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derseprinceoftbd · 1 year

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An explainer for Homestuck, typed up on a Google doc for Reddit, and now transplanted onto Tumblr, with the hope of crossposting it onto Reddit. Most explainers I've seen utterly fail to get the tone of the series across, thus not answering the main question I see: "what is Homestuck *and why is it like this*". Why does it evoke the reactions it does? Why are so many things considered a reference? Who is Vriska? (I can't actually explain that one in under 3000 words, it turns out.) But, here's a briefer briefer (heh) on the subject of "What the actual fuck is Homestuck":

#Homestuck, A History;

Andrew Hussie, a person (now going by any pronouns) then known for various obscure things around the net, made an interactive reader-driven comic-type-thing called Jailbreak where he would draw panels demonstrating the events of the story as dictated by other posters in the thread, putting his favoured suggestions in the narration and responding in kind. The happenings and variables were influenced by his own strange brand of humor and set of fascinations, such as rap, the Starsky and Hutch movie and the cast thereof, horses, clowns, and H!rry P!tter as a cultural presence. He would eventually compile this, along with the unfinished followup, Bard Quest, on its own website.

The third installment of the so-called MS Paint Adventures, Problem Sleuth, was a massive step up in production value, featuring impressive art and output speed as well as evolutions such as some pages being flashing gifs. This sort of thing was considered to be one of the best demonstrations of the potential of the internet. It ran for 1674 pages over the course of about a year.

Homestuck was the followup to that, running 8123 pages from April 13th 2009-2016 with numerous hiatuses in the latter half of that time. It featured such advancements as colored panels as default, videos with sound, small WASD-controlled computer games on various pages, and most importantly, actual conversations between characters, allowing them to become three-dimensional and truly sympathetic. (Hussie, it would soon be revealed, was heavily skilled at writing compelling and unique character voices and dialogue writing in general.)

Homestuck was definitely the most complex MPSA, with a grand overarching plot being integrated into the results of the actions of the readers. The plot revolved around an in-universe game called SBURB with the power to influence reality, sort of a Jumanji with time-travel mechanics that would soon be revealed to be the centerpiece of reality itself, a program that destroys the home planets of its players to motivate them to enter the world of the game and fulfill an unknown grand purpose, complete with millions of fully sentient NPCs.

Homestuck has been described as "a story that's also a puzzle", and this lens has gained authorial approval. This is the sort of story where the Author appears as a character to explain things to the audience, another character ends up changing the color of the site to his own scheme and narrating in his own voice, and the Author bursts through a literal fourth wall into the world of the story, hunts him down, and beats him with a broom. This is the sort of story where one specific person has killed another three times across multiple iterations of both themselves and the universe, and three of the killee are alive at the end, despite all of them being versions that were killed by the killer, who himself has one alive at the end, and both of those people have four-letter names, the first two letters of which are the same.

Eventually the suggestions from readers became so numerous and difficult that the suggestion boxes were closed near the end of the first year, but their influence carried on; one easy example is a character only seen from the top half initially being theorized on the official forums as using a wheelchair, a fact which would not only become Canon, but highly relevant.

The early MSPAs curated an audience through programming humor and 80s-90s film references as filtered through the styles of Terry Pratchett, Mark Twain, and the Something Awful forums, but the audience for Homestuck, due to the nature of the characters, was markedly different, especially after the Trolls showed up.

You've probably seen them.

The Trolls, initially presented as some extremely odd and bothersome fellows on the internet, were soon shown to be a race of grey-skinned, orange-horned aliens that had undergone a SBURB Session that they claimed had been influenced by the lead human characters. Trolls possessed multicolored blood in both organized castes and clear deviations, psychic abilities, unique typing styles, insectoid traits as opposed to hominid, near-universal bisexuality with the sole known exception being Sapphic, and a complex romantic system with its own symbols, comically vague-yet-comprehensive reproductive system, and of course, relationship dynamics.

I cannot express how perfect the Trolls were in terms of catching on. Tumblr loved these fuckers and it's not at all hard to see why.

