ballpit

L | she | 20s | writing, horror, homestuck

[cainettles]

I wanna die in this room

[oranges-covered-in-sugar]

It's all you.

[romrabbit]

kanaya's aurafarming ass during murderstuck:

[insecuregodcomplex]

[spiderstape]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[ellewhile]

Hi i just read family matters and. I love it first of all. I read it at work second of all, so i couldn’t properly react how i wanted. (I kept putting my phone down bc i just had to stop or id explode from giddiness). Its so. Powerful. I want to print it out but i know nothing about book binding lmao. Its up there in terms of best stridercest fics ive read. Thank you for writing it. If you ever write more stridercest, ill be there, eagerly waiting.

Thank you so much, anon! I have full plans to continue family matters as a multi chapter work. I’ve been working on chapter two pretty heavily recently, but it’s gone through about five different drafts at this point (cries) as I’ve figured out how this story ticks. I have hopes it’ll be posted in the next couple weeks, so keep your eyes peeled :)

[gloviiz]

New viral TikTok comment section reaction image

[tankhall]

almost died today

[flightyalrighty]

never sand down your story or your characters to make them more appealing to a wider audience, ok? Do what YOU want

🫵

[willgrahamscock]

when a tv show doesn't shy away from portraying fucked up themes, and there's love in the violence and the characters are doomed and codependent and there's a power imbalance and the cycle keeps repeating and they're miserable with and without each other and also they’re gay

[philcollinsenjoyer]

you write people having good sex you're just writing porn but you write people having bad sex. now you're writing a story

[furiosa-femininst]

Can I come over and stare at you like this

[krowsweater]

gardenias on the fucking tile where it makes no fucking difference who fucking held back from fucking who tbh

[sewercentipede]

reading the wiki for the american psycho movie every single thing it’s saying about christian bale has me in tears …….. he literally wanted the role so bad he got that buff in two weeks, rejected every other offer for 9 months while the producers tried to get dicaprio to be patrick bateman bc bale knew dicaprio would chicken out, went to dinner with the director and the guy who wrote the novel IN CHARACTER apparently scaring the shit out of the novelist, took the role for $50k, and then made all his costars think he was a giant freak bc he never fucking broke character, and APARENTLY LITERALLY HAS CONTROL OVER HIS SWEAT GLANDS AND USED THIS IN THE BUSINESS CARD SCENE

[sewercentipede]

ok thanks for the info wiki

[fuckboysecurityllc]

Hey Paul!

[vevader3]

It brings me comfort that, for a brief moment, Jared Leto genuinely believed Christian Bale was going to kill him with an axe

[prokopetz]

I have no dog in the race re: the Homestuck animated pilot, but it is very entertaining seeing all these folks posting long-winded responses to criticisms I haven't seen arguing that the critics clearly don't understand Homestuck, and in the process demonstrating that they don't understand Homestuck either.

[paprus-teutonic-knight]

any particular examples? (you can paraphrase and avoid giving users)

[prokopetz]

One of the most frequently recurring ones I've bumped into is arguments about whether or not the particulars of Homestuck's cultural framing as a product of its time are essential to its narrative, and whether the pilot mis-steps in updating that framing to be more contemporary, in which seemingly nobody involved in the conversation is aware that Homestuck isn't Like That simply as a product of its time; i.e., that it was a deliberate period piece even when it was new.

[gumbamasta]

I doubt any of the kids reading it back then where old enough to remember Johnny 5 is alive or Mac and Me. Fuck, I can barely remember it, aside from Steve Guttenberg being in one.

[prokopetz]

It ain't about the pop culture references; a lot of them are contemporary with the comic's publication, anyway. (e.g., the Barack Obama jokes, for one.) I'm talking more about the era of online culture the comic is consciously evoking.

While Homestuck's text ranges pretty widely, one of the central themes it keeps returning to is the experience of being a socially isolated teenager with unmonitored Internet access, as part of the first generation for whom that experience was possible – i.e., of being a bunch of unsupervised children trying to construct a society from first principles because there simply wasn't anyone to hand it down to them. The recurring Peter Pan shit may be a bit, but it's not only a bit, if you take my meaning.

Though the pop culture references are all over the map, in terms of its sense of time and place, the comic is pretty firmly situated in the mid to late 1990s; in fact, it's so precisely situated that you can map the beta kids and Alternian trolls to two distinct cohorts of that first generation of unsupervised children on the Internet, to an accuracy of plus or minus just a couple of years. A big part of why it can be hard to pin down exactly when the comic is meant to be taking place is because for all intents and purposes it's simultaneously 2009 and 1997.

