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bunbunbillion · 13 days

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THE BUNBUNBILLION Q1 2024 MEDIA THREAD EXTRAVAGANZA

i've been recording everything i consume for the past few months to do a media thread at the end of every quarter. and now april is over... so its time to talk about stuff!! forever!!!!!!

01/13 - Homestuck (Re-Read)

I finished re-reading Homestuck for the... 4th? 5th time? I've lost count. It's a good way to start the year though. This time around I read it with my girlfriend, who you should give all of your money too (@yinkybaginky), and it was very fun to see someones reaction to it for the first time. She knew literally nothing about Homestuck, not even what a Vriska Serket was. A truly great experience, especially thanks in part to the Unofficial Homestuck Collection. I'll probably have more to see about Homestuck in depth on a later date, so I won't bog down this post with that. It's my favorite piece of media ever, and that's all there is really to say on the matter.

01/24-01/25 - The Trolls Movies

I've been surrounded by gay people who love Trolls for the past like 5 years so I finally decided to give them a watch on a whim with my girlfriend, after catching some of the first movie in a streamers server.

They were fun! I really don't think I have much to say on them. They're kids movies, sure, but they're also just very visually great and made me go "yeah you know what some of those old pop songs WERE pretty good". I think when it came to stories I liked the first one the most just because I liked the Bergen's a lot, I thought their whole world was very well designed and all that. Don't have the most care for Branch, and Poppy is OK as a protagonist, but otherwise I had more fun with the other characters. Creature design is absolutely excellent and is what stood out to me the most of anything, though. The animation in the 3rd movie is also top notch, I really do want to see the series continue. If they do, I like the third movies approach of finding a niche to make "the thing" for the whole movie, it's a fun way of doing stuff.

We thought this shot was really funny.

1/20 - Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio

I was gonna watch this when it came out awhiiile ago, but just put it off forever. I saw Jacob Geller had uploaded a new video about Pinocchio, which talked about the movie and was like. Man. I wanna watch that video. Guess I'll go watch this entire movie. So I hopped into VC with Netflix on and just watched it.

It was Fucking Good!!!!!!!!!!! Every good thing you've heard about the movie is absolutely true. Do yourself a favor and just watch it. That being said, I also don't have too much to say about it! It's been a few months and it hasn't totally stuck around in my head, but that just means I get to rewatch it sometime, and I can look forward to that. It mostly made me want to watch more stop motion movies.

If I were to highlight anything, its that I love to make the movie all about death. Pinocchio as a story seems to constantly get turned into this thing all about freedom and living and how great life is and all that, but this movie completely nailed that yea. Pinocchio works so much better as a movie about death. A puppet living on a blessing against the laws of nature being used as a vessel to explore acceptance of death. It's really great.

the demons are such baddies btw

01/29 - Earthbound USA

Not the game, but the documentary put together by Jazzy Benson through Fangamer. It was absolutely fantastic. Easily my favorite game documentary I've ever watched... Because it's not really about the game.

To put into words, because I imagine 90% of people reading (not including the people I watched it with) haven't seen it or even heard of it, Earthbound USA is a documentary about specifically starmen.net and Earthbounds western fanbase.

The doc highlights basically every aspect of Earthbound in the west. They talk to the people who translated the game, who made the marketing campaign, the fans who bought the game day one, the translator of the MOTHER 3 fan translation, they talk about Earthbound Zero, about the virtual console releases, the quest to get MOTHER 3 officially localized and every single defeat that came with it, I mean Shigesato Itoi is just here too. It's everything you could ask for all combined with home videos from the early 2000s, an outstanding soundtrack that gives me goosebumps from Robbie Benson, it's just... So good.

I bought the DVD for the movie and streamed that to my friends, which you can get here on Fangamer, whenever they plan on restocking it at least. Or, you can watch it on streaming services listed on their website! If your a MOTHER fan, I'd say this is like, essential viewing. It may as well be official with how good it is.

01/29 - A Brief Retrospective of The Simpsons' Golden Age

I finished this the same day. I recorded this mostly as a joke, but hey if your insane and have watched every single Simpsons episode like me and want whats basically a Simpsons Summary Podcast, I recommend this 11-hour video.

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02/06 - MOTHER

A week later I couldn't get Earthbound USA out of my head, so I decided to finally sit down and go where no MOTHER fan has gone before. To the first game in the series.

It was really really good. Like, man, I don't know why I slept on it so long just because it was an NES RPG. Ok, I mean, I know why I did, it's because it's a NES RPG, but still.

This game really highlights everything that went into its two sequels to make them so good, and has so many little unique novelties about it that make it just so so memorable. The music, the writing, the places you go, it's just... So, so good. I still think the best way to get into MOTHER is to start with Earthbound, just due to how approachable it is, but if you like it and/or MOTHER 3, do not sleep on MOTHER/Earthbound Beginnings. It's just so good.

Probably use an emulator with rewind or save-states though.

i'll be fine with not hearing magicants music anymore though

02/17 - Yakuza Kiwami 2

I started this game probably years ago, and never got that far. Yakuza 0 is definitely one of my favorite games ever, and I was kind of mixed on Yakuza Kiwami, but I was enjoying the start of Kiwami 2 for sure.

How did I feel by the end?

I mean it's not BAD, per say, it's just... Not very good, either. The gameplay never really felt like it evolved much, the writing really felt like it never picked up and just kept ADDING stuff, but at least the side quests were probably the absolute best the series has given me so far. That definitely saved it for me, but man the story. It just wasn't very good.

I had a lot more thoughts after playing it, but I think think in the end it just comes down to;

Ryuji did not get nearly enough time to shine to be an impactful villian

The bastard cop was a character I was given no reason to care for, and the focus put on him did not feel earned in any way

Kiryu really did not feel that involved with everything going on

Sayama did not get nearly enough agency in this story

As for the twists, I didn't like how many there were at first, but I think by the end there were just so many twists I was like. Yeah nvm this is so fucking stupid it owns. So good on them for that!

I don't think I'll ever replay the main story for this game, but I will absolutely come back to those side quests, they're so good I don't want to spoil a single one. I am also really enjoying Yakuza 3 so far, so that's a we might just be back regardless.

the selfie feature is really funny. you really feel like your some 40 year old dad.

02/22 - Pokemon Scarlet and Violet: The Hidden Treasures of Area Zero - Epilogue

I have a lot of thoughts on Pokemon Scarlet & Violet. I am a HUGE Pokemon freak, like omega huge freak levels of such. I will claw and bite tooth and nail defending Sword and Shield any fucking day of the week. I think Scarlet and Violet are like, painfully mid games in such a disheartening way. I still enjoyed a lot of it, but man it's so held back by... everything, really.

And the DLC fixed I'd say about none of it. In fact, I'd go as far to say the 2 DLC stories only highlight and strengthen every single problem scarvi has as a game and it disheartens me, so, so so much. Unlike the Sword and Shield epilogues, which expanded upon the best parts of the game and experimented with brand new formats as prep for the next generation, scarvi kinda just does. Nothing. It's more Scarlet and Violet, slime grease and all.

Kitakami is... Ok, I guess? It's an exceptionally uninteresting region with absolutely no landmarks that stand out in my mind. The story in it is pretty subpar, it's a really annoying kind of "player has no control over a misunderstanding" narrative in a really obnoxious way and by god I'll say it I never really get a reason to care about Kieran. He's not bad by any means, I mean he's just a kid, but really I don't feel like I'd ever call him a friend. The story with the Loyal Three and Ogrepon is really cute though, I do love that they completely flipped the story of Momotaro on its head in such a fun and unique way.

Blueberry Academy I was looking forward to much more, thinking that while Kitakami was really rushed and pretty bad, it must mean more resources were just put towards the second DLC. I was pretty wrong, it was basically just as under baked... But also still better, regardless. They introduce a lot of characters you won't really remember with this DLC, and it feels weird because it feels like there SHOULD be more to these characters, but it's all confined to a pretty short campaign.

The story is pretty ok, and I like what they did with Kieran here, but the second you beat him in the champion fight the story like, immediately halts the breaks and everything stops mattering. I really thought Drayton might've been set up as an interesting antagonist, someone subtly bullying Kieran and egging on how he is, but in the end he's just a well meaning friend who's just eccentric. All the other trainers basically disappear as well, and Kieran reverts back to how he was before all this for the most part. Then the story with Terapagos has to happen, and you get the return to Area Zero, except with your new friends you've barely built bonds with and Briar instead.