It's also worth noting that this wasn't the only market-perfect part of Homestuck; Classpecting, the equivalent of Hogwarts Houses, featured a 144/168/288/336/384(depending on who you ask and what they count, I've always thought 192)-strong grid system of human personality traits that not only seemed eerily accurate as a personality mapper, but corresponded to what elemental powers one received in the game of SBURB.

So... yeah. Homestuck was an incredibly complex and engaging work in both plot and presentation, driven by a single incredibly talented and flawed creative voice above all, and which was perfectly made to attract a massive, unabashedly bizarre/proudly cringe, and notably largely queer fanbase across a younger internet. The style of presentation, art, and character writing was instantly recognizable and relatively easy to imitate, leading to fanfiction and even fanmade adventures galore, most of the latter hosted on MSPFA.com.

Content warnings for Homestuck include: blood, clowns, dicks-out furry art in the background of like ten pages, brief black-and-white nudity, swearing, the R-slur, a joke about an acronym organically forming the F-slur, child abuse, discussed child abuse and homophobia, mocking of the disabled (as an unsympathetic action), cartoonish levels of sexism (as an unsympathetic action), mocking of otherkin, minor characters being racial stereotypes of Black (Meenah) and Japanese (Damara) people, minor characters being stereotypes of disabled people (Meulin and Mituna), a controversial and prominent depiction of blindness, underage alcoholism, written depections of noncon (as an unsympathetic action), jokes about pedophilia, and child grooming (textually 100% non-sexual, but sexually-coded).

Also: when I said the Trolls type weird, I wasn't kidding. Every character gets at least one color for their speech text, plus a pattern for how they type, generally worse for the Trolls, ranging from "no caps" to "British" to "drunk" to "ebonics" to "aLtErNaTiNg" to WH4T3V3R TH3 FUCK K1ND OF L33TSP34K BS T3R3Z1 1S DO1NG. So that's worth a warning.

And that's as abridged as you can get when summing up Homestuck.

#homestuck #andrew hussie #altstuck #tlcstuck #csau #crow strider au #Double-Death Of The Author #Homestuck explained #contains references to Priest-Scribe theory #explainer

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angryangelalpaca-blog · 7 years

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Mayan Mesoamerica

(Anthony Orlando) Article 1: Mayan Origins

The origin of the Mayan peoples and culture remains relatively vague, though the common consensus seems to be split between the Mayans shooting off from the Olmec or simply migrating to the region/developing into an independent peoples from indigenous populations (Mott). Takeshi Inomata, a University of Arizona anthropology professor, offered a different narrative in 2013, claiming that the Olmecs and Maya had risen up around the same time and greatly influenced each other's growth and culture, whilst also claiming that in the pre classical age both groups may have been one in the same, only splitting with the growth of large scale maize based agriculture (Toor) and possible genetic changes within the crop (Mott). Earlier claims made in post-contact society regarding the Mayas origin are quite dubious by today's standards, with propositions ranging from the Lost Tribes of Israel to, as a 16th century Spanish priest would claim, Atlantis (Smith). Regardless, the pre-Mayan peoples that would evolve into them, as well as other groups, would arrive in the Yucatan region at their earliest in 2600 B.C.E (Cóttrill) with the first continuous settlements appearing at the end of the “Archaic Period” in 2000 B.C.E (Smith).

Works Cited:

-Cóttrill, Jaime C. “Mayan Civilization.” Aztec History, 24 Apr. 2017, www.aztec-history.com/mayan-civilization.html.

-Mott, Nicholas. “New Evidence Unearthed for the Origins of the Maya.” National Geographic, National Geographic Society, 26 Apr. 2013, news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130425-maya-origins-olmec-pyramid-ceibal-inomata-archaeology-science/.

-Smith, Herman. “Origin of the Maya...or Where Did Those Dudes Come from Anyway .” San Pedro Sun [San Pedro Town], Edited by Dan Jamison and Eileen Jamison, 9th ed., 19 Aug. 1999, www.sanpedrosun.com/old/99-332.html.

