tenaciouschronicler - Tumblr blog

[tenaciouschronicler]

Sburban Secrets: What Do We Know About This Game?

One Month Retrospective

GG: whats sburb?? EB: oh, it is this game. EB: it's ok i guess. i'm still figuring it out. [p.169]

Sburb, a video game released in beta by Skaianet Systems on April 10, 2009, is the central focus of Homestuck in its first 175 pages. I’ve tried to put together a comprehensive overview of all the information we know about the game so far.

Before John installed the game, our information was very limited. We had the green house and spirograph logos, release date, and a suggestion that it was a highly anticipated game poised to be the most important release of the year. We didn’t know anything about its actual gameplay - John’s apparent cluelessness, TT’s feigned confidence and TG’s stated disinterest say more about their characters than about what information is out there.

Since John and TT began gameplay, we’ve learned that the game blurs boundaries between the virtual and real worlds, allowing for a ‘server’ player to remotely alter the physical environment of a ‘client’ player. The game has its own currency, language and equipment, and is able to instantly transform a real house into an isometric, single-room view displayed on another player’s screen thousands of miles away. Game constructs can be summoned from thin air by the server player, and then interfaced with directly by the client player without a screen or controller. It is possible for both players to be server and client simultaneously, as the server role is conducted digitally, and the client role is fulfilled in the real world.

Like any good game, this initial taster of gameplay suggests a huge amount of mechanics and possibilities to be explored. So, what do we know about Sburb already, what does it say about the world John and TT live in, and what do we still have to discover?

Essay below the cut - about 4.2k words, but subdivided into sections, so feel free to skip to the ones that interest you.

Missed Hints

Combing back through the comic, I can't find any hints prior to installation that Sburb gameplay would take place in the physical world - however, I did miss a couple more general hints. The green house logo (hex code #38f43d) has the smaller square jutting out of the larger square on the top right, with the roof shifting position to allow for this. This was a clear sign that the game is about modifying the structure of houses.

The secondary logo - the green spirograph - was also a hint. Spirograph is a registered trademark for a children's toy, which according to its Wikipedia entry is 'a geometric drawing device that produces mathematical roulette curves' through moving differently sized gears and pins with a pen attached. Pieces can be combined via their 'teeth' to create more complex shapes. Before it became a drawing toy, early versions were used to help prevent banknote forgeries and to calculate areas within curves. The toy combines creative and mathematical pursuits - and I think the game functions similarly, combining mechanical constructs and data processing with free building and object design.

The final missed hint is in the Homestuck Adventure Map (found in the Unofficial Collection at /map/6) which is a page I'm really curious about in general. Beneath the act title, 'The Note Desolation Plays', we see a greyed out piece of build grist - a hexagonal bipyramid, or Gusher - with two dashes. We now know that this indicates a piece of equipment within Sburb that has no grist cost. Possibly, each Act will see us able to upgrade and deploy new machines - so Act 2 will be the Punch Designix, and we'll see a cost of 4 purple Gushers on the adventure map.

Skaianet Systems

On page 114, we see the Sburb installation screen, which states that the game is version 0.0.1. This is a small detail, but it sticks out, since this is clearly a large scale beta release - and version 0.0.1 suggests a very early, very limited pre-alpha release, a prototype of what the game will be played by only a very small group of people, probably involved with the game company. A beta release is typically a complete version of a game with all content and functionalities, but might still need bug fixes and small feature changes. The suggestion here is that Skaianet Systems made this extremely complex and potentially world altering game from scratch, did not test or modify it at all during the process, and blindly released it to a large number of players. This has the potential to be absolutely disastrous.

So, who the hell is making this game? Skaianet Systems Incorporated isn't a real corporation that exists outside of Homestuck, although given the scale and publicity of this game's release, they are likely an established corporation within the world. It's possible they released some of John's other 'quality titles', as these don't have known publishers. 'Skaia' is Bulgarian for 'sky' (and Skaïa is Afrikaans for 'sky') while Skaiå is Latvian for 'sound'. These are fairly generic words, but both already relevant to the meta of the comic - the sky is featured in the Act 1 icon of the adventure map and in the title card on p.82, and we have the [S] indicator for pages with sound, so either of these is a likely reference.

A less likely connection is that SKAIA is the Saskatchewan Automobile Injury Appeal Commission. The game is linked to the suburbs (we don't know if it would even work in a big city apartment or row home) and cars are also a huge part of the suburbs, necessary for getting around and for not being stuck at home. It's possible that the game was made by this organization to somehow warn against or prevent automobile injuries by...? I don't know, but the game being made by a non-gaming organization sure would explain why it hasn't had any pre-beta testing.

Pre-Release Reception

Sburb appears heavily advertised pre-release. We know that major game magazines had the chance to play and review Sburb before its beta release - but the only review we've seen is from GameBro, written by someone who explicitly didn't play it. However, the review being the featured cover story, combined with the reviewer referring to Sburb as the ‘“Game of the Year” or whatever’ that ‘a lot of cats seem hella pumped of’ [p.42] suggest that it is highly publicized and praised - disliking the game is a controversial opinion. We know that the game has an official poster and was featured on a calendar, which were either commercially produced or sent to people who signed up for the beta release.

