I picked up a comic called “Poetry is Useless” at the library a while back and it’s really weird because it’s this like… “Experimental” comic that’s done as mostly a facsimile of the artist’s sketchbook, so kinda like Driven by Lemons, which is what drew me to it to begin with…
And visually there’s all this promise, but textually it’s like… nightblogging tier writing. Like there’s this single panel with speech bubble thing on the page I’m currently looking at with just the text:
Oh snowflake, how I wish to caress you.
But every time
you melt.
and the page before that was just garbled truisms like “Behind every great man is fear itself,” that kind of thing, the sort of stuff that like would make for a cute Tumblr bot maybe. Like the writing ranges from justshowerthoughts to shitpostgenerator.
It’s just weird to have an ostensible comic that I’m paging through because there’s visually so much interesting shit going on but the text is just kind of a let down to read. Like I wish that the entire comic was just abstract entities like the weird heart mass here:
or an entire comic made of JUST these pages
because it’s gorgeous and I actually really love this kind of abstract silent comic
But as is, it just feels like… idk, having just gorged myself on Homestuck this actually feels a lot less daring and a lot less philosophically profound than this comic in which Con Air plays a deep role in the development of multiple characters and so do horse dildos, like I find myself frustrated with it because it has this kind of sloppy indie rock impromptu confessional quality to the writing whereas Homestuck is always AGGRESSIVELY stupid but usually really carefully put together in such a way that the stupidity adds up to profundity.
I mean I don’t really know where I’m going with this exactly but yeah this is basically my experience with this particular comic, I guess I feel like this could’ve just been way MORE abstract and inaccessible than it is and I’m disappointed that so much of it feels like… idk, like nightblogging basically
and now I want to re-read Driven by Lemons
I’m pretty sure that’s a potato. They kind of look like that before you clean away the sprouts. Such is the cruel truth of the world.
I guess it could be the heart of some sort of vegetable robot.
People have definitely reached the “totally get core pieces of canon catastrophically wrong in order to justify their outrage” stage of act seven anger. [grinds teeth]
On November 18th, 2011, a peaceful protest was held in UC Davis. A branch of “Occupy Wallstreet”, Occupy UC Davis was intended to protest police violence on UC campuses.
The police responded by hearing their concerns, agreeing and then pepper-sprayed the protesters.
That’s right, they attacked students that were protesting the fact that they attack people. source
If you’re thinking “Oh man, someone got some compensation for this, right!?” Yup. Someone did.
The cop.
The stress of being the poor victim netted him a $38,000 in worker’s comp.
That’s more than a lot of people make in a full year. source
UC Davis “Investigated” this. And the guy who conducted the investigation was a Police Chief William J. Bratton - Chairman of the private business that provides UC Davis’s security. SOMEHOWthere wasn’t enough evidence to charge the officers involved in this incident. source
It just came out that UC Davis has paid $175,000+ to a private “Image Management firm”, who is putting all of that sweet, sweet dollar into manipulating Google’s search engines, as well as other networks, to make it a lot LOT harder to find reminders that this happened. Read that what-proper:
They’re spending almost $200,000 of school funds to escape being remembered for this awful incident.
Okay, this has been a long time coming. Unfortunately, I wasn’t aware of threading comments on twitter so mostly I’m just grabbing what I wrote there and stuffing it in a text post to get it in one place.
Okay, hoo, here goes. So, seven months since Undertale. As Toby predicted, I was found in under a week - then found out shortly after. Now people say shitty things to me and about me legit all the time. It stings but, y'know, water off a duck’s back. I’m autistic, I’m fat, I’m poly, I might be NB, I have anxiety disorder, I’m on medication. I’m used to getting things slung my way. And I knew that once the connection was made to me in Undertale, it’d be same old story. We both knew how it would go. Toby warned me, expressed his concerns and asked me if I wanted to back down. I said “its worth it to be part of something I love so much”.
The problem is, some stuff had happened preceding that and surrounding that that kind of hurt.