-Toor, Amar. “Origins, Unknown: Where Did the Maya Empire Really Come from?” The Verge, Vox Media, 25 Apr. 2013, www.theverge.com/2013/4/25/4265458/takeshi-inomata-study-proposes-new-theory-on-maya-olmec-origins.

(Martha Rivera) Article 2: The Pre-Classic Mayan Period

Though many scholars are uncertain when the Mayan Civilization began, it is said to have begun around 2000 B.C. to 1800 B.C., which was considered to be termed the pre classic Mayan period. This was marked as the beginning of evidence that the Mayans had established a new way of life in agriculture, though they still depended heavily on hunting and fishing as their main source of food, they began growing crops such as; corn, beans, squash and cassava, which is known as Yuca to add to their diet. Along with the development of agriculture, basic forms of pottery, stone monument designs with scripts engraved, jade mosaics and carved stone began to appear and these were just the beginning of what the Mayan brought about. Towards the end of the preclassic Maya, the Mayan population began to grow rapidly, religious practices were started and small villages began to develop into cities, with many classes of mayans beginning to dwell, the Mayans started to expand their presence between the high and low land regions. Nakbe in Petén part of Guatemala is the earliest documented city in the Mayan lowlands, where large structures were to be dated back to 750 BC.

Work cited:

B. (n.d.). The Maya. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-worldhistory/chapter/the-maya/

“Pre-classic Period.” Pre-classic Period | MESO-AMERICAN Research Center, www.marc.ucsb.edu/research/maya/ancient-maya-civilization/preclassic-period.

History.com Staff. “Maya.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 2009,

www.history.com/topics/maya.

Maya civilization.

https://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_civilization

https://www.penn.museum/documents/publications/expedition/PDFs/54-1/who-were-the-maya.pdf

(Courtney King) Article 3: Location and Temples

The Mayans resided in what was called Mesoamerica, also known as the lands of Central America and Mexico. More specifically, these indigenous people populated what is modern day Yucatan, Campeche, Quintana Roo, Tabasco, and Chiapas in Mexico. In fact, location influenced these people greatly, considering their name comes from an old city in Yucatan (one of the places they lived) called Mayapan. Location also plays an important role when Mayans were differentiating themselves by their specific location and language. The Mayans called themselves Quiche if they were from the south, or Yucatec if they were from the north. Regardless of which “type” of Mayan they were - they all had one thing in common, building beautiful pyramids that are still standing today. There were lots of these temples spread throughout the lands in which the Mayans lived. There is Lamanai, located in northern Belize, Coba in Mexico, Caracol, which is the largest site in Belize, Tikal, in northern Guatemala, and the most known of them all, Chichen Itza which contains one of the most incredible temples named El Castillo. Those are just a few of the many temples that were spread across Mesoamerica. The main reason for these temple-pyramids were to pay respects to their gods. It is important to note where the Mayans resided because of the fact that Mayans are still alive today and continue the lives their ancestors once lived while getting to see the amazing pyramids that they built so long ago.

Works Cited:

Mark, Joshua J. “Maya Civilization.” Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia, 06 Jul 2012. Web. 01 Oct 2017.

History.com Staff. "Maya." History.com. A&E Television Networks, 2009. Web. 01 Oct. 2017.

Touropia. "10 Most Beautiful Ancient Mayan Temples." Touropia. N.p., 10 Nov. 2016. Web. 01 Oct. 2017.

Giffen, Mark. "Facts About the Mayan Pyramids." Synonym. Classroom, n.d. Web. 01 Oct. 2017.

(Alex Powers) Article 4: Mayan Language(s)

The language of the Mayans, prior to 2000 B.C., is known as a proto-Mayan language. As the Mayan civilization spread throughout the present day Guatemala regions of Central America during the pre-classic period, the Mayan languages developed alongside. The primary language to emerge from the Mayan classic period, entitled Ch’olan, became the language of elites responsible for diplomatic relations and trade, while local populations continued to speak in variations of the proto-Mayan languages. The survival of the Mayan language into our modern era is largely thanks to the diversification the language experienced in the pre-classic period, creating near 30 variations in the language. The Mayan ruling class emphasized the importance of verbal language, as well as the importance of a written text.

