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Started howling with laughter imagining myself writing stereotypical immigrant chapbook poetry but it's about me constantly going between New York and Chicago

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So this is a coming of age YA novel about a girl from Nebraska who writes not-Harry Potter fanfiction. It's hilarious and devastating and well-crafted and it took us completely by surprise.

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This is the order of events as nearly as I can reconstruct them.

In 2008 I start following a webcomic called Problem Sleuth.

In 2009 Problem Sleuth wraps up. The author, Andrew Hussie, begins work on 🤡's next project, a mixed media piece called Homestuck.

In 2010 I become an evangelist for Homestuck. I spread the word to my college friend Stephen. He joins an online Homestuck RP group. I move to New York. That fall, Stephen visits me and introduces me to a guy from the group named Josh, who plays Rose. I am immediately infatuated.

In 2011 Stephen starts development on a real life Pesterchum app. I organize a Homestuck group cosplay and we go to Anime Central with our whole college anime club dressed up as trolls. I sit in a field with 50 Daves. I write my first Homestuck fanfiction, which is also my first anything fanfiction. Josh moves into my apartment. Stephen is dating a pair of bisexual cosplayers. Act 5 concludes. It is Peak Homestuck.

In 2012 my girlfriend tells me that I am no longer allowed to talk about Homestuck with her. The What Pumpkin organization - Homestuck is too big to be one person's project anymore - launches a kickstarter for a Homestuck video game, which raises 2.5 million dollars. At the same time, it is becoming clear that something is wrong with Homestuck itself. The author is fed up with the project but is now financially bound to it. The content becomes increasingly mean-spirited and critical of its audience as What Pumpkin tries to turn itself into a game company.

In 2013 What Pumpkin loses a significant chunk of its Kickstarter money - how much we'll never know - through a comical series of development boondoggles. Stephen launches a Kickstarter to fund an expansion of the Pesterchum app - now the haunt of a large online community - and What Pumpkin shuts it down. Josh no longer reads Homestuck but we're still living together and we start a podcast.

In 2014 Homestuck is mostly on hiatus. When it returns I start this blog, which was originally called "Two Triangles," after Dirk's shades. Most of the old crew have stopped caring about Homestuck but I am a die-hard. I write more fanfiction, mostly lesbian fluff. I begin to meet new people who are still invested in the whole thing. This and the podcast become the core of my new social world. Homestuck itself is getting more and more chaotic and diffuse but I still believe Andrew can tie it all together.

In 2015 I break. I write a fanfic called "Theatre of Coolty," which is my Dear John letter to Andrew Hussie. (I kill him in the story, which is par for the course.) It becomes the most popular thing I have ever made, and is most likely the most popular thing I ever will make. It is translated into multiple languages. A person called Naked Bee (who becomes another dear friend) turns it into a short film with puppets. I have grown to hate Homestuck but it is now my primary source of external validation and the foundation of my social media presence.

In 2016 Homestuck ends. The last year of its existence is an extraordinary act of creative self-erasure. Hussie vanishes by degrees, and by the time the finale rolls out no trace of 🤡's writing or art is left in the product. It is an abnegation worthy of Prospero. To complete this act of conceptual self-destruction, 🤡 ends up selling the entire product to Viz, who let it corrode. (Nine years later, homestuck.com is a dead link, mspaintadventures an abandoned swamp of broken pngs.) Meanwhile, I provide the narration for Bee's audio adaptation of a novel-length Homestuck fanfiction called Detective Pony, which she later turns into a feature film. The author of the fic/novel goes on to Kickstart a dating sim based on the 2016 Republican primary, which he calls Grand Old Academy. It has yet to be published.

In 2017 I leave New York. My friendship with Josh deteriorates and our podcast ends. I am no longer a Homestuck fan. As such I rebrand - the number of triangles I am is no longer anyone's business.

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In 2021, Andrew Hussie releases a visual novel called Psycholonials. I do not read it.

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In 2025, I am back in New York, albeit not in the city. I'm married to someone I met through this blog. Most of my closest friends are people I met either through Homestuck or through the projects that came out of it. Even my college friends - the ones I still talk to - are the ones who went through the wars with me. My wife thinks Psycholonials is worth reading. One night we sit down and play through it together.

Psycholonials is a nasty, nihilistic little story about a fucking idiot who accidentally creates a movement and then runs away like a bitch when it gets to be too much, back into the bosom of 🤡's trust fund. It's also really good. It has all the things I loved about Homestuck, all the stuff I missed as 🤡 left it to rot. It demonstrates that 🤡 is not washed, that the failure of Homestuck was not because 🤡 lost the juice. 🤡 abandoned us on purpose. 🤡 chose 🤡 over us.

This was objectively the correct decision. And when you come right down to it, 🤡 never signed up to change my life. It just happened.

Still, I can't say that it doesn't hurt a little, sitting here in my 40s. I guess everyone follows at least one failed messiah. So, yet another farewell to the cool big brother I never had. I hope this is the last one.