[prokopetz]

#oh so you mean it feels like both: when it was written & when hussie(+peers) were last that age? 😉 (via @ramenheim)

Not quite, interestingly. The beta kids reflect my own cohort of unsupervised children on the Internet, but not Hussie's; Hussie was born in 1979, and thus was already pushing 20 in the late 1990s. The beta kids aren't written from the perspective of the ICQ Generation so much as they are from the perspective of an observer who just barely missed the boat on being part of that cohort themselves.

Of course, remember when I said that the different characters relate to the Internet in ways that are very precisely locatable in time?

Hussie's cohort of unsupervised children on the Internet is represented not by the beta kids, but by the (Alternian) trolls. The trolls are the IRC Generation to the beta kids' ICQ generation; this is reflected in everything from the palpable ghost of pre-World Wide Web BBS culture that informs their understanding of their analogue of the Internet, to the fact that they still think leetspeak is cool, while the beta kids find it quaint, and it's particularly apparent in the differences in how they use chat software compared to the beta kids.

[prokopetz]

(I have a suspicion that Karkat's faintly absurd penchant for indulging in curmudgeonly kids-these-days grumping toward the beta kids in spite of the fact that he's barely older than they are is one of the few places where Hussie allowed their own voice to really authentically come through, far moreso than any of the direct self-insert shit.)

[prokopetz]

#the way that Coding is a much bigger part of the troll's stuff stands out to me #and that karkat and sollux are specifically specialized in /malicious code/. (via @luesmainblog)

Yeah, you could write a whole analysis just based on how the Alternian trolls inhabit a milieu where some level of coding knowledge is part of the basic buy-in to be permitted to exist in online spaces at all, while the beta kids regard it as esoteric wizard shit, and how that directly reflects one of the least bridgeable generation gaps between mid 1990s versus late 1990s online youth culture.

[homestuck]

millennial forrest gump

[prokopetz]

Hah! The comparison isn't unwarranted, but I think it's a little more tightly focused than that. Structurally it's pretty weird, because the trolls' whole deal is so central to understanding what's going on in spite of the fact that most of them are almost entirely peripheral to the actual plot, but it's like... okay, so we have this group of Internet-obsessed feral children who we've been forced to figure out how to be a society from first principles because there simply was no previous generation to pass the foundations of their youth culture down to them, and whose character arcs wholly revolve around how they navigate – or fail to navigate – the grief of having poured everything they have and everything they are into creating a world which they've subsequently learned they won't be allowed to actually live in?

To put it briefly, Homestuck isn't an allegory for the rise and fall of 1990s online youth culture in the same way that The Lord of the Rings isn't an allegory for the First World War.

[frustrationinexcelsis]

As some side context, it's also worth considering how Homestuck was written and released as the very tail end of the "golden age" of webcomics. It's perhaps a little difficult to fully picture it now, but in the late 90s and the aughts, webcomics were the The Thing on the internet -- there are individual comics with dedicated fandoms now, sure, but back then there frankly wasn't much in online culture that wasn't involved with or at least clearly aware of most major webcomics. Like, we joke about all the old two-gamers-on-a-couch things now, but back in their day things like Penny Arcade were one of the primary ways that people got their commentary on gaming.

(There's another post I've seen floating about commenting on how TV Tropes is filled with references to webcomics from the 2000s that nobody's ever heard about, and that kind of misses the thing that most of those examples were in fact written in the 2000s when a lot of people cared about that!)

So to circle back to the Homestuck as a period piece thing, I think that it's very interesting to note its "historic" placement -- one of the very last of the really, really high-profile, widely-read internet comics, written in the 2010s and looking back to the very start of its period of internet history back in the 90s.

[prokopetz]

Also very true – though I don't believe Hussie truly anticipated that Homestuck would be one of the very last webcomics to play a centralising role in online youth culture in the same way that the popular webcomics of the late 1990s did, so that dimension of its self-commentary is probably unintentional!

[killrockstar]

some of the music i listen to is straight up bad

[tazetta]

if you've ever gone on a romantic "date" at olive garden just block me rn i literally can't deal with you proshippers -_-

[littlebigplanet]

what

[tazetta]

when you're there you're family