Works Cited:

Brown, Cecil H., and Søren Wichmann. "Proto‐Mayan Syllable Nuclei." International Journal of American Linguistics 70, no. 2 (2004) pp.128-86

Houston, Stephen, John Robertson, and David Stuart. "The Language of Classic Maya Inscriptions." Current Anthropology 41, no. 3 (2000) pp. 321-56

Thornton, John K. A Cultural History of the Atlantic World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. p.324

(Alex Powers) Article 5: Mayan Literature & Text

While the majority of common Mayan populations were illiterate, the ruling elite would practice literacy by appointing scribes. While the exact role of the scribe in Mayan society is still contested amongst historians, the belief is that they were the record keepers of the progressing society. The Mayan written language is hieroglyphic; meaning the language utilizes pictures and symbols to represent syllables, as well as logograms to represent entire words. Mayan scribes, or scholars, created many works of art and literature on pottery and in written texts; however, with the arrival of the Spanish, many works of Mayan literature were destroyed in the processes of colonization. Modern historians, examining the few remaining written texts from the Mayan civilizations, are now able to translate more than half of the texts which survived; however, the absence of any sort of reference to the proper utilization of the language leaves much of the remaining documentation untranslatable.

Works Cited:

Hamann, Agnieszka1. "Tz’ihb ’write/paint’: Multimodality in Maya glyphic texts." Visible Language 51, no. 1 (April 2017) pp.38-57

Foster, Lynne V. Handbook to Life in the Ancient Maya World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. p.331

Thornton, John K. A Cultural History of the Atlantic World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. p.169

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sensitivefern · 8 years

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Z undressed almost completely and sat cross-legged on the bed. I stroked her brown body delightfully and kissed her all the time. She said she was underkissed... When I kissed her on the eyelids, I told her they were salty. She said, ‘I cry a lot’... We discussed pubic hair. What was it for? I suggested protection. But she thought that this couldn’t be true, because men’s beards weren’t needed for protection.

She said that I was extremely gentlemanly, but that I didn’t take off my socks in bed – it is true that I was wearing uncomfortably bristling double garters... [...] I asked her about the open-mouth kissing that always occurs in the movies. I had never done anything like that. [...] – wonderful to feel a wet, gluey, reeking cunt.

[Edmund Wilson]

===

Preface

Is the ‘Holy Bible’ holy? Is it ‘the word of God?’ And can it be disproved?

There is nothing ‘holy’ about the Bible, nor is it ‘the word of God’. It was not written by God-inspired saints, but by power-seeking priests. Who but priests consider sin the paramount issue? Who but priests write volumes of religious rites and rituals? No one, but for these priestly scribes sin and rituals were imperatives: their purpose was to found on them an awe-inspiring religion. By this intellectual tyranny they sought to gain control, and they achieved it. By 400 BC they were the masters of ancient Israel. For so great a project they needed a theme, a framework, and this they found in the Creation lore of more knowledgeable races. This they commandeered and perverted – the natural to the supernatural, and truth to error. The Bible is, we assert, but priest-perverted cosmology.

[Deceptions and Myths of the Bible]

===

However dioxin is produced, it enters the air and ultimately returns to Earth in rain and fog, where it is then absorbed by plants which are then consumed by animals. After its entry into the food chain, dioxin builds up, or biomagnified, in the flesh of exposed animals, until they are either slaughtered or their milk is extracted for human consumption. After it enters the human body, it can continue to build up in our own tissues.

It was not until August 2000 that consumers became aware that dioxin is a regular contaminant in cow’s milk, and thus all dairy products. At the Dioxin 200 conference, a sample serving of Ben & Jerry’s ‘World’s Best Vanilla’ ice cream was revealed to contain 2,200 times the amount of dioxin legally permitted to be discharged into the San Francisco Bay by the nearby Tosco Oil refinery. [...] In its ‘Nutrition Action Health Letter’, the Center for Science in the Public Interest advised: ‘Clearly, one way to minimize your exposure to dioxin is to avoid animal foods, including dairy products’.