John and TT's lack of surprise about the game's ability to manipulate the real world environment plus their limited knowledge about the game's purpose and mechanics suggests one of two things. One, it's common in the world of Homestuck for games to extend into the physical world. This could explain the captchalogue and strife decks - it makes a lot more sense for real people to have inventory systems if these can be easily integrated with video games (although as Dad has captchalogue and strife cards floating around, this probably isn't their only function - it's hard to see Dad as a big gamer). Or two, this is the first game to attempt such a feat, and this aspect was well publicized and is the reason why the game is so anticipated by John, TT and the general public. This second option would make it even more foolhardy to release the game without alpha testing, but would explain why John is only trying to get to grip with captchalogue mechanics today.

I'm interested in what the wider public's reaction to Sburb will be. If this is the first game to extend into reality, I'd expect some kind of moral panic over young players losing a grip on the distinction between fantasy and reality. I'm thinking about the cultural response to games like Second Life, where non-gamers have been concerned that players will lose themselves in their game avatars and stop caring about real life, or take actions (such as cheating on a partner) that they wouldn't in real life, under the guise of 'playing a game'. Surely these public fears are only compounded the more 'real' a game becomes.

I think it'd be interesting if TG and GG became more directly opposed to Sburb when they learn more about it - TG expressly doesn't want to play and thinks it sounds 'so HELLS of boring' [p.110] and GG hasn't heard of the game, in contrast to John and TT's excitement to play it. This disinterest could become fear when TG and GG hear more about what's happening in John's house. This could be interesting in connection to the scientific themes of John and TT's chumhandles and religious themes of TG and GG's - TT is kind of playing god in this game by instantly building rooms and summoning large machines with unknown potential into being. It would be valid to be concerned about this, and the game could drive a rift between this friend group.

Punch Card Alchemy

EB: what is with all these big contraptions? TT: If I had to guess, they appear to facilitate a sort of system involving punch card-based alchemy. EB: huh. EB: to what end? EB: i mean what are we supposed to be doing in this game? TT: That remains to be seen. [p.157]

We explicitly don’t know what the objectives of Sburb are, but TT's guess here seems reasonable. A punch card is a physical card that stores digital data through punched holes, used for data processing and machine operation. They’re largely obsolete now, but their ability to bridge physical and digital spaces makes perfect sense with Sburb (and with Homestuck as a whole, since these appear to be captchalogue cards). So a punched captchalogue card can store data about the item on it, as well as storing the item itself. Alchemy relates to transmutation, traditionally to the transmuting of base metals into gold or sickness into health (with the goal of achieving eternal life). In our world it’s entirely speculative, but in the world of Homestuck it may already be real. 

According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, alchemy [and astrology] ‘represent attempts to discover the relationship of man to the cosmos and to exploit that relationship to his benefit. The first of these objectives may be called scientific, the second technological.’ and ‘have always been pursued in the belief that the processes human beings witness in heaven and on earth manifest the will of the Creator and, if correctly understood, will yield the key to the Creator’s intentions.’ This definitely ties in with the scientific/religious theme discussed above.

If TT is correct, Sburb is about storing data about objects on their captchalogue cards, and then manipulating that data such that it transmutes the object itself. For example, John could captchalogue the Con Air bunny, determine its corresponding sequence of holes and punch them into the card, and then add (or somehow remove) holes to change things about it, like giving it a second head. The players will probably have to create specific items in order to complete the game, items that don't yet exist in real life and require complex modifications - or perhaps they'll create something like a philosopher's stone, a codex for transforming objects as a whole. This could allow them to not only win the game, but to use their alchemical skills in the wider world, not just confined to John's house.

Machines and Mechanics

Sburb has at least three machines which appear game critical - the cruxtruder [p.170], totem lathe [p.152], and alchemiter [p.160]. A fourth machine, the punch designix, will likely become necessary later, and there are probably even more. We get a good view of each of these three machines on the stated pages, but as of yet, John and TT have not figured out the function or operation of any of them.

We know that something is inside the cruxtruder and can be released by opening its lid, which makes sense with its root word ‘extrude’. It probably extrudes 'crux', which is 'the basic, central, or critical point or feature' or 'something puzzling or difficult to explain'. I'd guess this will be the physical counterpart to the digital build grist, and that these are the two critical resources for the game, which don't have real world analogues and aren't made of any known material.

'Totem' originally refers to a religious or ancestral artifact, but has entered common usage as a synonym for 'emblem'. A lathe, meanwhile, is a machine that rotates an object so that an operation (such as cutting or sanding) can be applied to an object symmetrically, such as shaping a round ceramic bowl on a pottery wheel. I'm imagining the crux as a kind of soft putty, perhaps even an ectoplasm, which John shapes on the lathe into emblems - perhaps as prototypes for items that he will create later through the punch card alchemy system, so that he doesn't have to expend resources on creating the actual item before he knows if it'll work.