Similar to Drayton, I thought Briar might've been getting set up to be a bit fucked up. She's pretty obsessed with Area Zero and proving that Heath was right, and that feels like obvious easy set up for a villain right? Obsession is kind of the text book villain motive, especially in a series like Pokemon. But, no, like Drayton, Briar is actually exactly as she seems, and there's nothing underneath.

Unfortunetly, Area Zero itself was also not as interesting on revisit. I imagine it was the far lower budget, but it ends up mostly just being a very basic crystal-cave environment, without that really fascinating hollow-earth vibe Area Zero has in the base game. You're also mostly just traveling alone going on fetch quests to beat mini-boss Pokemon to open up gates, so that feeling of traveling an unknown place with friends is also completely lost. In the end, Terapagos isn't much of a character at all, like Ogrepon (or Miraidon/Koraidon) are, and is just kinda There. I'm sure the anime is doing a lot more with them, given they're a main character, but man they are NOTHING in this game and it's really disappointing with how incredibly hyped up they are.

In the end though, the thing I really came out loving with the second DLC was something I didn't actually know about until after finishing the epilogue, which was the brief interaction with the Professor in Kitakami once you have Terapagos. I won't spoil it, I'd recommend going to the crystal lake in Kitakami with Terapagos in your party to see it, but it was a moment where I was really like... Damn. This story really could've been something special.

NOW WITH ALL THAT OUT OF THE WAY, it was the Epilogue that I beat this year, which acts both as a bonus to the DLC, and a Mythical Pokemon event similar to ones from the DS games. And, I gotta say.

It's easily the best thing in the entire DLC, bar none.

Despite just being a revisit to Kitakami, the Epilogue is not only better written then both of the DLC chapters, but actually shows that promise for future games like the SWSH DLC did years ago. I had a smile on my face basically the entire time.

First off, hanging out with the three friends again after they basically disappear once you beat the game is so incredibly refreshing. Just having them over to your house is the first time in a Pokemon game I've actually felt that like... Oh, I'm a kid hanging out with my friends, kind of feeling. That original inspiration the Pokemon series had was just completely captured with that, and I love it, and it continues through the entire DLC. On top of that, the DLC does a lot of very small things with its cutscenes that I felt were really missing from the main game that actually completely caught me off guard. Seamless transition between overworld cutscenes, cinematic cutscenes, and battles mainly. It feels like Pokemon games have always struggled with taking you out of the story for loading screens or transitions or letting the player wander off or something. It's hard to immerse, but with this DLC just through the most simple methods they really catch you off guard with the cutscene framing and battle starts in a way I absolutely adore, especially since your with your friends who can actually Talk for you too. Helps that all of the writing is just really funny too, I had such a good time.

Overall, I think this is where I want the Pokemon series to go. The segment of Area Zero where you travel with all your friends already stood out to a lot of people, but didn't have the most writing to back it up. Similarly, this DLC has all of the writing, but it can feel like you aren't actually traveling with your friends, as they don't follow you. I think having a Pokemon game where you travel directly with other people in a bit of a party is the way to go with expanding on Pokemon as a series, and this DLC combined with base scarvi really proves How it can work. It makes me so excited to see where we can go from here, and I can only hope they learned from all these mistakes.

wow i had a fucking lot to say about scarlet and violet dlc and i didnt even mention this thing. whatever.

02/26 - Splatoon 3: Side Order

Funny story, I actually beat Splatoon 3 on a friends copy, but on my own switch, so when this DLC came out I ended up buying an entire new copy of Splatoon 3, with DLC, and an already completed save file. So was the DLC worth 80 bucks? I mean, no, not at all, but it was extremely good!!

It came out while I was out of town with my girlfriend, so we had a lot of fun playing it together, and I think it's just overall a genius idea for a Splatoon mode. It makes me like, viscerally crave an even bigger Splatoon roguelike, but I'm also like an extreme roguelike freak. The story was super cute (my big "I <3 PEARLINA" shirt notwithstanding) and basically everything it introduces is great. I haven't actually beaten the Agent 8 locker yet, because I'm Bad At Splatoon </3, but I everything else was just so good.

im actually extremely biased, btw

02/27 - Ponyo (Rewatch)

I rewatched Ponyo with my girlfriend while I was over for the first time since I was a wee little amoeba. It was so fucking cute!!!! I really do love Ghibli movies a lot. I don't think there's a lot I can say about Ponyo, per say, at least not as much as other Ghibli movies I love like Spirited Away (my fave movie evarr), but I think this movie combined with like. Finding Nemo, Animal Jam, and going to the Houston Aquarium combined are probably why I love marine biology so much now.

02/29 - Death Note

The anime, to be specific, for the first time. Yeah, I can see why this became such a big thing with fujoshis. I get it, I understand now. I'm sorry L, I didn't know your game.

Death Note is overall both an anime of its time, and an absolute classic you should be watching. It's engaging, it's dramatic, it's funny, and there's so many points where your just like "damn are they gonna bone" about the two characters the authors 100% had no intention to be seen in that way.

It's only real problems come from the authors also having no fucking clue what to do with women in the story, and making pretty annoyingly shallow characters that get sidelined really hard. The final arc is also a bit head scratching, but it makes for good drama, so I can't really complain, even if I remember a lot less of it. Great show, great ending. Where's my Misa & Rem yuri manga series.

he really is just fucking jeff the killer huh

02/29 - Promare

Watched this with my girlfriend on a whim, cus we wanted to watch a movie together. I've been a very lowkey TRIGGER studios fan since I was a kid, watching Kill la Kill when I was way too young to be watching shows that crazy boobed, but it did definitely contribute to my transgender-ness, so you can't fault it there (you can fault it for a lot of other things though). No matter what though, when TRIGGER just randomly came out with a full feature length movie released in theaters, I was pretty interested. Which is why I didn't watch it for years.

After watching it though? Yea, that was really fun. It's not much in the way of story, very basic Minority Allegory story I think, but it's all to make way for extremely crazy action scenes and homages to all their favorite mecha anime, which like, yea props they did a great job. Character design is extremely fun, environments are super colorful, animation is what you'd expect from TRIGGER (good), and there's a lot of man tits this time around. I recommend it!

03/04 - 2001: A Space Odyssey

I'll be so fucking honest I watched this on my phone on a plane ride and I don't fucking know anything that happened. I think it was good?? I think it made sense??? I really wanted to fall asleep but I really wanted to watch the movie. It felt like it was simultaneously 4 hours long and 30 minutes. I think I should probably watch it again. I don't know why I chose to watch it on a plane. But hey, I did!

watching this shit while half awake on a dark plane felt like i was in another fucking dimension. what the hell happened

03/08 - Fortnite Chapter 5: Season 1

Hey Fortnite, I play that game! Sometimes.

I've been pretty consistently "playing" Fortnite since Chapter 2: Season 5, and I do really like the game. I love the gameplay, I love all the stupid crossovers, I loved the story, it was just a really fun time!

Well, up until like half way through Chapter 3 at least. The problem with Fortnite is that, no matter what, in the end of the day, it's still owned by Epic Games, and that means at some point, shits gonna get sloppy. I won't go over my whole history with how I feel Fortnites been on a decline since Chapter 3, but I can at least say i was pretty fucking checked out most of Chapter 4. I really didn't like it.

So, coming back on for Chapter 5? Oh shit this game is actually fun I forgot. Played a shit ton that season, actually finished the main battle pass for once, had so much fun with all the new things they added, it really feels like Fortnites back.

Oh... and there's that LEGO mode... and that rockband mode... and there's racing I guess... I didn't really touch them much but they're neat... They were pushing those modes pretty hard, I hope this isn't a sign of something to come... I'm sure they'll keep up the momentum for the next season right? Battle Royale is totally back, right?

i ended up staying up till like the last day grinding in creative to get this emote. im so glad i can make perfect cell do the bird is the word dance now.

03/12 - King of Crusher

I beat this game over on my twitch, you can catch me live playing obscure games every so often each month!! Check it out and give me money! I said mostly everything I wanted to say about it on stream, but this game was just a really fascinating little art project that was both really frustrating and really funny to play. I really wanna find more little gems like this to play, it's so ODD but fun.

