Benedict's Hideout

[benshideout]

Hey, about that Sburb reinventing idea; sign me up.

Wow, that was from a while ago! I actually forgot I even had this sideblog. Um, so, okay the story with that was that I started it, but then it ended up being hard to schedule sessions with the participants and even harder once school started, and it fell totally by the wayside and... probably isn't happening anymore?

I'm probably going to recycle its concepts in a different thing, though, as like a forum adventure or actual game. I could probably exposit on what the original plan was, though, for the benefit of the people who fell by the aforementioned wayside. Probably on my main blog itsbenedict, since I don't use this one anymore.

[undeadsuits]

Arin doesn’t like his muse dress.

Text from this exchange

Godtier Lord and Muse designs by duedlyfirearms

[busket]

DUDES

arin would accidentally prototype sonic 06

and then it would be so tortuous that he would go back in time just to prevent it like dave did

[benshideout]

uu: HEY I’M GRuMP.

UU: i’m not so grUmp!

AAAAND probably like everybody immediately made this joke when they saw this!

(dang accidentally posted to mainblog what)

(i should probably just flip my main/secondary blog statuses if that's a thing it's possible to do)

[jamistasty]

The Earl of Lemongrab as Javert

(based on this post)

[jamistasty]

I forgot I made this I’m sorry

[benshideout]

ugly hysterical laughter emanates from my bedroom door. my younger sisters weep outside in fear, or perhaps pity. "shh" the elders say to the children. "it will end soon"

it does not

[robochai]

[benshideout]

Despite how much the awkward incomplete reappropriation of the word "nerd" in our culture bugs me... this. This forever.

[momunofu-deactivated20150808]

[lambdaupsilon]

rickz0r:

benjamincarignan:

Everyone you love.

This part was AMAZING. I’m pretty certain this is one of the many reasons they’ll never bring Mother 3 to the US, or anywhere else really.

oh lord the ‘absolutely nothing’ quote

[benshideout]

This level was the point where I noticed that Mother 3 is probably the best RPG of all time.

[cloversion]

my march madness votes:

ava’s demon

awkward zombie

cucumber quest

dresden codak

earthsong (*on the basis of ‘holy crap is that still a /thing/, i remember that’)

el goonish shive

freefall*

gunnerkrigg court

johnny wander

kiwi blitz

order of the stick

paranatural (VOTE PARANATURAL)

real life comics*

selkie (you’ve probably never heard of it. it’s cute.)

spinnerette (mostly for the mix. i’ve yet to actually read it)

string theory*

subnormality

that deaf guy

tj and amal

todd allison & the petunia violet

two keys (is amazing, you’ve probably also never heard of it, go read)

that’s not quite all the names on there i recognised. i was ~somewhat~ selective. but i would recommend practically all of these. less-so the ones marked with * voted more for nostalgia reasons. also i would have nominated alpha flag & myst comic had i known this was a thing before right now.

you all should vote! (for paranatural.) make your voices heard! (make your voices say paranatural) (pls vote parana..tur…al….)

[mathgirl277-deactivated20130822]

I need to check out selkie.

Also, I’m sad Archipelago doesn’t have more votes. It’s sooooo good. Just not very well known.

[benshideout]

Oh yeah, Archipelago is fantastic you guys. Captain Snow is such a great villain, and also everyone else and all the things in it are great??? And Paranatural has the zaniest expressions in the history of comics (Zanier, perhaps, than even Awkward Zombie. It's impressive.)

Despite all the sweet recognition good comics are getting, though, this webcomics mixup seems bound to be... perhaps more controversial than the last one, which managed to turn the Goblins and Gunnerkrigg fandoms into ravenous hateful monsters. (gunnerkrigg won which is of course how it should have been)

The problem this time?

And we’re giving you the option to put your money where your mouth is and buy additional votes for your favorite strips.

It’s 10¢ a vote for this round with a minimum of ten votes purchased at a time

Soooooo yeah, this is inevitably going to devolve into "who has the richest fandom", which may or may not be any worse than "who has the biggest fandom", but is certainly going to get a lot of people mad.