If TT's theory is correct, the alchemiter and punch designix perform punch card alchemy. The alchemiter also contains the word 'miter', which is either a perpendicular joint made by carving the edges of each piece into an angle, or a piece of headgear worn by Christian bishops and used to represent the bishop on a digital chessboard. This gives us a clear connection to building, and more religious imagery tying into the theme of playing God. 'Designix' contains design, which could be the designing of punch cards or could refer to intelligent design of the world by a godlike figure, and 'nix', refusing to allow something - suggesting that only some designs will be allowed on punch cards, while others will be nixed.

The cruxtruder and totem lathe both feature the green spirograph symbol, suggesting their creative/mechanical potential. The alchemiter features new gray fractal-like symbols, like a more geometric version of the spirograph. Fractals are commonly associated with self-similarity on different scales, recursion, and detail. These feel like potential themes of Homestuck as a whole - Sburb being a game within the game of Homestuck, MSPA's Midnight Crew being a comic within the comic of Homestuck, and Sburb and captchalogue cards both being bridges between physical and digital objects or ways to seemingly conjure objects from nothing - but they may also relate to how alchemy works, to the possibility of scaling objects up or down, or increasing their complexity to introduce additional functions. Or, the use of alchemy could lead to an increasing scale of gameplay as John levels up. Currently TT can only manipulate his house, but in time she may gain control over his street, then his neighborhood, then his whole town, and so on.

[thanks to @tenaciouschronicler for inspiring me to analyze the root words of these contraptions via their analysis of the interface buttons]

In-Game Currency

Judging by its inclusion in the Adventure Map and its clear criticality to gameplay, Build Grist is going to be really important. We see the Grist Cache on page 153. It's a large menu that takes over the entire screen, with 36 total entries. Only five of them are filled. The blue Gusher is Build Grist, and John starts with 20 units, his current Cache Limit. There's also a purple Gusher, a white cube, a yellow droplet and a green Gusher. John starts with zero units of these (unfortunate, as the Punch Designix costs four purple grist) but they are unlocked as possibilities, while all other entries simply read '?'.

Grist is necessary to create some items, but not all. Extending a room requires Build Grist, as does modifying a room (removing an item that's connected to the structure of the house itself, such as a toilet). Grist is not needed to move an item like the magic chest, which isn't stuck to the floor. We don't know how grist is obtained, but if it's necessary for creation then it may be acquired via destruction, through some variation on an equal and opposite energy principle. Now that TT has retrieved John's items from the yard, if she destroyed the extension to John's room, would she get the grist back? Would it be one to one, retrieving all four units, or would some be permanently expended - for example, getting two units back from destroying a four-unit extension? If she were to return the toilet to its original location, would she also recover some or all of the grist?

Since there are limited items in John’s house to destroy and potentially unlimited building, it’s more likely that grist is obtained through quests. John figuring out how to open the cruxtruder is probably an early game quest that will yield small amounts of bonus grist, as will using the other machines. Different machines may yield different grist types, with the currently ‘unlocked’ grists corresponding to the equipment John has access to. More complex quests will allow John to level up and increase his cache limit.

Or, in a darker timeline, John will have to spend real money for grist. Microtransactions have been a part of gaming for a couple decades, originally showing up in arcade games like Double Dragon 3, where players can insert additional coins into the machine between levels in exchange for powerups. This model has expanded to video games, and notably, Electronic Arts released an online store for The Sims 2 in June of last year. The Sims is clearly a huge influence on Sburb, so I can imagine this aspect being recreated too.

John has his dad’s PDA, which could be relevant if Dad has, say, his credit card numbers written down. Or TT could use her new powers to open the safe in Dad’s office, which could be filled with money. If the game is sinister, it may be trying to trap kids in situations where their houses are destroyed or they’re in physical danger, and then force them to spend their family’s money to put things right. There’s space for some interesting commentary on the increasingly commercial and pay-to-win aspects of video games.

Saving and Quitting

On page 138, we see the Sburb interface, which (among other things) has buttons in the top left to 'save' and 'quit' the game. While this is standard for computer programs, we don't know how these functions could interact with the real world. Can the state of John's house be 'saved' so that if TT does something stupid like rip out all the bathroom appliances or accidentally expend all the build grist, John's house could be restored to its previous state? If so, is it only the house that's restored (the house is saved at 5:30pm, gets modified for another half hour, and then the 5:30pm house instantaneously becomes the house at 6pm as the save is restored) or is the player also 'restored' via traveling back in time to 5:30pm? If it's the second option, would John remember the actions taken between 5:30pm and 6pm, or would his knowledge also be reversed? Would time also be reversed for TT as the server player, for Dad as a non-player in John's house, for the whole world? This seems outside of the scope of what the game should be capable of, and otterLocks on Discord pointed out that as TT cannot select a player [p.145], Sburb probably can't manipulate people the way it can buildings - so the 'house only' restoration is a lot more likely.