Firstly, he was cool with me, loved my character, said nice things about me, agreed to a unique room, an encounter, a battle and NPC. Then someone said “hey, Sam’s a freak by the way”. I never was told who, only that someone brought it up to him. Ever after, its been pain. Now, unique area, npc, boss fight, encounter - all that stuff went to another backer, who I’ve since been told is his friend?
I didn’t hear much for two years. I waited patiently, hopeful the bad stuff was over, super excited for Undertale. Then one day he messages me near the end of development and asks if he can just shitcan the whole thing, refund the money. All the fun ideas we talked about got scrapped. I stood up enough to say “no, thats real unfair” and that was about it. In the end, we didn’t even get to see the lovely sprite Tuyo did for So Sorry’s front - we only get the back in the game. I think its probably okay for me to share this now - if she says otherwise, I can take it down, of course.
I love the fight, I love the game, but its all tangled up in so much stress at this point. I don’t feel like a “cool secret” as I was told about. I feel like a skeleton buried under the floorboards of a closet. People keep comparing me to Muffet and its not hard to see why. She’s really cool, I love her design and the battle is amazing. But she’s also an external creation and you HAVE to fight her before you are even ABLE to trigger the So Sorry secret for some reason. That and not even getting my name in the credits with the other monster designers it feels like yeah, he didn’t want anything to do with me.
And I’m done, I’m done feeling hurt about it. I’m done with the naysayers being enabled nothin being countered. I’m done doubting myself for ever wanting to be out in the open. I’m a real person. My life has meaning no matter what.
And it would have been fine if Toby had actually ever directly addressed any of it. Instead, it was “don’t harass my backers, no good will come of it” and “all monsters are good”. No good came of it - for me, at least. It wasn’t all your backers being harassed and they weren’t being harassed for being your backers. It was one developmentally challenged guy who wound up with a weird job on the internet. I’ve tried talking to Toby about it, as has Khato, as have a couple of friends we talked to about it. Toby doesn’t want to make a scene. He’s worried about the backlash I think? But he has nothing to lose and I had everything to lose by being so involved. And I’m tired of losing. I’m tired of being indefensible for existing. I already got hit by the backlash. I’m just tired.
Also Toby isn’t bad, I just think how he’s dealt with me has been kind of, uh, a little dehumanizing. Just all this stuff is really contrary to the meaning and moral of his game since I guess I’m the wrong kind of monster. And I’ve spent seven months dealing with the stress. Its affected my health and my work both and there’s no end to it. It feels good to finally get all that off my chest. Its been a long time in coming but its been killing me, very slowly.
tldr: toby was more invested in me being a secret than me being a cool secret and not standing up for me made me feel isolated and hurt
I appreciate all the well wishing by the way. Its been exhausting and the support means a lot to me (by the time of posting it to tumblr, there’s been an outpouring of it on twitter and oh my god I was not ready for that).
I hope one day people like me and my audience get to just be ourselves in our own little corners of the world without being denied happiness.
I don’t think I’m a great person or anything. I try to avoid hurting people. Some times I do. I know I’m not perfect. I make mistakes. But I’d like to think I’m generally an okay person and I just want to be treated with the same amount of respect as all living things
going forward, I don’t know what to do now. I don’t think I can talk to Toby about it anymore than I already have. It hurts too much. I didn’t want a refund, I just wanted to be involved in something that made me feel powerful emotions and give what I could back.
when the game was being kickstarted, I fell in love with it instantly. I spread the word to every person I knew. I explicitly asked if he’d want to do the fantroll thing and he said sure. When it came out, I spread the game to everyone I knew, everyone I cared about and a bunch of people I look up to and respect because the game means so much to me as it is and I wanted to share that good with everyone who might want it. I worked and saved up as hard as I could to be involved - as best as a low rent commission artist CAN do - and I did it again when the game came out and I saw people itching to play it. It means a lot to me - I have a lot of stuff going on in my life but it made me feel like maybe things would be okay.
but the longer I go on dealing with the stress, the less I’m sure things will be.
some people have asked about what the original plan
called for. I don’t have it to hand but it involved him stumbling around
his art studio, trying to draw a butterfly that wouldn’t keep still.
silly and toothless stuff, but thats all the plan was for. Just
something light and fluffy. I commissioned some art from Tuyoki of it at
the time since she was open and seemed to want to work with me. We
didn’t have a whole lot of interaction, but she never did anything that
made me feel intensely alienated or anything.