03/15 - Animal Crossing (Movie)

Watched this movie as apart of a movie night with my groupchat and it was adorables so cutes! I don't think there's really anything I COULD say about this movie, but it does really make me wish Nintendo was more willing to make more stuff like it. Just a really well animated fun anime movie that's not trying to be this big thing.

the ending caught me completely off fucking guard though

03/17 - Unpacking

Similar to Animal Crossing, I don't really have a lot to say about this game besides so cutes! The story told through the environment was super adorable and I really do think back to this game a lot in a very emotional way.

That being said, I wish it was a tad longer for how expensive it was, as great as the art was lol

If you can find it on sale though, go play it!!

i was playing with my girlfriend and we ended up interpreting the main character as really hating her boyfriend. my fucking Pig of a husband wont let me put my posters on the wall. my Pigly husband. i need to Kill my Meat Pig of a Husband.

03/17 - Pizza Tower (The Noise Update)

In complete tonal contrast to Unpacking, I beat the Noise Update in Pizza Tower right after. It was, like Pizza Tower, really good, but not without its flaws.

In the time since I've played Pizza Tower, I've reflected a lot on what I love about the game and what I honestly don't care much for. I've been playing demos since the very first public one, and I've loved watching it evolve, but if there's one bit of context I've gotten that shapes how I look at the game, it's that the games creator has a really big issue with having a lot of ideas for stuff, and not really thinking about how they fit in together.

Pizza Tower is like, a REALLY good game, don't get me wrong. The movement is borderline perfect, the level design is consistently fun and flows well, the graphics are unmatched in how expressive they are, the music is some of my fave from the entire medium, but if there's one thing really holding back Pizza Tower it's that lack of focus, and I think you can boil that down to the core game design of levels.

Pizza Tower is easy to compare to Wario Land, given that's its primary inspiration, but I think it's much more akin to Sonic, which is also a major inspiration for it. The problem is, it definitely tries to apply Wario Lands brand of "wario can be anything" to sonics "levels can be anything". Sonic levels are all about super quick flashy levels you can blast through, each one having a gimmick unique to the level that you learn, master, and then use throughout the multiple zones. On the other end, Wario Land presents you with these large winding interior-like levels that you slowly (or somewhat quickly in the case of entries like WL4), navigate and solve puzzles throughout for treasure, with your main solution typically landing on how Wario himself can be controlled using various gimmicks unique to him. Your presented a gimmick, and then you remember that gimmick for the future so you can use it to solve a future puzzle. In many ways, these two games can almost feel like the opposite kind of game, only linked by being sidescrolling platformers where you can bust through walls. Pizza Tower, despite that, tries to be both, and in many ways succeeds, but cant avoid the problems that inherently comes with trying to be these two very polar ends.

Basically, I just feel theres a lot of really forgettable levels and an overall problem with gimmicks getting absolutely no chance to be explored so you can never really be rewarded in basic play for mastering a gimmick, other then replaying a level multiple times. I think less gimmicks but more places to use the same ones would be really great.

Talking about the Noise update specifically, it was just a fun retake on the main game, and made for a fun replay after not playing Pizza Tower for about a year since release. I find it really fascinating how even after changing how the entire game controls, the levels still work with minimal changes. I'm looking forward to see if they decide to change it any more in the future, and I hope whatever comes after Pizza Tower can be a much more focused experience.

03/17 - Hiveswap Act 1 (Replay)

See; Homestuck Reread. Been here a billion times, here to show my girl this time. I'll probably scream about this one later. <3

03/20 - Rescue Shot

See; King of Crusher. Another stream game! This one I liked even more, though I Really wish I had a lightgun (or could fix the mouse controls on my emulator). Incredibly adorable game with insanely good music, check out the VOD if your interested!

03/25 - Super Mario Bros. (1993)

I feel like in recent time, people have been hyping up this movie as like, secretly a really good film that people only hate because it's not a Mario movie. I'll be real, after watching it for the first time, I don't see it at all, I think this is just an incredibly funny bad movie.

Beyond not being Mario, which really doesn't matter at all, it kind of just felt like a fever dream of a script. Things kept HAPPENING there wasn't a single second to break I felt like I was in a nightmare hell dimension being blasted with insane plot beats and I couldn't keep track of anything. Without the Mario branding this would be like 10x LESS comprehensible, but good lord.

Maybe this is like, an arthouse film, and I need to watch it 12 more times and be high at least half those times, but idk I think it might actually be bad guys. Big Bertha a baddie though.

03/29 - The Croods

Another movie night with friends, we got the PRIVILEGE of watching The Croods. I saw it once when I was a kid, but I didn't really remember anything about it other then there was a character named Grug.

I now realize that the reason I remember this character is because this movie literally lied and he's the main character. It really tries to set up that the conventionally attractive main teenage girl is the protagonist but no this movie is 100% about Grug and it's so fucking Particular. Why pretend it's not about him when he becomes our sole point of view for half the film? Why pretend its about the teenage girl when she basically doesn't have any dialogue for the last 25% of the movie? What is this movie trying to say, politically? This movies a thinker. I think its a bigger thinker then 2001, honestly.

04/12 - Police Story

The first Jackie Chan movie I've ever seen and damn what a fucking good one to start with. Insanely entertaining, incredibly funny, and just a really great film! I don't think I have much else to say about it other then gush about each and every scene and how well made it is, but it really makes me wish we could get movies like this more. Just a practical effect wonderland where the main guy is just having fun with people on set. It's great.

hes kind of a babygirl

04/13 - Con Air

Actually the first time I've seen this movie, surprisingly, given my attachment to the media that has essentially co-opted this film. It wasn't good, like at all, but it was very very entertaining with friends. I didn't expect it to get so much into like, weird racism stuff?? Characters just keep appearing and getting named it's so fucking weird. What was the deal with Steve Buscemi's character, I feel like scenes were cut or something. Nick Cage was incredibly funny as the lead. It's the thing you watch with friends on 4/13, what else can I say.

why did he do this

04/19 - The Princess Bride

Honestly, I thought this one was a rewatch when we put it on in the GC, but I think I just remembered watching clips of it or seeing half of it on TV as a kid, so I'll just consider this a first time watch. It's really good! Just a fun simple movie full of extremely witty jokes. It's kind of like watching a Simpsons episode for the first time and getting to a part where they say something and you go "oh i've heard this quoted like a fucking million times, i get it now". If you haven't seen this movie, whattarya doin, go watch it!

i feel like were it not for andre being basically irreplaceable we would have a netflix reboot about these three right now. maybe that does exist already.

04/21 - PokeRogue

Half this thread is Pokemon and as I already said, I'm a roguelike freak. This game is like crack for me. That being said it's just alright. I think I'll be willing to judge it more once it's more finished and not just Pokemon in the most barebones form imaginable, coding wise. It's the basis for an extremely addicting game, and I plan on sinking even more hours into it soon. Extra points for using PMD music as well <3

im only just now finding out the rival is gendered. hey cunts let me play as a girl and get the girl rival or you hate me ok?

04/22 - The Mask (2023)

Now you may be wondering, The Mask? The movie from ten TRILLION years ago staring the homunculi known only as Jim Carrey? You'd be a fool to assume this. I am talking instead about Connor O' Malley's current best work, THAT The Mask.

There's not much I want to say about it, because I just think it's good, but if there's one thing I can say it's that Joker (2019) should be fucking embarrassed in how hard it was stood up by this short film.

Content warning for pretty heavy themes and a lot of crass jokes.

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04/23 - Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) & Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022) (Rewatch)

In preparation for the Knuckles show (which I still haven't finished), I decided it'd be nice to rewatch these two films for the first time. I haven't seen the first one since I watched it for the first time before Sonic 2, and I haven't seen Sonic 2 since I saw it at an early screening. What do I think of them now in retrospect?

Yeah, not very good films. Very fun! But damn, yea wow, I think with enough time to look back on them, there's a lot I really don't care for in them, and I'm not just talking about the human scenes.

I've been having a lot of conversations about adaptations lately, so I'll mostly summarize my thoughts here. In making an adaptation, your one mission in my eyes is maintaining what made the original loved. Not good, because that's not really a quantifiable thing. Not faithfully, because I feel you can make a good adaptation without being faithful. All you need to truly keep is the Reason people came to that piece of media originally, in my eyes. Whether that means going as hard as you can with something like The Last of Us, which essentially 1 to 1 recreates an entire video game, or be much more out there like with One Piece (Netflix), which essentially tells the same story but with wildly different circumstance and aesthetic.