The game requires wifi to operate, and when TT loses connection, she also loses control of John's house, dropping anything she currently has selected by the cursor. However, John can still interact with game constructs while she's offline. Once a machine like the Cruxtruder has been deployed, it exists independently of the server connection. This suggests that TT could simply quit the game and leave John's house in a total mess with a giant mysterious machine blocking his front door, and nobody could do anything about this. Highly unwise from the designer's perspective, because you know some players will use this game to absolutely fuck with each other. But the alternative sounds dangerous too - if actually quitting the game restores the house to its original state, what happens if the player was standing in a room that ceases to exist? Would they fall and get hurt? Could this upset the base structure of the house if too many modifications had been made before quitting? And perhaps most importantly, if the house suddenly shrunk and changed shape, what would the neighbors think?

Themes and Meta

How does all this tie into the broader themes and meta of Homestuck? This could be its own post (and probably will be at some point) but in brief - John wants more control over his environment. There are things about his home he is unhappy with, including an inability to go downstairs without encountering his father, and the presence of a large number of harlequins. Perhaps he plans to have TT help him change these things. If he really must be stuck at home, then having the ability to change that home (even via TT's intervention) to a far greater extent than his dad can is a worthy consolation prize.

TT is able to manipulate John's environment, and John has full knowledge that she's doing this, even if he can't control her actions - shown by his evident frustration when she starts ripping out the plumbing in the bathroom. The narrator or player of Homestuck is also able to take certain actions that change John's environment, though it seems like John believes in universe that he is the one doing this. These two things are related, but exist on different levels of abstraction from John himself - and interestingly, TT has a greater power than the narrator, which seems inverted from how most stories would function. It would be fascinating to see TT and the narrator fighting for control over John, while John simply wants to have greater influence over his own life. I don't think it's accidental that our most direct address from the narrator ([Mouseover the interface buttons. -AH] on page 138) happens at the moment TT takes control of John's house. John's agency (or lack of it) is a theme I'd really like to explore in more depth in the next few weeks.

Final Thoughts

Some aspects of Sburb are realistic, while others definitely aren’t. The fact that a toilet cannot be lifted from the bathroom without also destroying the floor and plumbing is realistic; the fact that an extra segment of floor can be added to a house and the wall will adjust to match definitely isn’t. The distinction appears to be that previously existing physical items in the house will react in more ‘realistic’ ways, while items and structures created by the game are less bound by the laws of reality, though not entirely free of them.

Overall, I think this game is built on two dichotomies - science (or machinery) vs religion and physical vs digital - and the interplay between them. Our four main characters will embody each combination of these dichotomies. Right now I think the pairings are John as science/physical (based on his screen name and role as the client player), TT as science/digital (server player), TG as religion/digital and GG as religion/physical (these two based entirely on screen names).

After attempting to organize all these thoughts, here are some of the key questions about Sburb I'm left with.

Who made this game, and what is their intent? Are they genuinely trying to make a good and cool game that pushes the limits of what gaming can be? Or are they trying to use young and impressionable gamers to cause actual harm to the world?

Does anything change about gameplay when the server and client are both connected to each other? Is this the ‘intended’ way to play the game, opening up new mechanics and possibilities for both players? Could somebody install both the server and client discs and play both roles for themself?

How do non-players interact with Sburb? How will John’s dad be affected by all the changes to his house? Could he interact with the Cruxtruder etc, or are they operable by players only? Can TT ‘select’ a non-player human?

What bugs are present in Sburb that need to be fixed in beta testing, and how will they impact John and TT’s game? What are the Sburb cheat codes? What are they capable of that the base game isn’t, and will John and TT find any?

Is John actually any good at video games? He’s sunk ‘countless manhours’ into them, but had trouble even installing Sburb, so has he ever beaten a game before? Will this just be another comedy of errors like his captchalogue system?

I’d love to play Sburb. I might not be eligible - I live in a row home in what Wikipedia considers an inner city area - but I have a few friends I’d trust to build an extra room on top of my room, with a cool spiral staircase/slide deal to move between them, for starters. Hussie has done a great job designing a game that’s both interesting to analyze and super fun to fantasize about playing. But the radical possibilities of the game open up even more potential for disasters, and when things about this game inevitably start going wrong (or right, if it's what the creators intended), we could see some drastic fallouts for John - far worse than a bathtub on his living room stairs.

[tenaciouschronicler]

beta kids’s handles

[tenaciouschronicler]

garden on my gnostic til i [post title pending]

(page 169)

gardenGnostic is BACK!!!! They definitely feel like a character who's set up to be mysterious and to make the audience want to see more of, and it's definitely working. We get confirmation that they sent the green package, which brings up a new question: John has gifts from two of his three chums, so why hasn't TT sent him anything? Is there a chance she will be able to send him a gift via Sburb?

GG doesn't know what Sburb is, which is curious. We know it's a highly publicized, long awaited game touted by journalists as the 'Game of the Year'. GG must be terminally offline, or into REALLY obscure stuff, to have not even heard of it. I have this theory that each of the chums is going to be associated with a different type of media - John is visual/screen media (movies and video games), TT will be print media (books both fiction and nonfiction, judging by the way she talks), TG will be audio media (music and perhaps podcasts judging by the 'tech' in his screen name and the fact that he likes to be 'cool' and perhaps on the cutting edge of new mediums). And GG will be... ???? They're an absolute missing link, and we don't know enough to pin them down, but I feel like learning more about them is the key to fully understanding the whole group.