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Day 1

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Catholic.

In 1944 a kitten named George (short for General Electric) was saved from drowning by a U.S. Navy crew member. George was then photographed and given a liberty card and detailed health record. Source.

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Someone in the replies asked "why would this exist," and the answer to that question was deleted and replies restricted, so why not answer it again! Doodles (poodle crosses) were a fashionable dog to have for a minute, which created the usual conditions around fashionable dogs (unethical breeding practices, uninformed owners) and for this or for sheer reasons of temperament (poodles are bastards), doodles are often unpredictably violent! Groomers and boarders know this, so that's a sticker that might make your dog less likely to be refused service or to be quarantined for the safety of other animals.

I was looking on Etsy for “dog inside” patches for Anzu’s carrier and I saw one that said NOT A DOODLE. Imagine any normal human who isn’t knee deep in dog world nonsense asking you why you spent money on that. Like my “I have unhinged opinions about something you didn’t know it was possible to even care about” patch is raising a lot of questions answered by the patch

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my girlfriend had a dream about matching halloween costumes for us- as weather reporter and Weather-themed Demiurge

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Here's my addendum to myfriendpokey's post: I don't care about any of that stuff. David Thomas wasn't my hero because he was a conceptual artist. He was my hero because he was a fat autistic man from Cleveland who could write beautiful songs. I think the rest of it is just camouflage, or post-facto justification. You can't just be that person. You have to argue yourself into existence.

This is my favorite video of Dave performing.

Anyway, The Modern Dance and Dub Housing are timeless albums, Dave and that other band from over in Akron invented punk rock, etc. But my favorite thing is that after all the juice was squeezed from that moment, and there was no reason to continue the project, he was like, fuck you.

It's me again!

Strive to carry this energy forward.

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RIP David Thomas

not the wendys guy, not the kid in the hall

i heard pere ubu's the modern dance as a teenager but what made me a "fan" was actually encountering some of thomas's critical writing, the liner notes to later album raygun suitcase which were quoted by greil marcus in a new foreward to his book mystery train, on elvis fans and the appeal of lives you'll never get to live. i wanted to know how they got there and what they did next.

something i always admired about both pere ubu and about thomas's solo work is the sense that failure, perversity and spite were always built into the project. the original version of pere ubu formed as a way to release a record as a weird artifact people would find in charity bins and be startled by, not know how to parse, and there's a sense the rest of their work is playing on the same feeling - inventing the career of an imaginary band, one which would unfold in mounting strangeness. One where the experimental cubist period would precede a peppy, paranoid 80s new wave pop period would precede grinding hard rock would precede odd studio collage, with digressions to soundtrack old scifi movies and put on an Ubu Roi musical. i think you get some sense of it from this tv performance - notice how he draws out the opening bit, sees it's playing too well with the crowd, abruptly switches gears, keeps going and making it more tangled until the laughter becomes nervous - and THEN starts the song.

some of my favourite pere ubu albums are the later ones like "lady from shanghai", part of a period where all the members would record parts seperately and have thomas stitch them together into new songs in studio to create odd, rickety take on "dance music". but i think my favourite records he did were the recordings with 2 pale boys. "surf's up" is my favourite album by them but the track "prepare for the end" is i think my favourite distillation of the line he was always walking between the goofy and the terrifyingly intense.

“We did the first record not as a beginning, but as an ending,” Thomas said in 1993, in likely the most interesting words ever written for a record industry press release, in this case for the then-new Pere Ubu album Story of My Life. “We wanted to leave an artifact that someone would discover. We were done—we were about to move on to real life.” But it didn’t work out that way, he said: “We had the misfortune to have a dream and vision at an early age that was too powerful to shake in older life. If you’re young enough and if the vision is strong enough, you will never lose it—like the people who became Communists in the ’30s. They had no alternative but to continue…We saw what rock music should be and could be nothing less than that would ever do for us.”

stand by earth man

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met my narrative foil & i can’t fucking stand her

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Today, in honour of the death of Pope Francis, I would like to recall his tireless struggle to make my life worse.

Both the same-sex marriage and gender identity laws in Argentina passed while he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires, which is to say the most prominent religious figure in the country, and he fiercely opposed them (famously calling the former a plot by the devil to destroy God's plan).

As a transgender lesbian in Argentina, having legally changed my name and gender and being married to my wife, things that have made my life enormously better and would not have been possible if he'd had his way, I can only say this: fuck you, you piece of shit. We won, you lost.

The next pope will probably also be a terrible person, because that's a requirement for the job of head of the Catholic Church. May it fade into irrelevance in my lifetime.

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all my homies have ailments

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it was not on wheat...

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In the post-scarcity future the only question is who gets the femme - the classic butch ace reporter/artistic genius lesbian or the modern business lesbian in the sharp suit. Maybe they'll erotically wrestle about it. Wait, weren't we supposed to be blowing up the sun?

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