The Sonic movies, in my eyes, simply don't capture that. In the first movie alone, Sonic and Eggman are essentially our only ties to the games, which is fine as long as they can nail them right, right? And, as many before me have really pointed out, no they don't really at all. Sonic isn't really like Sonic at all, he's a much younger, innocent, and hyperactive "version" of the character, and I say version in quotations because I don't really feel like with those adjectives removed he'd be all that similar to Sonic still. This is basically a new character, and that's fine, but I'd be hard pressed to say it captures what brought people to Sonic. Similarly, Eggman is very much not really similar to any iteration to Eggman at all (except maybe AoSTH?) A lot of people love Jim Carrey Eggman, and I totally get why, but man he really has never clicked with me. I think I like canon Eggman too much to let go, it's over for me.

But I'm sure anyone who's been around Sonic long enough has heard a trillion complaints about the first movie. In rewatching the second movie, I found that it moved way faster then I remembered, and just had way less.. character? Tails is so incredibly shoehorned in, which is a common complaint, but it really felt like at times Sonic was too?

In Sonic games, Sonic isn't exactly a character we put ourselves in the shoes of. Sonic is like this cool older brother we're just along with for the ride. If anything we insert ourselves (as kids) in Tails' shoes. Sonic doesn't really have an internal monologue, nor does he really tend to need a big shonen arc to overcome in his games. He's very much this vessel to explore other characters, to see how people respond to his brash and cocky personality. In that way, Sonic works really well, but can struggle really hard when he's placed all alone. He needs people to not only bounce off of, but to do the emotional side of the story in his stead. With the Sonic movies, we get this very very diffrent form of Sonic being put into this scenarios the canon Sonic wouldn't typiclaly find himself in, and see how he acts. It can work for original stories, because it's basically an original character, but that's the struggle with Sonic 2, and I worry Sonic 3 as well. They aren't fully original stories. Sonic 2 is a loose adaptation of Sonic 3 in most ways, with Knuckles being the true second character, and Tails being mostly to the side. Knuckles acts basically perfectly, like yea that's Knuckles, no notes there outside of maybe not taking his heritage seriously enough, but that's him. So how do you write this movie sonic into this adaptation with a Knuckles whos playing it basically straight like the games? Well... I mean, you kind of just... You, don't, really? Sonic is really just There sometimes, to say quips and to move the story forward. With exception to the scene where he's having a feeling jam with Knux, which I like, Sonic is very much Just There, and it feels really odd. In the games, this works because of his aforementioned status as this guy your along with for the ride, a dude whos too cool to even be the protagonist, but Sonic Movie Sonic IS the protagonist. He's meek and still learning and is far from the asshole we know in the games and comics, but implanted into a games storyline, he just doesn't have much he can do. He can't be that too cool guy that let's his friends do the talking, because he's already been set up as this superhero esque main guy who needs to learn a lesson by the end of the film, or overcome some kind of arc. It's just all odd in retrospect, and I really wonder how they're gonna tackle it in Sonic 3, especially without all the characters that make Sonic Adventure 2s gears go.

i also couldnt stop staring at his teeth in the movie. i really dont like the teeth idk why im just now noticing them.

04/25 - Pseudoregalia

Knocked this game off my backlog and I'm really happy I did! Beat the game with all the time trials done and I really do love it. I want to call it the perfect length, but really I think it was just a bit too short and I hope we can get more content in the future, I'm definitely itching for more levels and maybe even more time trials.

I can't think of much else to say about the game. I don't think I picked up on the story much at all, I'll probably have to ask my girlfriend about it sometime, but it's not exactly a big part of the game. The music was absolutely fantastic, and I adore all of the costumes for the main character. I like her design, for many obvious reasons.

For further criticism besides length though, combat feels pretty useless. There's really no point in the game where I ever feel like I have to or even SHOULD fight, and the final boss ends up losing a lot of impact because of it. Enemies just become a hazard in navigating the world in a way that isn't particularly fun. Similarly, there were a few upgrades that had maybe one use ever and I don't even know why they're there. I think this game could benefit a lot from playing even harder into it's all too obvious inspirations and just getting a bunch of RPG mechanics and more RPG inspired elements in here. Give me Symphony of the Bunny-Cat-Goatgirl, full on.

I also watched madagascar 2 with friends, but i don't even feel like counting it. watch this fucked up compressed video instead.

THAT'S IT FOR Q1 2024!! I'm really trying to look at a lot this year, and I hope to have EVEN MORE TO TALK ABOUT in 4 months! maybe ill do it even earlier because damn this was a fucking lot to write. If you read this far thank you, I'll be sending you a giant mettalic muscular butler sir in the mail as thanks.

#bunny post #2024 media thread #Youtube

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derseprinceoftbd · 7 months

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In honor of the new Upd8, here's the updated version of my Personal Homestuck Explainer.

An explainer for Homestuck, typed up on a Google doc for Reddit, and now transplanted onto Tumblr, and too long to fit in a single reddit comment. Most explainers I've seen utterly fail to get the tone of the series across, thus not answering the main question I see: "what is Homestuck *and why is it like this*". Why does it evoke the reactions it does? Why are so many things considered a reference? Who is Vriska? (I can't actually explain that one in under 3000 words, it turns out.) But, here's a briefer briefer (heh) on the subject of "What the actual fuck is Homestuck":

Andrew Hussie, a person (now going by any pronouns) then known for various obscure things around the net, made an interactive reader-driven comic-type-thing called Jailbreak where he would draw panels demonstrating the events of the story as dictated by other posters in the thread, putting his favored suggestions in the narration and responding in kind. The happenings and variables were influenced by his own strange brand of humor and set of fascinations, such as rap, horses, clowns, and H!rry P!tter as a cultural presence. He would eventually compile this, along with the unfinished followup, Bard Quest, on its own website.

The third installment of the so-called MS Paint Adventures, Problem Sleuth, was a massive step up in production value, featuring impressive art and output speed as well as evolutions such as some pages being flashing gifs. This sort of thing was considered to be one of the best demonstrations of the potential of the internet. It ran for 1674 pages over the course of about a year.

Homestuck was the followup to that, running 8123 pages from April 13th 2009-2016 with numerous hiatuses in the latter half of that time. It featured such advancements as videos with sound, small WASD-controlled computer games on various pages, and most significantly, actual conversations between characters, semi-hidden behind clickable boxes at the bottom of some pages, allowing them to become three-dimensional and truly sympathetic. Hussie, it would soon be revealed, was heavily skilled at writing compelling and unique character voices and dialogue writing in general.

Homestuck was definitely the most complex MPSA, with a grand overarching plot being integrated into the results of the actions of the readers. The plot revolved around an in-universe game called SBURB with the power to influence reality, sort of a Jumanji with time-travel mechanics that would soon be revealed to be the centerpiece of reality itself, destroying the home planets of its players to motivate them to enter the world of the game and fulfill an unknown grand purpose, complete with millions of fully sentient NPCs. (Homestuck is, technically, an isekai.)

Homestuck has been described as "a story that's also a puzzle", and this lens has gained authorial approval; events are often told anachronistically, as a kitchen sink of high-concept ideas are explored by a man who sometimes wants to show off his semi-deconstructive version of a classic sci-fi/fantasy trope, sometimes wants to infuriate readers through anticlimaxes and misdirections, and sometimes wants to just go off on a tangent about a random movie from his childhood that somehow soon becomes integral to the plot in an absurdly esoteric fashion.

Eventually the suggestions from readers became so numerous and difficult that the suggestion boxes were closed near the end of the first year, leading to less meandering from Act 4 onwards, but the influence of the audience remained; one easy example is a character only seen from the top half initially being theorized on the official forums as using a wheelchair, a fact which would not only become Canon, but highly relevant.

The early MSPAs curated an audience through programming humor and 80s-90s film references as filtered through the styles of Terry Pratchett, Mark Twain, and the Something Awful forums, but the audience for Homestuck, due to the nature of the characters, was markedly different, especially after the Trolls showed up.

You've probably seen them.

The Trolls, initially presented as some extremely odd and bothersome fellows on the internet, were soon shown to be a race of grey-skinned, orange-horned aliens. Trolls possessed multicolored blood in both organized castes and clear deviations, psychic abilities, unique typing styles, insectoid traits as opposed to hominid, near-universal bisexuality with the sole known exception being Sapphic, and a complex romantic system with its own symbols, comically vague-yet-comprehensive reproductive system, and of course, relationship dynamics.

