sorio99 - Tumblr blog

[sorio99]

Wait, did Grant get COVID before or after getting a Tramp Stamp? Genuinely curious what the timeline for filming was here.

[sorio99]

Wait, there was absolutely no point to the players learning the wenis, was there?

[sorio99]

@samreich I understand the point of the creepy parts, but that doesn’t mean you are forgiven, including by your players.

[sorio99]

10 Year Anniversary Of Homestuck

For the record, I’m writing this at 7:30 PM on December 16, 2018, because honestly, who knows what I OR Tumblr will be like on April 13, 2019? Maybe it will be a smoking hellscape. Maybe it will be lovely and rainbow filled. Or maybe it will be nothing BUT porn. I don’t know. But I bring it up because I also have no clue what will happen with Homestuck and Hiveswap in the next five months and, frankly, I don’t care.

I wanna talk about what Homestuck has meant to me.

I discovered Homestuck first in, I believe, 2013 or 2014. I was starting up high school, and my parents had a program on my computer blocking “adult” websites, which worked about 20% of the time. I found it after reading Problem Sleuth, the previous MSPA, and I loved it. I loved the characters, the humor, the world-building, and even the art. As silly as it was.

It wasn’t my first fandom, or even the first fandom I observed. That would probably have been the Legend Of Zelda, whose fanfics I read while I was still in the single digits, and unclear what, if any, biological differences there were between men and women (the answer switched over the past 12 years from “breasts” to “loads” to “well, it’s kinda complicated, but going just by gender, nothing except brains”). It was, however, the first fandom I decided to take PART in.

I created a Reddit account solely so I could join the Homestuck subreddit, where I was a rare commenter and even rarer contributor. However, in late 2014, early 2015, I noticed most of the posts on the subreddit were just links to Tumblr posts. As I soon learned, Tumblr was where the majority of Homestuck fandom activity took place. As such, I joined Tumblr with my go-to username for most online accounts, Sorio99.

The rest is, if not history, certainly documented on my blog. Discovering new fandoms like Gravity Falls, Steven Universe, and most importantly, Undertale. Connecting with people in REAL LIFE over stuff from Tumblr, including people in my group therapy sessions. Coming out of my shell about being online, and eventually gaining a few people on a website or two that actually give a shit about my existence.

However, getting back to Homestuck, the fact is I don’t even need to go to Tumblr or the fandom to talk about how it affected me. Throughout High School, I struggled with some of the worst mental health I’ve ever experienced. But I kept going. Not because of anything that mattered, really. My family helped, but only about half of them were actually helpful. I didn’t really have any friends to speak of, at least not close ones.

But I kept going to see what would happen in Homestuck.

It really is the dumbest little things that keep us alive.

Eventually I got real, professional, effective help, and, no joke, 6 months later, Homestuck came to an end. It was certainly an odd time, but it did have an impact on me. My sense of humor, my fandoms, my presence, and even me just BEING here is mostly because of this stupid not-a-webcomic.

And I know, objectively, it is MORE than flawed. It has touches of racism, of sexism, slight heteronormativity and great big HEAPS of ableist language. I know Andrew Hussie probably isn’t too good a person. I know people probably got ripped off by the Hiveswap kickstarter. I know the first time Hussie contributed to it in almost a year, it involved posting some EXTREMELY anti-semitic lore in his web-code. And I know that, deep down, I probably could have gotten to this point WITHOUT Homestuck.

But you know what? For all it did for me, and for the internet as a whole, I’m still really fucking grateful.

So happy 10th birthday, Homestuck.

And thank you for everything.

[sorio99]

Came out to my first IRL friend, and not only was she super supportive, it turns out we’ve both been queer this whole time.

For anyone out there afraid of being rejected for who they are, there ARE going to be people who still care about you and support you. I promise.

[sorio99]

I’ve officially been on the winning team of a Splatfest for the first time! Good game everyone, I don’t know how much I did to help.

[sorio99]

Yeah, the timing here is just a LITTLE suspicious, Tumblr.

[sorio99]

Holy shit, it’s on his Wikipedia now.

[sorio99]

There’s something about the whole “WcDonald’s” promotion going on right now that I find deeply uncomfortable, and I’m not sure I can put it into words.

[sorio99]

So Mullenweg really has deleted every post about recent events except for the inciting post (which makes him look the absolute worst, even now), his half-hearted fully-pathetic pinned post about he’s definitely not transphobic…

…and a single reblog from one of the only people still even vaguely on his side.

With the deleted posts including the one where he at least insincerely and pathetically tried to apologize.

At this point, there’s no benefit of the doubt. Matt Mullenweg is unfit to act in any official capacity, and needs to be removed from position of CEO.

There are a hundred other problems Tumblr and Automattic need to address, but this decision is pretty unambiguous.

[sorio99]

Sometimes, when I play games originally made in Japan, I wonder what parts of the writing were actually intended in the original language.

Like, I’m playing Splatoon 3’s DLC today, and the character of Acht is pretty much always referred to with They/Them pronouns in dialogue, which for a single person in the English language would presumably mean they’re nonbinary. However, it could also mean that the characters who use those pronouns may not know what gender Acht is, and there aren’t a ton of situations where they’re even referred to by pronouns. And I wonder if that same ambiguity of gender is still there in the Japanese script, or if it’s only present in the English script.

Or there’s a dialogue exchange where Marina asks if Acht is hitting on Pearl “in front of”, with the implication that the sentence ends “in front of me,” which given the established connection of Off The Hook would seem to imply a romantic relationship, but also, that whole dialogue sequence might have been added in by localization, because the main point of the exchange is implying Acht is aware of Pearl from before the DLC. But also also, based on external material, if Acht isn’t non-binary then they’re probably a girl, so the localization would be either adding or adapting a scene of an either nonbinary or female being accused of hitting on another girl, which seems surprising for the fairly conservative Nintendo of America.

Anyways, non-binary octopi and lesbian squids may or may not be canon, is my point, and I’m curious if that’s also the case in Japan.

[sorio99]

I’ve been playing Side Order since, like, 2 in the morning, and I’ve gotta say, it’s already a strong contender for “Best DLC of the year”.

[sorio99]

Anyways, I’m gonna do some Splatoon posting for a while, because Side Order is out now, and I need a break from stressing about how absolutely fucked Tumblr is.

[sorio99]

My biggest fear with the whole PhotoMatt, Predstrogen thing is that it’s not going to become widespread enough for people to actually act on. That Tumblr’s very insulating nature is going to make it only pop up in the feeds of a small subset, and even if it does break containment, it’s only going to be as a novelty or meme. That people will at most see it as a funny joke or, more likely, never see it at all, rather than as an ongoing problem that the owner of Tumblr, so central to his company that he put his first name in the company’s name, would rather be picking fights with random Tumblr users over his terrible decisions, rather than actually address the site’s ongoing problems with systematically deplatforming trans women (as well as, as has been noted many times now, people of color) which have existed for years.

My second biggest fear is that some other major news event will come along and most of the people who WERE talking about the issue will just stop.

[sorio99]

The CEO of Tumblr, according to Wikipedia, lives in my hometown, which means that the timestamps I see on his posts are the same time he probably experienced posting them.

Which means that Tumblr is being run by the kind of guy who would be up at half past midnight replying to angry asks and digging his heels in deeper to a controversy he probably could have avoided at one point.

[sorio99]

In case I get banned in the next few hours (because this dude was up at midnight responding to his asks, so why wouldn’t he punch back immediately) this is why.