Thats the piece at the top of the post - again if she isn’t cool with me sharing the work, I can take it down from the post.
Finally, someone’s told me it may be even more complex and possibly worse than I
was aware of. I won’t say anything specifically until I can find out. I don’t know what the case is and I don’t want to say anything based on supposition, only what I’ve experienced or understand. I guess I’ll make an addendum to the addendum if I find out more.
Thanks for listening, folks, and thank you for the kind words on twitter.
You’re cool and this is awful what’s happened to you.
I MUST PUT DOWN THE TOYS AND WAYS OF A CHILD. AND CONFRONT THE BIG THINGS OF BECOMING A HUGE MAN. BY DUELING THE SUPREME BEAST OF MY LEGEND LAND, HIS SERPENTINE EMINENCE, YOGURTBONER HIMSELF. I’M ABOUT TO GO FIGHT HIM NOW, SO THIS IS THE LAST TIME YOU WILL EVER HEAR MY EXCELLENT VOICE.
I WILL DUEL AND CRUSH MY SLITHERING SEXUAL SNAKE BOSS, TO FINISH WHAT I STARTED WHEN I STEPPED MY METAL FOOT INTO THIS CHILDREN’S FARCE. I WILL DO THAT BECAUSE I WANT TO, AND WHEN THAT IS SAID AND DONE, AND YOU SEE ME AT THE PEAK OF A MOUNTAIN OF TROPHIES, RESTING ON MY THRONE OF PRIZES, I WANT TO GET TO TELL YOU THAT I DID WHAT I WANTED TO DO. SO IF YOU REMEMBER JUST ONE THING I SAY, OF SO MANY GREAT THINGS SAID BY ME, THEN PLEASE REMEMBER THIS.
I WANTED TO PLAY A GAME.
In case this wasn’t abundantly clear to everyone by now, the reason that Homestuck ends with BOTH John reaching for the door out of reality AND Caliborn destroying his clock is because both represent the characters getting, in the end, exactly what they wanted.
Paradoxically.
I’d started to grasp this but something kind of threw a wrench into that interpretation for me!
Mainly, that caliborn and calliope exist in the new universe the kids presumably escape to, so the kids are still kind of bound to causality. Like are the kids doomed to die before calliope and caliborn end up leaving? Do they just find some new planet to terraform or live in and kinda fuck off and leave Earth for them?
I guess it’s meant to be an open question but i dunno something about them still being linked to the whole causality cycle still kind of makes me ?????
They actually almost certainly aren’t.
I mean you could I think read it that way potentially… but I think most of the evidence in the comic suggests that Caliborn and Calliope never find the Earth that we see everyone move to at the end of the comic.
Everything that Caliborn and Calliope experience happens in the ALPHA TIMELINE. The Alpha Timeline is two timelines back from what we experience in the ending though. First, John fucks it up by jumping away and not coming back, which allows Aranea to steal the Ring of Orbs Nofold, which allows the first split into [s]Game Over. Then, John, Roxy, and Terezi say fuck this bullshit and rework the timeline again so that Vriska is there, which we have quite a bit of evidence shouldn’t have been the case at all.
The Alpha Timeline is the one in which the ultimate weapon is charged by absorbing the kids and Lord English is created.
It’s a paradox, not dissimilar to the creation of the Alpha kids in fact–they’re actually created in an alternate timeline.
So what we see in the ending is, in fact, the circle closing, the mobius reaching around to bring about Lord English’s end, tidying up his existence as a bug that lacks cause through a weapon that never existed.
The ending we see is of the kids breaking out of that loop entirely.