I cannot express how perfect the Trolls were in terms of catching on. Tumblr loved these fuckers and it's not at all hard to see why.

It's also worth noting that this wasn't the only market-perfect part of Homestuck; Classpecting, the equivalent of Hogwarts Houses, featured a 144/168/288/336/384(depending on who you ask and what they count)-strong grid system of human personality traits that not only seemed eerily accurate as a personality mapper, but corresponded to what elemental powers one received in the game of SBURB.

So... yeah. Homestuck was an incredibly complex and engaging work, driven by a single incredibly talented and flawed creative voice, which was perfectly made to attract a massive, unabashedly bizarre/proudly cringe, and notably largely queer fanbase across a younger internet; you may well be aware of incidents such as cosplay failures and inappropriate recreations of Troll culture. The style of presentation, art, and character writing was instantly recognizable and relatively easy to imitate, leading to fanfiction and even fanmade adventures galore, most of the latter hosted on MSPFA.com.

The main site for Homestuck is broken now-it's recommended that new readers download the [Unofficial Homestuck Collection](https://bambosh.dev/unofficial-homestuck-collection/), and starting with Problem Sleuth to ease into the format and writing is a pretty popular choice. The ending is also considered generally quite poor in a number of ways, particularly regarding unfollowed foreshadowing and blatant abandonment of character arcs, with some fans even [making](https://friendlybatteringram.tumblr.com/tagged/altstuck) their own [works](https://mspfa.com/?s=44153&p=1) as [substitutions](http://mspfa.com/?s=12003&p=1). You can find The Homestuck Epilogues (a sequel novel) on the official site, and Homestuck^2 Beyond Canon (a sequel webcomic after the Epilogues) on its own website, but neither of these are very well liked by fans (at all). YouTube also has several dubs of the comic; by far the largest and most popular is [Voxus](https://youtube.com/@Voxus), which has unfortunately slowed to a crawl at around the 65% mark.

Content warnings for Homestuck include: blood, violence including decapitation, clowns, brainwashing/mental possession, dicks-out furry bara art in the background of like ten pages, brief black-and-white nudity, swearing, the R-slur, a joke about an acronym organically forming the F-slur, child abuse, discussed child abuse and homophobia, mocking of the disabled (as an unsympathetic action), cartoonish levels of sexism (as an unsympathetic action), statements that an antagonist is analogous to Hitler, mocking of otherkin, a minor character being a racial stereotype of Japanese people (Damara), a somewhat major character being a stereotype of Black people (Meenah), minor characters being stereotypes of disabled people (Meulin and Mituna), a controversial and prominent depiction of blindness, eye trauma, underage alcoholism, written depections of noncon facilitated by mind control (as an unsympathetic action), sexual assult (an unwanted kiss, as an unsympathetic action), jokes about pedophilia, and child grooming (textually 100% non-sexual, but sexually-coded).

Also: when I said the Trolls type weird, I wasn't kidding. Every character gets at least one color for their speech text, plus a pattern for how they type, generally worse for the Trolls, ranging from "no caps" to "British" to "drunk" to "ebonics" to "aLtErNaTiNg" to WH4T3V3R TH3 FUCK K1ND OF L33TSP34K BS T3R3Z1 1S DO1NG. So that's worth a warning.

And that's as abridged as you can get when summing up Homestuck.

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understandableparadox · 6 months

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Tamiss Eriism

They're my trollsona! Here's the bio I used for art fight:

Your name is TAMISS ERIISM.

Flowing through your veins is good thick VIOLET blood. While you don't care much for the hemospectrum overall, you still find yourself admiring the way it looks. You think it is VERY PRETTY, you love living underwater, and the perks it gives you are TRULY ENVIABLE.

Perhaps connected to your high status within the hemospectrum is your MASSIVE GOD COMPLEX. In your opinion, you might be the best person on the entire planet, maybe even better than THE CONDESCE HERSELF. Though you probably wouldn't say that to her face. You'll prove your great power one day by overthrowing her so everyone will respect you for your TRUE POWER. Though that's not making very much headway. Maybe some day though, with your SICKLE in hand, you'll finally prove yourself.

You are ever so slightly obsessed with CULINARY and CRYPTOGRAPHICAL HISTORY. You are in fact quite fond of most HISTORIES, and take an interest in many forms of the PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE. You even model many aspects of yourself after HEROES you saw in your books. One, a cobalt blood, gave you a great appreciation of SPIDERS AND ALL SORTS OF INSECTS, though your lifestyle gives you hardly any opportunity to view any for real. There was another from the same place on the hemospectrum as you who you also found REALLY COOL. He inspired much of your personality such as your INTEREST IN DRAMA, ROMANTIC NATURE, and AMAZING HAIR STRIPE. Sometimes you even feel like you can HEAR THEIR VOICES but that's probably normal. Despite how TOTALLY COOL you are, people hardly tend to notice you. Once your plans are complete though, that WON'T HAPPEN ANYMORE.

You also like READING TOMES OF KNOWLEDGE. Though most of the knowledge is either on BEING A HUGE LESBIAN or MATH YOU DO NOT QUITE UNDERSTAND. Or communism. It is quite a ball though.

Your trolltag is atlanteanAscension and you speak iin a wway remiiniiscent 8f y8ur favv8riite her8es.

Lollie Gravez

Your name is LOLLIE GRAVEZ and you use ne/nem/nir, sh3/h3r/h3rz and h3/h1m/h1z. You are a SCENE KID first and foremost, and a troll second.

You love COMICS, CARTOONS, and SHIPPING, and listen to way too much ALTERNATIVE MUSIC. You send a lot of your spare time SEWING CLOTHES, both for yourself and your PLETHORA OF PLUSH FRIENDS. You spend way too much money on VIDEO GAMES, that you never get around to playing. When you aren’t hiding in your room away from the world, you love watching shows with your friends, then making self inserts for all your friends. Your squad loves the troll anime SUGIO QUEST FOR KOKORO, despite it being outlawed for rebel imagery.

#homestuck #polls #tumblr polls #tournament polls

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cyber-corp · 10 months

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A "summary" of Homestuck Act 5: Act 2

by someone who is starting to miss when it was just about getting the SBURB beta from your dad

We can no longer start nice and simple. This is the beefiest act of Homestuck thus far, so it would practically be impossible to summarise it into a singular Tumblr post.

So here are a list of highlights/things that stuck out to me!

This act is mainly about the trolls and humans working together ('working' is a very loose term) in order to stop Jack Noir (who fused with Jade's dog Bec to become Bec Noir, a ultrapowered freak). Karkat has his first interaction with John from his perspective where he screeches insults at him, to which John responds "oh yoooo karkat! what's happenin dawg?"

Speaking of John, he (and I think Rose, not completely sure) manages to reach god tier, the highest tier in the game! Woo-hoo!

Dave isn't so lucky however, as his doomed self is killed by his Alpha Timeline self (do not question this. carry on)

Rose goes "grimdark" with some help from a certain Doc Scratch, who also tells her about summoning his master Lord English, and exactly what the Scratch is, which is a mechanism that can replace an unwinnable session with a new, winnable one.

Vriska kills Tavros (who then comes back, doesn't revive her and therefore making her ascend to godtier), Sollux and Eridan duel with a sick animation (where Sollux gets knocked out and lo2e2 hi2 annoyinng li22p), Gamzee goes haywire from an Insane Clown Posse video, and then Kanaya chainsaws Eridan. Truly the best of friends.

I cannot talk about Cascade because that is another can of worms that I wish not to get into. I think the Scratch happens.

Homestuck is a very unique piece of media. You can experience it fully, but it is impossible to talk about at length. That being said, I am very interested to see what happens in the next act. Hopefully something good.

Hopefully.