A possible explosion outside GG's house is weird, but the way they talk about it is even weirder - 'whoa what was that?????' as though they expected John to hear it too. I don't think they're neighbors, otherwise why wouldn't GG deliver the package in person? It's possible they just have a very stream of consciousness talking style, but, it's more interesting to me to think that they genuinely thought John would have an answer. And also, we know that John has weird shit going on in his house right now, possibly loud noises as TT uproots the whole ass bathtub, so is it possible at all that GG is hearing sounds from John's house? Are they on a permanent voice call? Or is there a weirder explanation than that?

[tenaciouschronicler]

Movie Update

I watched A Time To Kill tonight; it's a long and emotionally heavy movie that gets into some very dark themes. As such, I don't really feel good about rating it or analyzing it in relation to Homestuck. If the comic does shift in tone and reckoning with racism, sexual assault, or similarly weighty topics, I will engage with those as they come up, but given the current tone of the comic it doesn't feel right to make direct links between these two pieces of media. If anyone else is considering watching this, I'd recommend looking up a list of content warnings first.

MOVIES WATCHED: 7/11

MOST RECENT MOVIE: A Time To Kill (1996) - rating n/a

[tenaciouschronicler]

May 19 2024 2009

(Ungodly hour posting)

I've been stuggling to make posts on the recent updates but each keeps leaving me like there's no good place to bring thoughts together without just that little bit more info.

With how this last one ended theres a good chance we are gonna be hit with a lot. Most of what we have gotten is TT creating so much chaos. First removing the toilet and putting it outside, then placing a machine infront of the door, then my personal fave:

EB: you can see me, right.

EB: tell me what is wrong with this picture.

Absolutely Nothing!

John also upgrades to a sledgehammer, conveniently placed below the toilet hole that he (very gracefully) jumps down.

We learn that TT probably doesn't have the best home life and is almost the opposite side of the country from John where its storming and wifi is intermittent.

At 5:25 we get the chance to talk with GG with the help of Dad's PDA. A very bubbly person who has surprisingly NOT heard of SBURB.

Lots of questions on mechanics of the game and it's lasting real worlds effects have come up on the D forum but @homestuckreplay has an amazing analysis that i scheduled for later (or you can just find it on the blog) that touches on these and other things. Seriously, check it out its great!

[tenaciouschronicler]

The dedication to doing clown research is amazing. That being said, I never would have viewed Dad from the lense of being an Actual clown. Not only is this take very convincing, I would actually Love to see a clowning performance of the day to day mishaps of suburban white collar office workers.

Regarding John, I think some of the push back, while being normal for teens, Could also be from his dad being the only clown rep around. I cant say for certain since we only start the journey on Johns 13th, but if John has only really seen his dad performing it could feel like he's being pushed towards a certain way of clowning. Obviously, in your post, Dad is only trying to open his son up to the potential he has To clown but it could be being taken differently.

Clown Con Is Serious Business

In a delightful parallel to John's conversations with TT, TG and GG, yesterday we got to see some messages from Dad's friends! I hope that grayslacks66 is okay - Dad might have been able to help him out if John hadn't stolen the PDA! Dad literally makes his son's birthday a part of his screen name, and this is how John repays him. Unbelievable.

Anyway, these names - grayslacks66, 2busy4this, officeurchin1280, wellPressedAttire - as well as the application name and Dad's professional outfit, suggest on the surface that Dad is a boring office guy. BUT WAIT. There's something suspicious about this. grayslacks66 dunked their necktie in the coffee pot while reaching for their hat, presumably as they were leaving the house to go to work, as they then returned for a fresh tie, indicating that they needed to wear a tie for the rest of their day. And this happened at twenty past five?? What kind of office job could this person have that doesn't begin until at least 5:30pm??

It's so clear to me that these people are Dad's clown troupe, and this is all part of their act. I've been reading a book on clowning technique, The Art of Clowning by Eli Simon, and I'm learning about how diverse clown personas can be, and the huge variety in their routines.

[Clowns] also address serious issues such as political assassinations, family strife, and drug wars. (Simon, p.5)

The Strife sequence between John and his dad (Homestuck, p.90-92) is our best example of Dad's clowning technique. It's a short sequence, but it has all the deliberate and emotion-driven physical comedy that is central to clowning.

Dad appears to be a silent clown rather than speaking, and some of his primary persona's characteristics are 'confrontational', 'zany' and 'outgoing' (this last one as we know he tends to initiate interactions). I'd also describe him as an 'in-clown' rather than an 'out-clown', meaning he's confident, commanding, talented, and knows how great he is on stage. As well as being a master of the prankster's gambit and an incredible baker, we can guess he's a talented musician (as the piano is in his study) and knows how to do DIY (the tire swing and Slimer pogo ride), and he might also be good at card tricks, lockpicking (the safe), and/or art (if he painted some of his own harlequins).

Dad clearly uses a lot of cake and food themed props, but with his troupe he probably uses more business themed props, like legal pads, ballpoint pens, telephone receivers, document wallets, printer ink, and so much more. I bet they have incredible routines based on the absurdity of office life, and the incident grayslacks66 describes above is either something that really happened to them as they were leaving the house for clown practice (that they'll now incorporate into their clowning) or an idea they came up with to work into the group's performance. I want to see their show SO badly.