[benshideout]

There's an Evil Me stuck inside of my brain.

The following is some junk I typed into Zero's Skype window while he was offline, because I have an awful habit of typing loads of junk into Zero's Skype window while he's offline. But then I figured hey, this is exactly rantabulous and self-indulgent enough to go on my blog.

[1:37:35 AM] Benedict: i just noticed something about the way i think about things

[1:38:01 AM] Benedict: i was just listening to the weekly escapist podcast, and someone sent in a question

[1:38:22 AM] Benedict: they were an english teacher from norway, and they claimed to have noticed a pattern among students

[1:39:15 AM] Benedict: he started talking about how the students who played rpgs and adventure games were more creative and good at english, whereas the people who played sports games and shooters used more foul language and got worse grades

[1:39:23 AM] Benedict: the point he was trying to make was obvious

[1:39:33 AM] Benedict: and i found myself physically cringing and shuddering

[1:40:33 AM] Benedict: because i keep finding myself drawn to that mentality, where the 'nerdy' people are smarter and more creative and better than those plebeian douchebags who play their sports and calls of duties

[1:41:34 AM] Benedict: but i have this feeling that to make that judgment would be douchey and condescending and unfair- that i don't want to have a mental bucket for "this kind of person is the Hated Enemy, and i'm better than them"

[1:42:27 AM] Benedict: but i can't make myself /stop/ unconsciously sorting people into plebeians and patricians

[1:43:22 AM] Benedict: my mind won't stop having an image of a Stupid Evil Enemy that it compares people against

[1:46:06 AM] Benedict: like i'll be walking around campus, and i'll see a dude with a buzzcut walk out of the gym

[1:47:09 AM] Benedict: and my brain will say "ugh, look at him, he's probably a fundamentalist christian frat boy who plays call of duty on xbox live and watches fox news and plays sports and kicks puppies"

[1:48:02 AM] Benedict: and i immediately have to tell myself "shut UP, he's probably a perfectly normal person and you need to stop randomly hating passers-by"

[1:49:27 AM] Benedict: and then evil me will go "but isn't it the unwashed masses of ignorant mainstream normality that you hate so much? why should being normal save him?"

[1:50:52 AM] Benedict: and nonevil me will then attempt to spit out a spluttering incoherent rebuttal about being a charitable person

[1:51:33 AM] Benedict: and evil me goes "suuuuuuure" and sits back in his chair

[1:52:30 AM] Benedict: evil me is probably the source of the biggest objection i have to humanism

[1:52:55 AM] Benedict: according to him, humans are like the worst possible candidate for bringing light and creativity and beauty into the universe

[1:53:35 AM] Benedict: after all, they're riddled with cognitive biases and poisoned by their inbuilt tribalism

[1:54:48 AM] Benedict: he only lets humanity hold the torch of hope because there's nobody else around

So yeah, this just in: I still can't deal with my dumb jackass brain being horrible to everybody all the time. 

SC: I, REGULAR BENEDICT, THE ENTIRE GUY, APOLOGIZE ON BEHALF OF MY STUPID EVIL SELF, *WHO IS ACTUALLY ME*.  SC: THE GUY TALKING RIGHT NOW.  SC: LIKE, THERE'S NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THOSE GUYS, OK? 

[mamoru]

smile! it makes your mouth into a boat! I bet you want to be on a boat

[benshideout]

Oh, and all this stuff is an actual thing I'm planning to run, like I've got notebooks full of worldbuilding and ridiculous mechanics and jargon? And I'm working with some of those Replay Value people to test the waters and run a sort of alpha build. I'll make a big post later once I've figured out how to do this, but for now you can check out the sync.in page where we talked about a bunch of specifics.

[benshideout]

wait shit that came out wrong it was meant to be a joke sorry

no yeah i got that but i figure why not f'real address it because it makes sense as a criticism whether or not you meant it? so thanks

[benshideout]

Aaaand what was that you just said about aping Hussie and how it doesn't always work out? :P

There's a difference between aping, ripping off, and copying. I think. Like, there's a scale from "has nothing to do with" to "is literally just the same exact thing", and I'm saying hey, if the goal is to make something as cool as the original thing, you've got to back off a little on the scale.