#homestuck #sollux #john egbert #rose lalonde #dave strider #lord english #doc scratch #vriska #tavros #gamzee #kanaya #eridan #karkat #gecko boy #gecko boy reads homestuck #i don't think i should do these summaries #for the sake of my sanity

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aquariumgirls · 10 months

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vei lorepost. (tldr at the end before the cat picture. also this is a huge vent about how being on the internet so young (i was seven) damaged me as a person in a way that i fear may never be truly fixable and also i hate myself)

when i was young (like seven. i was on the internet too young) it was the ship and let ship/dont like dont read era of the internet. being a small child with autism i wanted to consume as much content related to the things i liked as possible, and ended up stumbling upon spaces i should not have been in nor been able to access at my age.

most of them were pertaining to things that i know understand are problematic. it damaged me fundamentally, as i only exited those spaces and realized all the things that i thought were normal were wrong, when i was 13 years old. it was traumatizing for me. it desensitized me to things that i should not be desensitized to. things that are disgusting to me now. and it fucking sucks when people say that fiction doesn't affect reality, because it absolutely fucking does. i am literal proof of that.

when i was eleven, i got my friend into undertale. it was the early days of the fandom, and i liked it because i had watched a youtuber play the demo of the game a few years prior. certain ships were popular. because i was eleven, i thought certain things were normal, and i was in nsfw spaces despite being so young, because it was practically everywhere.

when my friend got into it, she also got into one of the most popular problematic ships. she gave me a nickname pertaining to it, and despite me not knowing why, i was ashamed and embarrassed when she would call me that.

i (obviously) am not pr*ship. i am not neutral, either. i resent pr*shippers because people like them normalized things for me and exposed me to things that i should not have seen, and that should not have been normalized. i still get intrusive thoughts about it. i still feel ashamed of who i used to be. i still feel disgusted with myself when i have said intrusive thoughts. i am in therapy, and it took me a while to realize that it was traumatizing. i didn't just see gross fictional content, i saw real gore, shock videos that made me nauseous, videos from depraved people that i watched on a dare, among other things.

my first anime was hetalia, which im very much NOT proud of. you can imagine the shit i saw in 2011/2012/2013. i also had homestuck as a special interest until i was around sixteen, and by then i had been actively trying to avoid it for about a year.

basically: fiction affects reality and i am legitimately traumatized because of it. to be real i havent told anyone this. im afraid of being judged. i dont want people to think im like the people who exposed me to traumatizing and damaging content when i was little. these things make me physically nauseous with shame. you obviously dont have to read this post because its long as hell but i know that some people my age have probably had similar experiences. i dont call myself an anti anymore because im nineteen years old, but i deeply DEEPLY resent and hate pr*shippers. i also know that some of them are coping in unhealthy ways. but it doesn't change the fact that they exposed me to things i shouldnt have seen when i was a young, impressionable child, and it doesn't change the fact that they're still doing it now.

i am in therapy. i avoid and block every pr*shipper i see and religiously scour blogs to make SURE they aren't one. anytime a blog i like gets exposed for being one in secret, i feel sick.

i was in those damaging spaces longer than ive been out of them and sometimes i think that ill be damaged like this forever. ive done things im not proud of. things that make me so ashamed that i throw up. sometimes i wish i could wipe my memory from up until i was 13. i dont think ill keep this post up very long because frankly i dont want people to think im some sort of freak or whatever, but ive been thinking about this recently and i need to say it to SOMEONE before i go fucking crazy.

tldr: i was in pr*ship spaces until i figured out that shit was wrong and by then i was already 13 (in eighth grade) and by then the damage was already done and now im left with trauma, intrusive thoughts that make me physically nauseous, and a fear that im actually secretly like the people who exposed me to those traumatizing things.

cat photo to thank you for reading.

#vent #god. its just so fucked up. i wish i could change the past but what the fuck ever i guess

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marisoft-paint-adventures · 1 year

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Pgs. 70-84

There is also a CAN OF PEANUTS on the desk. Ha ha, oh DAD. You won't be falling for THAT one again any time soon. A severe peanut allergy is a terrible affliction to cope with.

most important Egbert fact, commit this to memory now.

OH SHIT IT’S “PLAY A HAUNTING PIANO REFRAIN”-

youtube

listening to Showtime is like a ritualistic tradition to me, man oh fucking man does it still hit to this day. there is no greater joy that popping open this comic again and hearing these notes once more. I would call this The Homestuck Song but there’s a million of equally iconic tracks and some of them are literally called the main theme of Homestuck so I’ll just say that this is The Act 1 Song.

yes I’m considering it over Suburban Countdown, it’s a good song but this just fucking encompasses everything.

little boy John really just sat down while hunting for Sburb just to go:

also the Jonkler is here and I have no idea why but it amuses me.

now I just gotta let the next Flash play out wholesale, it needs this.

youtube

The streets are empty. Wind skims the voids keeping neighbors apart, as if grazing the hollow of a cut reed, or say, a plundered mailbox. A familiar note is produced. It's the one Desolation plays to keep its instrument in tune. It is your thirteenth birthday, and as with all twelve preceding it, something feels missing from your life. The game presently eluding you is only the latest sleight of hand in the repertoire of an unseen riddler, one to engender a sense not of mirth, but of lack. His coarse schemes are those less of a prankster than a common pickpocket. His riddle is Absence itself. It is a mystery dispersing altogether, like the moon's faint reflection, with even one pebble of inquiry dropped in its black well. It is the most diabolical riddle of all. "Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones, as wind extinguishes candles and fans a fire." -Walt Whitman Yes, you are certain Walt Whitman said that. One hundred percent positive. You have a feeling it's going to be a long day.

this does not get old, never, in all of my years I can still sit down and listen to Windchime Foley rattle on forever. there’s something just completely alluring about this page as a whole, the sudden shift into these thoughtful prose in the narration, the droning ambience of wind, the unmelodic windchimes weakly singing, the slow pan showing the entirety of John’s neighborhood, the heavily iconographic sun, and that fucking title drop, everything here is good, I love Homestuck.

what really gets me about it nowadays is just that tiny bit of characterization you could gleam if you read way too much into it. these empty streets and houses with no life in them, the description of something feeling truly missing from John’s life, the sheer sense of hollowness in this entire town, it really makes you think about what John’s life was like before the game came in and turned everything on its head.

Rose pursues a passion for the grim and gothic while playing weird mind games with her mother, Dave lounges around a shithole apartment eating takeout and playing video games at the same all while his brother trains him to become an epic ninja through the art of mad beatdowns, Jade faffs about on an island without a care in the world.

what does John do?

the idea of an isolationist John is often spurred as a reaction and coping mechanism from the trauma of the entirety of Sburb, after experiencing essentially a sensual and emotional overload watching everything and everyone die multiple times over in a universal reproduction system. not much attention is given to the thought of these tendencies of seclusion manifesting beforehand.

because in a quiet house owned by an idealized American father figure situated in a neighborhood that feels utterly lifeless despite its colorful appearance, what does John have outside of his small group of internet friends?

it’s easy to throw this kind of thought process around for any of the kids in the comic, the writing has them acknowledge no one but themselves when it comes to close relationships, as if everyone else on Earth basically didn’t exist.

but it feels way more apparent in John’s case, because it really feels like this kid pretty much has nothing interesting going on in his life until the launch of Sburb.

a lot of this can be attributed to John simply being more of a blank slate considering he’s the protagonist, but it’s just a thought.

oh and after this introspection someone commands John to shit in the mailbox and it’s punctuated with a gif that I swear is animated like a modern day Vine boom shitpost.

never change, Homestuck.

#homestuck liveblog #hs liveblog #hs reread #liveblog #reread #live read #liveread #homestuck #hs1 #hs #home22tuck #Act 1 #Flash #john egbert #june egbert #Beta Kids

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probablystupid · 8 days

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HELLO EVERYBODY LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT HOMESTUCK-

Four kids, best friends who have known eachother online for years, decide to start a new and still in Beta multi-player game called SBURB. It all starts with our main character John, who gets his package on his birthday. Little did these four freshly 13 year olds know that this game would end the world as soon as they entered. Now the mission is to complete the game and win the prize: a new world for them to shape. Along the way they meet some other players from another world, aliens called Trolls. And there's a few deadly glitches to be bugged out....

The first act is a lot of character introduction and buildup, aswell as early art style as it was being worked on by only one dude for a while. Impatient people don't get past the beginning unfortunately, but its absolutely worth the read, even the beginning! Quality jokes

Homestuck, A History;

Andrew Hussie, a person (now going by any pronouns) then known for various obscure things around the net, made an interactive reader-driven comic-type-thing called Jailbreak where he would draw panels demonstrating the events of the story as dictated by other posters in the thread, putting his favoured suggestions in the narration and responding in kind. The happenings and variables were influenced by his own strange brand of humor and set of fascinations, such as rap, the Starsky and Hutch movie and the cast thereof, horses, clowns, and H!rry P!tter as a cultural presence. He would eventually compile this, along with the unfinished followup, Bard Quest, on its own website.