Costume-wise, the only facial feature in Dad's design is a nose. While it's not the bulbous red nose we typically associate with clowns, there's no reason why it couldn't be an oversized prop nose. Dad's hat, pipe and tie - which we see on p.79 are common features of his - could easily be the costume elements that Dad needs in order to get into clown mode.

If, for example, you are offered a piece of cake but refuse it, the potential for cake exploration is squelched and you will have no one to blame but yourself. (Simon, p.18)

I think Dad really wants to give John some clown training - he sees John's interest in amateur magic, a distinct but related field to clowning, and thinks John would be a great clown. I agree with him here, and it's very sweet that Dad wants to pass on his passion. When Dad pies his son in the face, it's not an act of hostility, it's an opportunity for John to get in on the routine and for the two of them to start clowning together. But instead of saying yes - a key rule of clowning - John is constantly saying no, shutting down the opportunity both to connect with his dad and to discover new things about himself through artistic exploration. It would probably be better if Dad just talked to John about this directly, but, 'clowns "think" on an entirely different plane than non-clowns' (Simon, p.33).

The book also talks a lot about direct audience connection, and clowns as performers who break the fourth wall. Given all the meta elements in Homestuck so far, I can see this becoming more relevant as time goes on and Dad (and his friends?) hopefully become bigger characters.

[tenaciouschronicler]

egberts shitpost

[tenaciouschronicler]

Wow things are actually getting started. So yeah it seems like we got the full suite of sims abilities. We also got a peak at other things in the phernalia registry like the Cruxtruder which sounds like a cross between Cru(???) and extruder so it extrudes cru what ever that is. There’s also the alchemiter which I’m guessing is connected to the alchemy excursus though I don’t know what either of them do. There was also an arrow in the phernalia registry so there might be more stuff? I’m excited to see how this progresses.

[tenaciouschronicler]

New update! So we’re getting even more into the mechanics of sburb now but still no elaboration on what the object of this whole game is. We also see that TT doesn’t know what the aim of the game is either. Now diving into what we see, TT says that the alchemy we’ve seen reference too is based around a punch card system. I’m guessing that the punch cards are like the first computer programs which used cards with holes in them to convey ones and zeros. We also saw two new things in the phernalia registry, the punch designix which I’m betting will make new punch cards, and the pre punched card which is the only thing we’ve see so far that costs grist and is in the registry. It also costs a new type of purple grist which we haven’t seen yet.

[tenaciouschronicler]

matthew mcconaughey was homestuck before homestuck was cool

Continuing through John's McConaughey wall, I just squeezed some time out of my sleep schedule to watch Failure to Launch. Unlike John, I tend to enjoy romcoms especially from the early to mid 2000s - even though I usually don't like the values and worldviews in them - and it met my expectations in being a great hour and a half that definitely won't stick with me long term.

It's about parent and child relationships again, and this is the most on the nose one yet. The main character, Tripp, lives with his parents and refuses to leave despite being a Cool and Normal Guy(tm) because a tragic past has left him stuck, unable to fully develop into what white American society thinks an adult should be. This is both John right now and John's fear of his future - he struggles enough living at home at 13 and must be terrified of still living there at 35, and he's already scared about the aspects of life he might be missing out on. He knows that in theory his house is nice and has everything he needs, but he sees his own life the way other characters in the movie see Tripp's - like there's something wrong with him for not having more.

John sees himself as Tripp, but let's be real. He's probably more similar to the other men Paula convinces to move out of their parents' homes, like the guy who's obsessed with the Star Wars original trilogy. I wonder if John doesn't like "chick flicks" because they tend to promote "normalcy" and the status quo - the main characters all settling down into conventional, heterosexual relationships and fulfilling traditional 'life milestones' by the end, no matter how quirky they were at the start. The characters who don't fit into this are generally laughed at and sidelined. I don't think John sees either of these as a great option.

This is the first post-2000 movie of John's I've seen, coming out only three years ago. It's an outlier, because there's no way John's dad showed him this one. Dad wouldn't want to suggest that he'd ever kick John out the house or resent him for being there. John definitely watched this when it came to DVD because of his McConaughey crush and accidentally got filled with existential anxiety by mistake.

Also, the family in this movie lives in house number 420. Hoping and praying that the Egberts have a funny number house too.

MOVIES WATCHED: 6/11

MOST RECENT MOVIE: Failure to Launch (2006) - Rating 7/10

[tenaciouschronicler]

May 15 2024 2009

(shh its really not but lets pretend because i was ~☆busy☆~)

Ok! Ok! We are doing ~things~!

Nice to see some immediate answers to what some of these buttons do/hold even if TT herself is kinda doing things randomly.

TT: If I had to guess, they appear to facilitate a sort of system involving punch card-based alchemy.

EB: huh.

EB: to what end?

EB: i mean what are we supposed to be doing in this game?

TT: That remains to be seen.