If I remember well, doomed timelines are created when someone changes an event in the past to have a different outcome; Game Over was retconned by John+Terezi, but what about this supposed Alpha Timeline ‘fucked up’ by John? I mean, what makes you think there was a splitting at all? Also, that would meam that one can retcon a doomed timeline into… another ‘doomed’ timeline? Why should that be a thing, given Paradox Space’s ‘self-correcting’ nature? I’m a bit confused.
It’s somewhat thematically satisfying, but ‘mechanically’ wobbly.
Let’s be real, ALL the time mechanics are wobbly as shit.
But basically John seems to be able, by virtue of his weird fucked up canon breaking powers, to uh… break… canon, basically. That seems to be specifically what the powers are meant to do.
memory-of-amalgamy also pointed out to me earlier that Doc Scratch quite explicitly defines the Alpha Timeline as the timeline that leads to his simultaneous creation and destruction that he has dominion over so it’s probably worth reassessing kind of everything that we think we know about timelines tbh.
But basically I just think there’s way more evidence to support this idea than there is for any other interpretation of the ending. Lots of little stuff like the fact that Calliope seems to have a copy of Rose’s book from the original meteor timeline, the fact that Vriska isn’t supposed to be there at all, the fact that it lines up perfectly with all the Gnostic symbolism I’ve been babbling about for literally four years now… it just fits way better than assuming that things still follow some loop and it’s way way more satisfying that way.
*writes and deletes parts of this message, coming up with objections and taking them down sistematically…*
Ok, I’m pretty convinced of the general idea, I’m just not sure about what event caused the splitting that generates the Alpha Timeline which ‘ends’ with Lil Cal possession. It’s hinted that John has his uber-teleport powers (unless Caliborn is off target, which may be the case, but on the other hand John is the only one who seems able to reach him), so he already touched the SBURB-juju; problem is, this means he has already become a canon-breaking entity and I’m not sure how did he split the timeline while uncontrollably zapping around, since all his appearences seems to happen in the Game Over timeline.
In talking it over with @memory-of-amalgamy and @hexmeridian the consensus we’ve come to is that John teleported away, left the ring, and FAILED TO COME BACK FOR IT.
It’s not so much anything he did, it’s the fact that he failed spectacularly to occupy his required role within the narrative.
Wasn’t that the cause of the Game Over timeline itself? I mean, Aranea being able to snatch the ring was the significant event that initiated the clusterfuck. As I see this, for this to be a consistent theory there need to be two splitting events.
In the Game Over timeline, John loses track of the Ring of Life, so Aranea takes control. This causes the final [S]; then John faces his denizen, acquires control over the zapping, and ends up in cahoots with Terezi to alter the timeline, so the first splitting event occurs; he also retcons the Ring’s disappearence, picking it up before Gamzee can, so the Game Over timeline ends doomed and, above all, reoccupied his ‘required role’.
In the Escape timeline, John keeps Vriska alive while his native alternate self (if that makes sense) exploded under Jade’s watch, leading to Collide and the ending.
So the question is: what event produced the third, ‘Alpha’ timeline? I think John is the only one who can make major retcons in the endgame, but we have no reason to believe he splitted the timeline again (I don’t think there is another timeline where he remembered to pick up the Ring before leaving it to Gamzee, as it would be a matter of chance and LUCK DO3SNT 4CTU4LLY M4TT3R in Paradox Space); I may even say that retcon!John might be unable to be split into multiple timelines (it would also be consistent with Typheus’ “there will be only one of you alive”), so unless I critically missed the point of your last post, my doubts remain uncleared…
Yeah it sounds like maybe you’re misunderstanding?
There are two splitting events:
First, John loses the ring
Second, John and Terezi rework the timeline
It’s the INITIAL timeline, where John was supposed to not lose the ring but also supposed to not bring Vriska back to life via shenanigans, in which Lord English is created.
From the moment Gamzee touches the ring, Lord English is reduced to a force without cause, a paradox.
So what you’re saying is that the Homestuck ending as it exists now is a modified version of a timeline that never existed?
I wonder what we should call this hypothetical timeline-that-never-was.
