan of when things get all philosophical... though I wonder how much of that is true, and how much of it is... after-life-specific. Also I'm still wondering what their actual plans were that involved all of them dying, and whether it was kind of like the opposite version of Jade's crazy plan to save their entire scratched session by doing Space things, theirs was to save their entire session by doing... er... death things? Thereby creating dream bubbles that aren't-quite-dream-bubbles?

I don't remember where I was going with any of this...

Oh no, you've been around me for too long. ^_^

[flutingfrenzy]

I really enjoyed reading this comment, because it only convinced me more that you and the Sburb Glitch FAQ are meant for each other.

Is the game necessarily unwinnable in its first iteration?

I believe that we will know the answer to this question by the time the story is over. Either way, I think there are practical reasons for having two sets of players. I've always considered the players from a given universe to be a race - maybe even a species - unto themselves, and I suspect that allowing members of the actual native species of the planet they came from to enter the medium would be...hazardous. How and for whom, I'm not sure, but I think we can all agree that there are some unanswered questions regarding Dad. But anyway, if players end up living with families who weren't created via ectobiology, those people might end up in the medium, and that seems like something Skaia would want to avoid.

Honestly, I think a second set of players are only necessary as "backup" on a meta/narrative level. It would be pretty confusing if the beta kids arrived in the alpha universe and then there were two Johns and so on. I'm trying to think of a reason that two Johns would be a bad thing from a game perspective, but all I can come up with is that maybe it would be bad to have two players with the same title and aspect...but I couldn't say why exactly that would be, or whether both iterations would definitely have to be the same.

Recent updates have gotten me thinking about stuff we talked about awhile ago. Specifically, the connection between the deaths of pre- and post-Scratch versions of oneself, which the text on that lantern thingy in Myststuck reminded me of when I realized it could be talking about either the Alpha kids' dreamselves OR the Beta guardians. I think you called it! Only I noticed that the green metaphor lantern clearly went out before the blue one, so either it definitively parallels the dreamselves and not the Beta guardians, or Grandpa died within four and a half months of Jade's arrival on Earth, but that can't be right. But anyway, I think this is an intriguing development for two reasons: first, because dreamselves are involved, so it could have implications for the Alpha kids' prospects for god tier; second, because of what it might tell us about the Alpha guardians (assuming we aren't about to learn everything there is to know about them).

It seems comically obvious now and I don't know if it means anything, but I also notice that in both forms of both people who use their respective chumhandles, GT seems to die first, followed by GG, and then by TT and TG at about the same time.

But the real reason I revived this comatose thread was to ask: has Homestuck been weirding you out lately, or is it just me? First there was this page, and then this happened, and now Dirk's story, which seems uncomfortably...allegorical.

Oh my god the presidential election is totally going to be written into the comic this fall isn't it.

(Also, I was going to write a post on the second new album, but everything I tried to write came out sounding like the Comic Book Guy and now I have to set aside some time to reevaluate my life. In short: I was disappointed with the number of remixes. Still, I can't hate on an album for long when it's got a song like Coolkid. Dapper Dueling and Pendulum as well.)

(Also also: Sim Jade is so fancy.)

[evilhippo]

Re: "has Homestuck been weirding you out lately?"... Yes! It is rapidly becoming the sort of thing I read from between my fingers. Leaving the allegory thing to the side for the time being, I'm pretty sure there's some awkward behind-the-scenes plot-tweaking going on in the midst of this nonsense that the narration is meant to cover up. I also suspect the reason that the story has gone off into uncanny allegoryland is going to turn out to be that it's being written by someone else entirely (stupid Hussie, killing himself off), and my suspicions are that it's either Gamzee or someone related to him (or at the very least is a troll).

The particular Alpha-guardian tangent we're on right now is making a MESS of the thing I'm meant to be writing for the Homestuck reverse bang, and now I'm stuck trying to decide whether to treat Dirk's version of past events as strict canon, or a story that has degraded and been misheard over time (I'm hoping it's the latter because 1) complexity! and 2) it doesn't entirely ruin my fic). Also we always seem to go into these kind of weird shifts in tone when ancestors are being discussed... it was more obvious with Doc Scratch's narration, but it's definitely happening here too. There just isn't an easy genre to put it into, I think. (It's dancing around weirdly close to some kind of RPF crossover at this point, though.)

I am sincerely hoping that the presidential election isn't written into the comic... it's going to be bad enough dealing with it in the regular media.