So..... even THEY dont know what the game entails?? How in the world was this game marketed?? Why would you get a game without knowing how it works or it's purpose?? This adds so many layers of mystery to this game and now we are ALL gonna be learning together. John wants to create chaos so bad but ~Oh No~.

These images just speak for themselves. (i was right σ(￣∇￣))

I love Johns explanation for WHY TT needed to get his stuff from the road.

EB: no, i am telling you.

EB: it jumped out of my sylladex like a frightened weasel.

Pretty accurate there my friend.

AND THE PDA!!

No hilarious clown wallpapers or anything like that. (Oops, you mean harlequin wallpapers.)

It seems your DAD uses it to keep tabs on various acquaintances... his fellow street performers, maybe? You guess the performing arts must be pretty serious business after all.

John. Buddy. My Guy. WHAT DOES YOUR DAD DO FOR WORK? Is he really a performer (PLEASE theres no other answer) or are you just blinded by his interests?

I wanna breakdown these machine names but i also wanna learn organically but im itching to know even Potentially what their uses are, ugh.

[tenaciouschronicler]

Prank gone wrong

@theplanetsarefalling

[tenaciouschronicler]

TT: Select John.

You cannot select a PLAYER!

JOHN abjures the meddlesome cursor.

Happy almost 413! Day one: Gameplay!

Click 4 better quality

[tenaciouschronicler]

john's movies GOOD?!?!

Homestuck is 1 month old today! Sadly we didn't get an update to celebrate, but there's still so much to puzzle over with Sburb that I'm okay with it. Plus I watched Contact last night, and I'm canceling the narrator for claiming that John likes 'really terrible movies' because this movie kicks so much ass. I don't care if John only likes it because he thinks Matthew McConnaughey is pretty, this rules, I want to stop here and watch this one six more times.

In this movie, we get a cool scientist who's really good at her job and could easily have a successful career, turn away from that to focus on a fringe project searching for aliens, despite constant criticism and loss of funding. Eventually she succeeds, proves that aliens are real like it's no big deal, and is recognized by her work enough to be the first human sent to greet alien life. Only, since she can't prove that she actually met aliens or even left the planet, scientific opinion turns against her once more, despite her certainty that the contact did happen.

Now if we extrapolate this to John and Sburb, we could see a similar arc. He and TT are probably going to have some weird ass experiences playing this game. Something we don't know yet is how the game reacts to non-players - 'You just hope he doesn't notice the MAGIC CHEST on the roof' (p.143) is the only nod we get. What if the environment is only changed for the players, and the changes simply don't exist for Dad? What if they're technically living in different versions of the same house now, and John has to try and prove that TT is actually changing his environment? That could make for a weird story that deals a lot with object interactions, the same way the early pages did.

This movie's primary theme is science vs religion and faith vs proof, and the situations in which those aren't so different. I think we're already seeing this in Homestuck via the chumhandles, with John and TT being connected to science ('biologist' and 'therapist' respectively) while TG and GG are associated with faith ('godhead' and 'gnostic'). Maybe we'll get to see TG and GG play Sburb together and have a completely different gameplay experience to John's with TT, and we'll be able to compare and contrast the ways that they alter their environment.

I know family is a really common theme in movies, so I'm curious. If you randomly selected any five movies from, say, 1985-2000, what are the chances that parent-child relationships would be a driving plot force in all five? How meaningful is it that this keeps reoccurring? And from which Egbert's perspective do we see Ellie's relationship with her dad from? Is this John wishing he was like Ellie, and that his dad encouraged his interests more instead of trying to force clowns and cakes onto him? Or is this Dad trying to let John know that he does support him, that he'll get John movie posters and help him buy memorabilia for his friends and participate in John's love of pranks?

I am going to be so john egbertcoded and get a poster of this movie for my room too.

VIES WATCHED: 5/11

MOST RECENT MOVIE: Contact (1997) - Rating 9/10

[tenaciouschronicler]

my friend is clicking and dragging me and im being so normal about it

(page 138-147)

HOLY SHIT. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. WE ARE PLAYING SBURB. Or, more specifically, TT is playing Sburb as we and John simply observe.

In the next couple days I'm gonna explore into the possibilities of the 'phernalia registry' and other details on page 138, as well as look for prior hints about the nature of Sburb that I glossed over, because holy shit, this feels like such a curveball. But the weirdest part is that JOHN IS BARELY REACTING. THIS IS A REGULAR DAY TO HIM. What the hell is happening? Surely this can't just be the norm for video games in this world. I guess John and TT probably knew in advance what this game was capable of, which explains why they were so excited - and TG not wanting to play could be a sign that he doesn't want anyone to see his house.

I'm curious about TT's first move being to select John's magic chest and put it on the roof. I feel like she's something of a prankster too, even while she tries to act more serious, but it's very convenient that something John was looking for was right underneath. Did she suspect that? Was it random? Was she being guided by the game somehow, like a tutorial suggesting that she go for this item first, the same way other games give easy rewards early on to suck players in?

