Homestuck Re-read Part 4: COOL K1D
Upd8! Upd8! Upd8! I've been waiting for this one all day, finally a good excuse to not be working on me and my friend's Pokemon fan game.
That's not true, I have been working on it. It's just that working out how to design a game engine (because naturally, I want to make things more difficult) by just Thinking About It instead of looking up prior art on the subject is kinda difficult and leads to a lot of rewriting. But I think I've made some decent progress for today, so I deserve a break. Definitely not rationalizing.
Anyway, Homestuck.
Years in the future, but not many...
Our first meeting with THE MAYOR OF CAN TOWN. I seem to remember there being more with the exiles at the moment then just the page and bonus content, but I imagine it's just that over 9 years your memories get mixed together a bit.
I read homestuck for the first time 9 years ago. What the fuck.
We get to see the start of Rose's walkthrough on GameFAQs. It is bleakly spelled out to the reader: playing sburb has doomed you, now playing sburb is the only thing that can save you. This is Rose's captains log as she goes down with her ship; This will be the captain's log of the starship Lalonde on it's mission to boldly go where no person has gone before.
[S] ==>
Back to John, we see that he's seemingly survived the meteorite. But things are different, darker now. The fireplace is extinguished, windows no longer look out over John's neighborhood but into a solid void broken only by menacing eyes glaring back in. His home is stuck atop a giant spire piercing a cloud layer below. The kernelsprite splits in two becoming kernel and sprite. The kernel bifurcates, half rising up to the sky creating a series of spirograph gates while the other descends with an unknown purpose. The sprite remains with John, taking the appearance of a harlequin.
An interactive flash...
The first of many walkabouts. "We" are able to direct John about his home and interact with various objects. This acts a bit like a recap of act 1 from the perspective of John informing a strange disembodied voice.
We can see a strange splattering of oil over John's bed and the red box, something has taken the bunny. I was originally mistaken that this oil was from an event that would not occur having had occurred already, but it's just standard variety oil staining.
Rose wants to know if John is there. But we won't reply just yet. All our other chums are offline however, sadly.
Exploring the house further we can run into John's Dad's office and look out the window. All that can be seen is the end of the land mass we are stuck on top off and an endless expanse of darkness above a grey cloud layer. Things are not looking good for John.
Going outside we can look over the edge for ourselves. It is a long way down to whatever is at the bottom. We can also see the house's electrical hookup is completely severed, but the desktop computer inside and all other electronics still seem to be powered.
CONCLUDE THE MINDLESS AMBLING
John receives further instruction from the disembodied voice, teaching it at long last that he is JOHN not BOY. He returns to his bedroom to reply to Rose under the voice's instructions. We get further confirmation that the world seems to be ending from Rose, multiple homes have been struck by meteors over the last few days. John's was the biggest so far, large enough to annihilate his entire neighborhood. They discuss if the purpose of sburb is to save the world, unaware that it's fate is sealed.
Rose is able to recycle the PERFECTLY GENERIC OBJECTS and regain some build grist. Enough to extend a platform from John's home to get him in range of his PDA. A harlequin statuette is fired off into the darkness as he takes the portable computer.
We can see John's father's friends are worried about him, trying to raise him for an update over SERIOUS BUSINESS. We disregard this for pesterchumb, to remain in contact with Rose. John is perturbed by the disembodied voice that commands him, which is diagnosed as the 'early symptoms of an anxiety disorder' by Rose. John refuses to kill himself at the command of the voice, before we get to learn about the voice.
The wayward vagabond who will go on to become a true leader of cans is seen descending into a sealed hatch marked with sburb's distinct spirograph insignia. He is the one commanding John via a strange house-shaped computer found in a bunker.
GameFAQs
Rose updates her walkthrough with the basics of sburb and saving the client user's life. There are multiple odd metaphors for the alchemical process used to create the item on the pre-punched card; Both key and barcode. Neither is especially helpful considering it isn't too complicated of a process. We get to see the title of the next chapter
==========================================================
[A100] So your cruxtruder is ticking. Do this to live.
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Rose looks out the window of her observatory. The skyline above the trees burns ever brighter with meteor trails. The rain cannot fight the fire back anymore.