[Whitewash]

===

[An] interaction sphere is a region in which one society disseminates its symbols, values, and inventions to others... [...] The Adena interaction sphere lasted from about 800 BC to about 100 BC.

Textbooks sometimes say that the Adena were succeeded by the Hopewell, but the relation is unclear; the Hopewell may simply have been a later stage of the same culture. The Hopewell, too, built mounds, and like the Adena seem to have spoken an Algonquian language (‘Hopewell’ refers to the farmer on whose property an early site was discovered.) Based in southern Ohio, the Hopewell interaction sphere lasted until about 400 AD and extended across two-thirds of what is now the United States. Into the Midwest, came seashells from the Gulf of Mexico, silver from Ontario, fossil shark’s teeth from Chesapeake Bay, and obsidian from Yellowstone. In return the Hopewell exported ideas: the bow and arrow, monumental earthworks, fired pottery (Adena pots were not put into kilns), and, probably most important, the Hopewell religion.

[1491]

===

‘Berries of most honeysuckles won’t hurt you, but they are virtually tasteless. An exception is the blue fruit of the Northern fly honeysuckle [Lonicera canadensis], which is sweet, tasty, and can be prepared like blueberries for pies and jelly’.

===

❚David Frum Anything yet? Did I miss the Trump White House’s comment on the latest WikiLeaks attack on US intelligence agencies? ...Have any of the super patriots at Fox had anything to say about the latest attack on US national security by their friends at WikiLeaks?

New Republic The WikiLeaks CIA dump is quickly turning into a conspiracy theory: The CIA did the hacks!

Pope Francis Spotted Sunbathing Nude In St. Peter’s Square

Probiotic found in yogurt can reverse depression symptoms

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derseprinceoftbd · 1 year

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In honor of the new Upd8, here's the updated version of my Personal Homestuck Explainer.

An explainer for Homestuck, typed up on a Google doc for Reddit, and now transplanted onto Tumblr, and too long to fit in a single reddit comment. Most explainers I've seen utterly fail to get the tone of the series across, thus not answering the main question I see: "what is Homestuck *and why is it like this*". Why does it evoke the reactions it does? Why are so many things considered a reference? Who is Vriska? (I can't actually explain that one in under 3000 words, it turns out.) But, here's a briefer briefer (heh) on the subject of "What the actual fuck is Homestuck":

Andrew Hussie, a person (now going by any pronouns) then known for various obscure things around the net, made an interactive reader-driven comic-type-thing called Jailbreak where he would draw panels demonstrating the events of the story as dictated by other posters in the thread, putting his favored suggestions in the narration and responding in kind. The happenings and variables were influenced by his own strange brand of humor and set of fascinations, such as rap, horses, clowns, and H!rry P!tter as a cultural presence. He would eventually compile this, along with the unfinished followup, Bard Quest, on its own website.

Homestuck was the followup to that, running 8123 pages from April 13th 2009-2016 with numerous hiatuses in the latter half of that time. It featured such advancements as videos with sound, small WASD-controlled computer games on various pages, and most significantly, actual conversations between characters, semi-hidden behind clickable boxes at the bottom of some pages, allowing them to become three-dimensional and truly sympathetic. Hussie, it would soon be revealed, was heavily skilled at writing compelling and unique character voices and dialogue writing in general.

Homestuck was definitely the most complex MPSA, with a grand overarching plot being integrated into the results of the actions of the readers. The plot revolved around an in-universe game called SBURB with the power to influence reality, sort of a Jumanji with time-travel mechanics that would soon be revealed to be the centerpiece of reality itself, destroying the home planets of its players to motivate them to enter the world of the game and fulfill an unknown grand purpose, complete with millions of fully sentient NPCs. (Homestuck is, technically, an isekai.)