Anyway, I watched Deep Impact last night, and I liked it a fair bit more than I expected. It hit a good balance of the large scale space travel/disaster movie aspects and the smaller scale, almost soap opera family drama parts. Both of those extremes were interesting, although the politics did feel very 90s, and while I liked the characters, I didn't connect with any of them on a deeper level.

This movie was about family, much like the first three - but this was the first to be about chosen family as well as biological family, as well as the struggle to make the choice between them. When Leo was riding that motorbike through the standstill traffic trying to find and save Sarah before the comet hit, I couldn't help but wonder if John loves anyone that much. We don't know how close he is to his friends, how long he's known them, or how he feels about them deep down. But TG got him the bunny from his favorite movie and TT put that bunny back in the box because she knew it would make him smile and these people do understand him on some level. That means something, and I really want these relationships to be explored.

Interesting also that this movie is about a regular suburban teenage boy discovering something worldchanging while simply hanging out and engaging in his hobby with a friend. Interesting that John, as we speak, is a suburban teenage boy hanging out and engaging in his hobby with a friend. This game is capable of physically affecting the world around it so directly, and I can believe that there are other players trying to use this for more dangerous purposes than messing with each other's rooms. Perhaps through playing the game John will meet or learn about other players, and have to stop them from using the game destructively, as a sort of alternative to boss monsters.

MOVIES WATCHED: 4/11

MOST RECENT MOVIE: Deep Impact (1998) - Rating 8/10

[tenaciouschronicler]

SBURB Interface Button Names - weird choice but ok

Heres the approximate breakdown I could glean from google:

SELECT - self explanatory: pick or choose

REVISE - examine and make changes to something

DEPLOY - utilize or arrange for deliberate purpose

Now we get into the weird ones.

Looking up phernalia only brings us paraphernalia. Theres two definitions for this that could make sense:

euipment, apparatus or furnishing used or necessary for particular activities

personal belongings

Next we have registry which is a place where records are kept. However for computers specifically its where information is recorded about software settings.

In all we can guess:

PHERNALIA REGISTRY - a record of items necessary for the game (the activity we are doing). What the items are is unclear.

For grist the first definition is grain which... doesnt make sense for the game, especially when the image for it kinda looks like Gushers if Im being honest (which is weird in itself). Some better options are:

useful ideas or material

(as in the idiom 'grist to the mill') anything that can be used to your advantage

It comes from Old English meaning 'grind' so potentially material that the PLAYER grinds for that they can then use.

A cache is a hidden store of things or computer memory which stores information temporarily for quick access.

Combine it and we get:

GRIST CACHE - useful material stored to quickly use for advantages

Atheneum auto corrects to athenAeum and I dont know if it was deliberate on Hussies part to remove the 'A'. Regardless, this one has a more straightforward definition: institution for the promotion of literary or scientific learning, i.e. a library.

EXPLORE ATHENEUM - explore library (of what? - that is the question)

Most people know alchemy but for the sake of completion: a seemingly magical process of transformation, creation or combination. Excursus also has a simple-ish meaning: further detailed descussion of a topic normally in an appendix.

Together, finally, we have:

ALCHEMY EXCURSUS - (potentially) appendix of magical processes to transform, create or combine things

Doing all this research makes me SO curious to see everything in action as we progress in SBURB, especially since we the readers are blind to the actual use of these buttons.

[tenaciouschronicler]

May 13 2024 2009

Boy Howdy! In the words of otterLocks [OL] - "i love how TT has just started moving stuff around without explaining anything. yessssss give us nothing!!!!!! "

At 5:10 John Time, server connection is made with TT leading to one Trippy loading screen. @homestuckreplay has already done an amazing deep-dive into all the phrases flashed at us, which good on you friend for the patience on that!

The real meat-and-potatos happened yesterday.

We see John at his computer but now theres an interface over top the page. AH (possibly Andrew Hussie) tells us to mouse over revealing the following options:

Select

Revise

Deploy

Phernalia Registry

Grist Cache

Explore Antheneum

Alchemy Excursus

Im gonna make a seperate post later breaking down the meanings behind some of the more stange options.

With no preamble TT starts causing more chaos.

EB: is my magic chest on the roof now??

TT: Yes.

EB: :(

Luckily, this reveals John's STACK MODUS card allowing him to switch modi. John's dad is off for more baking supplies (Sir. SIR. There is no more need for cake!)

You just hope he doesn't notice the MAGIC CHEST on the roof. Or all the shit you threw out the window, for that matter.

John, in a moment of brilliance asks TT to bring the Flung items back but SBURB seems to have limitations. Instead TT tries to SELECT John which is also not allowed.

You cannot select a PLAYER!

JOHN abjures the meddlesome cursor.

It's interesting that John is capitalized but not abjure. Our last pages are kinds sweet. John mentioned to TT that he got TG's gift and she reveals TG had told her about it. Further TT, using the SELECT option, recreates the famous line from Con Air.

Look at that jelly bean smile! I love these bits that show that John's friends listen to his likes even if they may not have the same taste.

We, the reader, can be confused by whats going on right now, but John seems pretty nonpulsed by the shenanigans. This is probably because the game has been so heavily promoted in universe so our characters Know what they are getting into. I hope at least some things get explained so we aren't completely blind.