So while I AM explicitly trying to recreate the original thing, here, I'm distancing myself from all the particular elements that constrain the setting and aren't particularly necessary to recreate the experience.

To mutilate a metaphor, what people tend to do is throw out the baby and bathe in the bathwater, whereas I'm trying to keep the baby and throw out the bathwater. 

[benshideout]

The problem with roleplaying Sburb

So, okay, setting aside all those grievances with that particular sort of roleplaying Sburb, I noticed sort of a fundamental problem with adventures and roleplays that seek to recreate the experience of playing through Sburb. Most of them just straight up ape Homestuck and all its running gags, and pretty much just dump their own characters into the existing "Hussnasty" format.

This, for a couple big reasons, doesn't actually work at all.

Firstly, and less directly important, is that you're kind of cheating. Like, if you want to tell your story about these characters and their experiences with this game, you don't want to go around duplicating the experiences the Homestuck characters had with this game. It's kind of lazy writing, and it takes some exceptionally interesting characters to make it work.

But more importantly, you can't really simulate the experience of playing Sburb by... actually playing Sburb. A vital component of that experience is discovering all these crazy mysterious mechanics, and exploring this totally unknown world and figuring out what you're supposed to do. When you just straight up take Sburb, you're revealing all that stuff ahead of time! Everyone's already read Homestuck, and we know in detail how most of it works already. There can't be a payoff of discovery when all the answers have been fed to you.

So how do you /actually/ recreate the Sburb experience for players?

The answer, I'm guessing, is to reinvent everything about it until you have a bizarro-universe counterpart where everything works completely differently. So, that's what I'm trying. I have a fistful of ridiculous ideas, a hat full of pretending to be a GM, and a head full of going to freakin' do this thing.

wow that memetic template really did not work out did it

[benshideout]

You feeling okay?

Feeling okay? Yeah, I'm fine, dredging up old feuds is kinda rough but it can be cathartic. I don't actually get depressed all that easily? Plus now that I've gone through that noise, I can move on to the interesting thing I said I was going to mention.

[benshideout]

Corollary to all that

So okay wow what did I even write last night. Man! Whatever. Something I should mention before moving on to the good stuff is that several-hours-ago me was kinda dumb to make it look like he was oppressed by bad people and made a totally okay choice to spit in their faces and leave.

The break was, um, not really my finest moment. It happened in the midst of one of the aforementioned arguments with cornguy, and I just got fed up and threw a completely childish tantrum about the whole thing. On the scale of douchey things I've done, I'd rank last night's rants as like a 6 or 7, and that tantrum mess a 9. 

(I'd prefer not to talk and/or think about my high-water mark for 10.)

I don't really think any of my particular complaints at the time were invalid? And I still think withdrawing directly instead of continuing to be an agitator was a good decision. But lashing out at everybody for my own problems wasn't cool, and I'm sorry for being a jackass. 

[benshideout]

So as mentioned, my self-insert character didn’t fit, and I had to retool him by exaggerating his flaws, driving him insane, and ultimately killing him at the end of a long and convoluted personal storyline that ended up with a super depressing lame-duck aesop in order to preserve the tone of the…

[cobbshouseofnetandwaffles-blog]

I like this one because I’m in it.

It’s a self-absorbed wwehnkfest, but at least I’m in it.

[benshideout]

oh man i see what you did there with the tag, put a sock in it okay that's a good one i am hecks of burned right now

(the joke is that my nickname was sock back then)

but yeah i never claimed my sideblog wouldn't contain "self-absorbed wwehnkfests", being self-absorbed was never a thing i said i wasn't.

(in case you couldn't tell from sc literally being my self-insert character i mean)

I'm fully aware that all this noise is self-indulgent complainy rubbish, but sometimes a guy's just gotta get some self-indulgent complainy rubbish out even though he didn't anticipate the dude he was complaining about to see and immediately jump on him about it.