Homestuck has been described as "a story that's also a puzzle", and this lens has gained authorial approval; events are often told anachronistically, as a kitchen sink of high-concept ideas are explored by a man who sometimes wants to show off his semi-deconstructive version of a classic sci-fi/fantasy trope, sometimes wants to infuriate readers through anticlimaxes and misdirections, and sometimes wants to just go off on a tangent about a random movie from his childhood that somehow soon becomes integral to the plot in an absurdly esoteric fashion.

Eventually the suggestions from readers became so numerous and difficult that the suggestion boxes were closed near the end of the first year, leading to less meandering from Act 4 onwards, but the influence of the audience remained; one easy example is a character only seen from the top half initially being theorized on the official forums as using a wheelchair, a fact which would not only become Canon, but highly relevant.

You've probably seen them.

The Trolls, initially presented as some extremely odd and bothersome fellows on the internet, were soon shown to be a race of grey-skinned, orange-horned aliens. Trolls possessed multicolored blood in both organized castes and clear deviations, psychic abilities, unique typing styles, insectoid traits as opposed to hominid, near-universal bisexuality with the sole known exception being Sapphic, and a complex romantic system with its own symbols, comically vague-yet-comprehensive reproductive system, and of course, relationship dynamics.

I cannot express how perfect the Trolls were in terms of catching on. Tumblr loved these fuckers and it's not at all hard to see why.

It's also worth noting that this wasn't the only market-perfect part of Homestuck; Classpecting, the equivalent of Hogwarts Houses, featured a 144/168/288/336/384(depending on who you ask and what they count)-strong grid system of human personality traits that not only seemed eerily accurate as a personality mapper, but corresponded to what elemental powers one received in the game of SBURB.

So... yeah. Homestuck was an incredibly complex and engaging work, driven by a single incredibly talented and flawed creative voice, which was perfectly made to attract a massive, unabashedly bizarre/proudly cringe, and notably largely queer fanbase across a younger internet; you may well be aware of incidents such as cosplay failures and inappropriate recreations of Troll culture. The style of presentation, art, and character writing was instantly recognizable and relatively easy to imitate, leading to fanfiction and even fanmade adventures galore, most of the latter hosted on MSPFA.com.

The main site for Homestuck is broken now-it's recommended that new readers download the [Unofficial Homestuck Collection](https://bambosh.dev/unofficial-homestuck-collection/), and starting with Problem Sleuth to ease into the format and writing is a pretty popular choice. The ending is also considered generally quite poor in a number of ways, particularly regarding unfollowed foreshadowing and blatant abandonment of character arcs, with some fans even [making](https://friendlybatteringram.tumblr.com/tagged/altstuck) their own [works](https://mspfa.com/?s=44153&p=1) as [substitutions](http://mspfa.com/?s=12003&p=1). You can find The Homestuck Epilogues (a sequel novel) on the official site, and Homestuck^2 Beyond Canon (a sequel webcomic after the Epilogues) on its own website, but neither of these are very well liked by fans (at all). YouTube also has several dubs of the comic; by far the largest and most popular is [Voxus](https://youtube.com/@Voxus), which has unfortunately slowed to a crawl at around the 65% mark.

Content warnings for Homestuck include: blood, violence including decapitation, clowns, brainwashing/mental possession, dicks-out furry bara art in the background of like ten pages, brief black-and-white nudity, swearing, the R-slur, a joke about an acronym organically forming the F-slur, child abuse, discussed child abuse and homophobia, mocking of the disabled (as an unsympathetic action), cartoonish levels of sexism (as an unsympathetic action), statements that an antagonist is analogous to Hitler, mocking of otherkin, a minor character being a racial stereotype of Japanese people (Damara), a somewhat major character being a stereotype of Black people (Meenah), minor characters being stereotypes of disabled people (Meulin and Mituna), a controversial and prominent depiction of blindness, eye trauma, underage alcoholism, written depections of noncon facilitated by mind control (as an unsympathetic action), sexual assult (an unwanted kiss, as an unsympathetic action), jokes about pedophilia, and child grooming (textually 100% non-sexual, but sexually-coded).

And that's as abridged as you can get when summing up Homestuck.

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