Homestuck was the followup to that, running 8123 pages from April 13th 2009-2016 with numerous hiatuses in the latter half of that time. It featured such advancements as colored panels as default, videos with sound, small WASD-controlled computer games on various pages, and most importantly, actual conversations between characters, allowing them to become three-dimensional and truly sympathetic. (Hussie, it would soon be revealed, was heavily skilled at writing compelling and unique character voices and dialogue writing in general.)

Homestuck was definitely the most complex MPSA, with a grand overarching plot being integrated into the results of the actions of the readers. The plot revolved around an in-universe game called SBURB with the power to influence reality, sort of a Jumanji with time-travel mechanics that would soon be revealed to be the centerpiece of reality itself, a program that destroys the home planets of its players to motivate them to enter the world of the game and fulfill an unknown grand purpose, complete with millions of fully sentient NPCs.

Homestuck has been described as "a story that's also a puzzle", and this lens has gained authorial approval. This is the sort of story where the Author appears as a character to explain things to the audience, another character ends up changing the color of the site to his own scheme and narrating in his own voice, and the Author bursts through a literal fourth wall into the world of the story, hunts him down, and beats him with a broom. This is the sort of story where one specific person has killed another three times across multiple iterations of both themselves and the universe, and three of the killee are alive at the end, despite all of them being versions that were killed by the killer, who himself has one alive at the end, and both of those people have four-letter names, the first two letters of which are the same.

Eventually the suggestions from readers became so numerous and difficult that the suggestion boxes were closed near the end of the first year, but their influence carried on; one easy example is a character only seen from the top half initially being theorized on the official forums as using a wheelchair, a fact which would not only become Canon, but highly relevant.

The early MSPAs curated an audience through programming humor and 80s-90s film references as filtered through the styles of Terry Pratchett, Mark Twain, and Something Awful, but the audience for Homestuck, due to the nature of the characters, was markedly different, especially after the Trolls showed up.

You've probably seen them.

The Trolls, initially presented as some extremely odd and bothersome fellows on the internet, were soon shown to be a race of grey-skinned, orange-horned aliens that had undergone a SBURB Session that they claimed had been influenced by the lead human characters. Trolls possessed multicolored blood in both organized castes and clear deviations, psychic abilities, unique typing styles, incectoid traits as opposed to hominid, and near-univeral bisexuality.

I cannot express how perfect the Trolls were in terms of catching on. Tumblr loved these fuckers and it's not at all hard to see why.

So... yeah. Homestuck was an incredibly complex and engaging work in both plot and presentation, driven by a single incredibly talented and flawed creative voice above all, and which was perfectly made to attract a massive, unabashedly bizarre/proudly cringe, and notably largely queer fanbase across a younger internet. The style of presentation, art, and character writing was instantly recognizable and relatively easy to imitate, leading to fanfiction and even fanmade adventures galore, most of the latter hosted on MSPFA.com.

The main site for Homestuck is broken now-it's recommended that new readers download the Unofficial Homestuck Collection, and starting with Problem Sleuth to ease into the format and writing is a pretty popular choice. The ending is also considered generally quite poor in a number of ways, particularly regarding unfollowed forshadowing and blatant abandonment of character arcs, with some fans even making their own works as substitutions. Few speak of the epilogues. Fewer still speak of the sequel.

Content warnings for Homestuck include: blood, clowns, dicks-out furry art in the background of like ten pages, brief black-and-white nudity, swearing, the R-slur, a joke about an acronym organically forming the F-slur, child abuse, discussed child abuse and homophobia, mocking of the disabled (as an unsympathetic action), cartoonish levels of sexism (as an unsympathetic action), mocking of otherkin, minor characters being racial stereotypes of Black (Meenah) and Japanese (Damara) people, minor characters being stereotypes of disabled people (Meulin and Mituna), a controversial and prominent depiction of blindness, underage alcoholism, written depections of noncon (as an unsympathetic action), jokes about pedophilia, and child grooming (textually 100% non-sexual, but sexually-coded).

And that's as abridged as you can get when summing up Homestuck.

#homestuck #karkat vantas #explained #lefttumblrandsworetonevercomebackbutheyhereiamgoinginsanebecauseofthiswebcomicthanksandrew

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deathbyautopilot · 1 year

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We Control the Narrative - On Website Eugenics, Homestuck, and Your Problematic Favs

Written by Sophia 🌀

I entered the digital realm at about 10 years old, just barely witnessing the shift from the web to apps. I played Runescape on a dusty old desktop fitted with Windows XP and would browse open forums for games I would never play. But as much as I try to remember the endless dotcom online world, works like Kate Wagner’s 404 Page Not Found expose just how far gone that era truly is. For two decades now, the internet has been gradually appropriated by a powerful few, corralling an expansive and free userbase into an easily controlled market.

Kate Wagner effectively captures the fleeting memories of the open internet in a time before apps, and the "thrill of the hunt" that came from this open landscape. Any hyperlink you navigated through could have opened up into a new world; knowledge you could have never imagined, groundbreaking new media that nobody had seen before, or complete communities redefining what it meant to have a personal blog.

This quote pulled from internet historian Olia Lialina summarizes the landscape best:

“It was a web of sudden connections and personal links. Pages were built on the edge of tomorrow, full of hope for a faster connection and a more powerful computer.”

But in a post-iPhone world, the shift towards streamlined and prescribed apps neglected the web into obsolescence. Maximalism gave way to minimalism, UIs gradually deteriorated, urging you to download their new app or subtly manipulating the content that browsers would expose users to. As a 90s kid, Wagner watched this happen in the fall of MySpace, where personal archives were purged simply because it was not profitable to keep them around. For me, it was the fall of Adobe Flash, and the creative media that it took away.

Adobe Flash and I go way back, with my most memorable internet experience happening on April 6th 2016, when the multimedia webcomic Homestuck released the flash video [S] Collide as the conclusion to Act 6. Since its debut in 2009, Homestuck has become a legend of the early web; a rich and expansive digital narrative that the Atlantic dubbed “a story that could only be told online”. By blending IM chatlogs as dialogue, GIFs as panels, flash media, fully animated videos with complete soundtracks, and a one-of-a-kind narrative, this interactive site would draw in millions of users with each update and bridge the divide between forums, personal blogs, and social networks like Twitter.

When Adobe Flash went down in 2020, Viz Media (having recently acquired publishing rights) made little effort to preserve this 8000+ page time capsule. This prompted fans of the series to come together to compile the Unofficial Homestuck Collection, an optimized, offline version of the original site, even offering language filters to correct its less tasteful writing choices. This was an invaluable act, but it also represents a process of corporate neglect, and this ongoing cleansing of any media online that is deemed unworthy of preservation. Wagner compared this to a series of minor Libraries of Alexandria being burned to the ground, and rich personal narratives being buried beneath a controlled legacy of human history.

“The artifacts of internet life are personal—that is, not professionally or historically notable—and therefore worthless.”

Homestuck fans are split between those who recognize it as a postmodern masterpiece comparable to Ulysses, and those who would be happy to see it left in the rubble of the old web. I understand the desire to leave the unfavourable behind us, but accepting the latter narrative gives in to what Wagner called “Website Eugenics”; A process of devaluing the maximalist, often personalized and gaudy, or in some way flawed in favour of the minimalist, rigid professional class standards being set for the contemporary web. In the case of “dated” media, either cringey personal blogs from middle school or crass lowbrow humour, they will be posited as a damper on material history, when in fact it is deeply human.

The more that we accept a narrative of some remnants being of value, and others being a poor reflection of our popular culture, the more that we allow an oppressive power dynamic to play out. Internet historians, archivists, and cultural commentators like Kate Wagner are doing what they know combats this agenda; revel in the legacy of the early web, retain all that you can, and do it authentically.

#death by autopilot #kate wagner #404 page not found #homestuck #philosophy #lost media

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kayden-valcourt · 1 month

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🤘🏻Introduction!🤘🏻

Warning: Flashing/blinking gifs This is my introduction + rules for requests!

Sup, my name is Kayden and I am a guitarist, metalhead, programmer, Skater, and artist!

I am 16 years old plus a professional Gemini!!

If you wanna join me and my friends' server use the link below!

