Homestuck Re-read Part 2: Upd8 Went Up Before I Posted The Last One

It's so cool how I do things like decide I want to blog re-reading the upd8s after the first one went up or how I left actually doing the reading and blogging until the second upd8 was nearly out. What a cool and sexy thing of me to do. I totally don't have my SFTP client still open from uploading the last blog post after some quick corrections while I write this and prepare to read upd8 two. That's absurd, why would I do that.

New homestuck pages to read; Theres a new marble hornets video to watch; It's like I'm back in 2010, except everything is a lot more existentially terrifying on account of not being an actual child.

UPD8 ::::3

It is time for John to try and claim his prize, the mythical SBURB BETA discs. Not from his father's car (at this point) but from a kitchen containing multiple stray baked goods and guarded by the baker-patriarch himself. Hopefully John's disguise will allow him to pass by unnoticed.

[S] John: Enter

Of course not. That would be far too easy. It is in moments like these that I am reminded of the words of a great man.

Between two kinds of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force. ¹

or as Homestuck puts it

> [S] STRIFE!

God, Homestuck is, one of the things of all time. This is stupid, and I love it. Attack your father with hammers, he'll just auto-pastry it.

SYLLADEX SHENANIGANS

In part 1 I expressed a lot of love for the sylladex and its overly complicated mechanics and this is one of the reasons why. Here we can see John captchalogue a pie tin he had been the victim of. Unlike his previous captchalogues though, John has no free cards in his Sylladex. This might seem like an invalid or illegal action, however it is perfectly compliant with John's fetch modus of Stack. The items in the sylladex are pushed back by one card, resulting in the bottom item (John's Smoke Pellets) being ejected onto the floor. Just as John seeked a way to distract his father...

Moments later John repeats the trick, captchaloguing the cake baked and wielded by his father. A tome of comedic knowledge ejected from the sylladex to land atop the pellets creating a haze John can use to escape the encounter. And as is tradition when one completes an encounter in a game, one must search for loot.. While stealing from his father, we also see that John is able to grow his Sylladex by causing a captchalogued captchalogue card to be ejected from the sylladex.

The amount of Homestuck specific words in this document is causing my spell checker to freak out with squiggly underlines up and down the screen. Because I write my blog posts in VS Code, a red underline is reserved for invalid code; my document is bleeding bright cerulean blood all over. An omen of things to come.

John has claimed his father's PDA, the red box and the Sburb Beta client.

JADE! ! !

For a brief moment we are introduced to the green texted GardenGnostic, A.K.A Jade Harley. Granted, she had left again before John had returned. But this is the first time we see her introduced!

We are then pestered by Dave. They discuss Strangely Relevant character Nicolas Cage, the finer points of irony and how Dave is fucking cool. John resolves to play the Sburb with Rose.

> J4D3BLOODED POST READER: Open browser and go to j4d3blooded.xyz

These new blog posts are okay, but you preferred when J4d3 made posts about youtube videos.

I need to start working on one for september, but I haven't seen any that speak to me. It isn't that I haven't watched any of high quality this month, but none have spoke to me in the strange kind of way that makes me want to write them down.

LOOSE ENDS

Homestuck is an incredibly convoluted story involving time travel, in canon retconning and background shenanigans that have been taking place since before the story began and that were set in motion by events not yet transpired. John has accidentally propelled his father's PDA out the window. This seemingly small detail will come back to influence events in the future. Compared to some of the other threads that end up becoming important (even threads we've already seen but have no reason to assign dramatic personal stories too), this PDA is barely obscure.

Meanwhile.

A Tentacle Therapist Connects to a client

For all the computer science terminology in homestuck, I always find the use of Client and Server to be a bit muddled. Rose is running the server which attempts to connect to the client, which is the reverse of the usual way around. The Sburb software refers to the the server player (Rose) as the host user but the effects of the sburb software falls upon the client. It seems a bit mixed and backwards.

John presses [ENTER] to begin the game. The mystery of what Sburb is begins to unfold for us.

It looks like, The Sims?

Sburb Beta

Without getting into too much detail about what sburb truly is, I want to talk about sburb.

We see Rose interact with the world around John using a user interface similar to the sims 3. She is able to move objects, alter the structure of the home and create machinery out of thin air. All with seemingly no more effort then if she were actually playing The Sims. It does seem to all be powered by some kind of currency called 'Grist'. Very little about sburb is explained to the players, at least at this point. More will be explained later and further along in the story it will be revealed there are ways to gain lots of information about the game, but for now there is close to zero information available.

Based on what we know so far, you would never guess how much time has been spent collectively day dreaming about playing sburb, recreating sburb in other mediums or the existential and philosophical nature of sburb itself. There are multiple ongoing projects to adapt sburb into TTRPGs, video games, minecraft mods, etc. The game is itself like a puzzle box, one that I am somewhat sad we never get to see all the pieces too or their typical configuration. As much as I love the story of homestuck, I wish there was more information about sburb specifically.

JADE ! ! !

I love her so much. She does however, appear to be in trouble. A vague explosion sound near by cannot be a good sign.

Meanwhile, Rose continues to perform acts of architectural terrorism upon John's home. She may as well have just bombed his bathroom. Rose's poor internet results in a bathtub being placed atop the stairs due to a connection loss. It's interesting that sburb can manipulate the actual physical reality around John but still requires a mundane internet connection.

MORE SBURB

Remember earlier when I mentioned Rose was deploying heavy machinery around John's home? Well it's time to see what they're used for. With Rose's assistance, John hammers the fucking cruxtruder. A mysterious blue orb is ejected and a countdown begins with 4 minutes 13 seconds remaining. Surely nothing bad will happen when that runs down. John extrudes a cruxite dowel.

We see more examples that information isn't conveyed through sburb itself, at least not readily. Rose only learns the name of the kernelsprite and that it needs to be 'Prototyped' twice from user submitted walkthroughs for sburb on GameFAQs.

Naturally, we proceed to just throw a sliced up oversized harlequin plushy at it, in hopes that that will do something. Which is does, achieving 'Tier one' 'Prototyping', causing the kernelsprite to emit esoteric symbols similar to a Fleur-De-Lis; or as the kids call it: the symbol from saints row.

We get to see the creation of the PERFECTLY GENERIC OBJECTS. A staple of homestuck references. A giant meteorite heads for John's home, timed perfectly with the countdown on the cruxtruder from earlier. Three minutes remain.

COOL K1D,,,,

Rose commits to writing her own walkthrough for Sburb, meanwhile Dave has a rather iconic conversation about the size of meteorites being described in movies that I hate.

THE END OF AN UPD8

A cliffhanger ending for tonight, John is inadvertently blocked from exiting his room due to a disconnected Rose accidentally dropping the bathtub against his door. One could say, he is Door Stuck.

That joke doesn't work because he isn't actually stuck in the door.

Rereading homestuck is, a lot of fun. It has been a bit of a marathon today, just because I kinda fucked up the timing. But I am still having a good time. As I am sure I will be for the foreseeable future, I shall look forward to tomorrow's upd8.