[benshideout]

Not a Part 4

So really the narrative is done with, but I figure I should at least spew pointless vitriol and write down all my ugly complaints while I still have a full head of steam.

Like, okay, I kind of thought almost everybody's characters were... SUPER BORING. Like, there was a pretty diverse cast of characters with different personalities and character traits? But none of them were really allowed to... do anything. Like, the thing about Sburb is, it's a hugely unstable situation that routinely has cosmic-level consequences. In Homestuck, a series of minor fuckups by a bunch of teens cascaded into multiple apocalypses, the creation of several major villains, and possibly the creation of the universe itself.

I mean, wait, fuck. You know, like, whatever the super-universe that encompasses all the frog-universes that people keep creating/murdering is called.

So when you have like, fifty different people who have nothing to do but play Sburb over and over? It massively strains disbelief that the status quo never actually changes. The most dramatic things that happen are individual characters dying or turning evil or breaking up with each other.

The weirdest thing was how practically nobody seemed to have an... objective. Like, none of the characters seemed motivated by anything? I took an informal poll a couple times, asking people explicitly "what are your character's goals" or "what motivates your character" and over 50% straight up said "survival". The rest gave various reasons that all boiled down to "prevent anything from changing", which kind of flies in the face of everyone constantly angsting in-character about how nothing changes.

And when people aren't being weirdly depressed and unmotivated about stuff, they're being unbelievably goofy or just plain incommensurately lighthearted about stuff! Like, hey, ten minutes ago you were talking about your dead family, and now you're giggling about who's moirails now or who Nagdra just boned? What even?!? This kind of emotional instability on top of de facto enforced plot stability was just... I don't even think I HAD a suspension of disbelief toward the end, there, I was just pretending it all wasn't happening while I orchestrated the closest thing I could muster to an epic conclusion.

Anyway yeah I guess a lot of people are fine with just stewing in low-level feels and drama, and I'm just really really confused about how it appeals to people. Diff'rent strokes for really really different possibly alien-brained folks, I guess.

[benshideout]

The Tragicish Tale of Replay Value, Part 3

So as mentioned, my self-insert character didn't fit, and I had to retool him by exaggerating his flaws, driving him insane, and ultimately killing him at the end of a long and convoluted personal storyline that ended up with a super depressing lame-duck aesop in order to preserve the tone of the RP.

The character, though, was only part of the problem. The other part of the problem was that I had a whole mess of heated disagreements with some of the "higher-ups" about how the roleplay as a whole was being conducted, and how my approach was really incompatible with theirs.

Replay Value is an okay place, if you like soap opera-style character interactions tinged with existential horror as the bread and butter of your experience. That I ended up ollying outy instead of trying to push my approach is evidence that there are plenty of people who totally do like that, and would rather I not fuck everything up.

One of the big things was an issue of canon government. Replay Value has an EXTENSIVE body of supporting canon and worldbuilding stuff, much of which "belongs" to certain players, somehow. Like, one person might have the final word on how exactly Horrorterrors and Angels work, and a completely different person might be the "authority" on the aspect of Heart and its associated powers- because they claimed it first. There's definitely a heirarchy of People In Charge and People Not In Charge- it's not just a sandbox for derivative works of the Sburb Glitch FAQ.

Anyway, I ended up butting heads with a particular fellow who will remained unnamed but who has something in common with the thing that's left over when you eat all of the corn off of an ear. Dude was like the Judge Freakin' Dredd of policing all the plots and making sure nobody did anything new without approval from the relevant canon authorities. Constantly getting chewed out for seemingly innocuous stuff was a big reason I ended up skedaddling.

I left, technically, because my concerns over the structure of the RP- that the rather draconian laws regarding the integration of people's extra canons discouraged participation by new players- were not supported by the evidence. Everybody seemed fine with puttering around with disbelief-straining domesticity and goofy chatroom stuff, so I decided the problem was with me and flew out of there like a bat out of hell.

Or like. A bat out of... a place where he didn't really gel socially with the other bats, because he thought the stuff they were interested in was boring.

I should maybe have a Part 4.