I mainly chill and draw all day, or sleep all day, or talk to people all day, or look at the wall all day, it truly just depends on the day man. I love talking to people too, so don't be shy to talk to me because I'm always looking for new people to talk to and be friends with!! also here is my Carrd https://bivh.carrd.co

I love to listen to music, if you can't tell. I am especially fans of nu metal, black metal, heavy metal, glam metal/hair bands, hard rock, alternative rock, punk rock, and classic rock! Iron Maiden, Korn, Metallica, Rob Zombie, Murderdolls, Nine Inch Nails, and Slipknot are my current favorites!

I also love to play my guitar, it's an Epiphone SG Special, cherry red color. I love to play and it's one of my few hobbies!

I'm super into learning about and collecting photos of my favorite bands/band members, I especially am into Joey Jordison as of right now. I have over 100 photos of him and I think my favorite pictures of him are ones taken during his time in Murderdolls.

I'm also an artist, more of a cartoonist. Digital art is my thing, I am shit when it comes to painting, sculpting, sewing, using charcoal, and anything else like that. Cartooning has been my thing since I was 12 and I plan to continue with it since I haven't stopped. I also have characters and write stories and lore for them, I plan to work on a comic when I get my art style down and have the time. I also do requests!! rules for requests:

Nothing 18+ (nudity and sexual) this includes any fetish or kink material, I probably won't draw heavy gore for requests just because it might make me a little uncomfortable to draw that for someone else, I also won't draw animals/pets/"feral" characters (I just don't have the skills for that yet).

But I can draw characters from a show, your ocs, honestly anything.

I have the right to decline/ignore your request, these are free and I do them on my own time, thank you!!!!

I also love playing video games, specifically Minecraft, Fallout 4, Skyrim, Gmod, and TF2. I also have Pesterquest + Hiveswap which I read sometimes.

I'm also in some fandoms, gee imagine that. I like Breaking Bad, a lot actually, I also like Homestuck (Pesterquest and the canon comic), Fallout 4, old Disney Movies (Aristocats, Lady and the Tramp, 101 Dalmatians, Bambi, etc), Suicide Squad, Evil, Beavis and Butthead, Rick and Morty, Family Guy, American Dad, Futurama, Bojack Horseman, Beastars, Q*bert, Disenchantment, and others. Sollux is literally me IRL, idk how some asshole stole my identity and turned it into a character but they did and somehow got away with it.

I'm always open to talk to new people plus make friend, I'm actually hella lonely and need better people in my life! Thanks for reading!!

#Kayden Valcourt #Introduction #looking for friends #discord server #public server #Meet me #guitarist #artist #cartoonist #digital artist #metalhead

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even-the-tiniest-bugs · 1 year

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To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Wandersong. The humor is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of video games most of the jokes will go over a typical viewer's head. There's also Miriam’s nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into her characterisation - her personal philosophy draws heavily from cartoon TV shows, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these jokes, to realize that they're not just funny- they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike Wandersong truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the humour in Miriam’s existencial catchphrase "ENOUGH WITH THE SINGING ALREADY!!!" which itself is a cryptic reference to Andrew Hussey’s classic webcomic Homestuck. I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Greg Lobanov's genius unfolds itself on their computer screens. What fools... how I pity them.

And yes by the way, I DO have a Wandersong tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the ladies' eyes only- And even they have to demonstrate that they're within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand.

#wandersong #copypasta

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jokest3r · 2 months

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Tagged by @g0giro ! Tyy, I hope these facts people find interesting

Three (+1) Facts About Me

1.) I first got into art as a little kid, 4 or 5, but eventually stopped practicing once I was around 7 or 8. Though I would still doodle little characters on paper and things like that. I only truly got back into art when two people(who are now my closest friends) pushed me to get back into at 12 or 13. I still have drawings from back then that have been accidentally archived, which I'm embarrassed of but still hold some nostalgia for. I also joined tumblr around that time, as I was obsessed with Voltron and Homestuck(embarrassing but I still have Homestuck somewhere in my heart.) I'm thankful I never posted my art back then as much as I think they are good to look at to see how far I've progressed as an artist though I doubt I will ever post them. If, however, people are very curious, I may post one or two.

2.) My first ever forays into video games was Pac-Man on the Gameboy. I LOVED the shit out of that game as a kid, the next few games I got introduced to was World At War and the original Modern Warfare Series, something my sibling enjoyed and I would watch them play Zombies as they always hogged the console lol. I was also introduced to San Andreas for the Original XBOX along with Saints Row 2 for the XBOX 360 and Fallout 3. I played Saints Row 3 and even got my parents to preorder the 4th one in the series when I was 8, and could barely stand over the Gamestop counter. I think also my first case of gender envy was probably when I played Origins in Black Ops 2 and saw Rictofen in the beginning cutscene. I LOVE POST-APOCALYPTIC GAMES.

3.) I love reading, writing, and watching horror movies in my free time, my first ever horror movie was actually "Ghost Ship" and I was also extremely interested in the SAW movies and still am years after. I would like to think my favorite movie genre is Horror, as I can't find myself interested in anything else. I love sci-fi books and fantasy romance. Though for writing I mostly keep myself to Fan-Fiction rather than my own works, just isn't as fun and interesting.

4.) Bonus Fact, I go by Cat mostly as a pseudonym for my real name which is far away from Cat. My real name compared to my screen name would probably make people laugh in all honesty. The name cat comes from the mob you can discover in Final Fantasy "Gimme Cat" who asks you for a diamond and when given runs off with it without giving anything in return. I fell in love with the mob as my friend streamed it and decided to make it my new name on Discord as as soon as Discord forced everyone to make a new user/rename themselves someone had taken my original name. Though I find this one, much more fitting.

Tagging: @welldonekhushi @applbottmjeens and anyone else, no pressure !

#tagging game #as i dont post much about myself i was stumped on what to put #but i hope these were good picks

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derseprinceoftbd · 10 months

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An explainer for Homestuck, typed up on a Google doc for Reddit, and now transplanted onto Tumblr, with the hope of crossposting it onto Reddit. Most explainers I've seen utterly fail to get the tone of the series across, thus not answering the main question I see: "what is Homestuck *and why is it like this*". Why does it evoke the reactions it does? Why are so many things considered a reference? Who is Vriska? (I can't actually explain that one in under 3000 words, it turns out.) But, here's a briefer briefer (heh) on the subject of "What the actual fuck is Homestuck":

#Homestuck, A History;

Andrew Hussie, a person (now going by any pronouns) then known for various obscure things around the net, made an interactive reader-driven comic-type-thing called Jailbreak where he would draw panels demonstrating the events of the story as dictated by other posters in the thread, putting his favoured suggestions in the narration and responding in kind. The happenings and variables were influenced by his own strange brand of humor and set of fascinations, such as rap, the Starsky and Hutch movie and the cast thereof, horses, clowns, and H!rry P!tter as a cultural presence. He would eventually compile this, along with the unfinished followup, Bard Quest, on its own website.

Homestuck was definitely the most complex MPSA, with a grand overarching plot being integrated into the results of the actions of the readers. The plot revolved around an in-universe game called SBURB with the power to influence reality, sort of a Jumanji with time-travel mechanics that would soon be revealed to be the centerpiece of reality itself, a program that destroys the home planets of its players to motivate them to enter the world of the game and fulfill an unknown grand purpose, complete with millions of fully sentient NPCs.

You've probably seen them.

The Trolls, initially presented as some extremely odd and bothersome fellows on the internet, were soon shown to be a race of grey-skinned, orange-horned aliens that had undergone a SBURB Session that they claimed had been influenced by the lead human characters. Trolls possessed multicolored blood in both organized castes and clear deviations, psychic abilities, unique typing styles, insectoid traits as opposed to hominid, near-universal bisexuality with the sole known exception being Sapphic, and a complex romantic system with its own symbols, comically vague-yet-comprehensive reproductive system, and of course, relationship dynamics.

I cannot express how perfect the Trolls were in terms of catching on. Tumblr loved these fuckers and it's not at all hard to see why.

It's also worth noting that this wasn't the only market-perfect part of Homestuck; Classpecting, the equivalent of Hogwarts Houses, featured a 144/168/288/336/384(depending on who you ask and what they count, I've always thought 192)-strong grid system of human personality traits that not only seemed eerily accurate as a personality mapper, but corresponded to what elemental powers one received in the game of SBURB.

And that's as abridged as you can get when summing up Homestuck.

#homestuck #andrew hussie #altstuck #tlcstuck #csau #crow strider au #Double-Death Of The Author #Homestuck explained #contains references to Priest-Scribe theory #explainer

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