A horrible mistaken is nearly made as Rose moves to perform the secondary prototyping with a box of betty crocker's cake mix, narrowly avoided by the sprite dodging. It's unclear if it knows the horrible truth behind the brand or if it is the mischievous nature of the harlequins embedded within the sprite. It again dodges prototypation with Colonel Sassacre's book, but the vibration of it being dropped results in an urn of ashes being upturned onto the entity.
We see the newly created NANASPRITE play a small practical joke on John as he moves back upstairs.
Hope is lost. Rose's internet troubles cause the car to be dropped. The chain linking John's fate with Rose's must expand, as John cannot perform his duties as server player in this moment; the disc was in the car.
JADE ! ! ! !
I love her so much.
Sometimes I worry that all I'm doing is summarizing homestuck. It feels like that is mostly what this post is; summary with some dramatic language thrown in. But I don't have a huge amount to say about most of it, I guess. No special memories attached to just random pages and pesterlogs we've come across.
As much as it seems like Jade would be my favorite character in Homestuck, I don't think she is. Don't get me wrong, she is absolutely one of my favorite characters in both Homestuck and of all time. The only cosplay I've ever done was Jade Harley. My name is J4d3 Harley. But I don't think she is my favorite character in Homestuck. I don't think I could pick an absolute favorite though, considering how many great characters there are.
I guess not being a part of the fandom when it was coming out or while reading it is probably why I have no specific memories attached to a lot of parts. I sped read homestuck every day after school without talking about it to anyone, since I only really had two friends who were interested and they didnt want to spoil me.
DAVE
An introduction to a R34L COOLK1D. We finally get to see Dave in the flesh. His bedroom is exactly as you'd expect, it looks like a mash up of every TV cool kid's bedroom to ever grace the silver screen. The walls bristle with katanas and posters while the floor is scattered with makeshift furniture and enough hobby equipment to entertain a small army. I am reminded of all the craft equipment and electronic components lining the shelves next to me, sitting unused and waiting to be un-abandoned. My hard drive is littered with half completed software projects.
Maybe I'll get some more stuff done on my fan game after I finish Homestuck for today.
██████ OF TIME
We haven't gotten anywhere close to classpects regarding sburb, and I don't know how long chronologically it would have been between the release of these pages and the introduction of aspects. I wonder if Dave's introduction taking place in 'the past' relative to the present where John and Rose are in danger was a decision informed by him being a time player, or if it was just a happy accident. If I remember correctly Jade's introduction takes place in the past as well, but Rose's didn't.
HASHMAP
A third fetch modus, this time represented as a hash map. The hash function is variable, but is currently set to an odd algorithm involving vowels and constants. What a weird way to do it.
We get to see an earlier conversation from a new point of view., just to make sure we remember that Dave's story is currently behind everyone else's.
NEVER FORGET
It looks like Dave's magnum opus is not yet available for viewing. So we're moving on to looking at The Midnight Crew instead. God Andrew is such a hack, mspadventures hasn't been good in ages. They're all fighting for no reason and theres 3k pages of this shit?
The first conversation without John. Truly monumental. It's weird to see a pesterlog without his trademark blue text. But it is only the first of many.
SLIGHT EMOTIONAL MOMENT
It is at this point that I realize that, I think it has taken me nearly 2 hours to read a bit more then 100 pages of a webcomic where some pages have literally no text. Granted, I was trying to write a blog post about it simultaneously but. This is not a great feeling.
I used to be able to read decently sized books in a single day and now this is, A Lot. I guess I've not been focused on it exclusively and been thinking about and doing other stuff at the same time but. It's definitely not a good feeling to have realized this.
Theres only a handful of pages left for today, so there's that at least. Back to being slow at something else after.
PROPHECY
His disks are damaged in a somewhat embarrassing way he would rather not talk about.. We get to see the nightmare apartment Dave lives in.
My internet has died trying to load the next page, and I am stuck here staring at a blank white screen in firefox. Excellent situation to be stuck in after a brief moment of not feeling great about myself. At least I can't see my reflection in the screen.
Dave hangs his sburb copies up to dry; turning the fan off to stop them being blown away.
My internet fails again.
I was so close to being done with today's part of the re-read.
A bird attacks the disks. Dave accidentally ejects his sword from the sylladex into the bird, causing the corpse and the discs to careen out the window. We don't know it yet, but we return to Rose as today's upd8 draws to a close.
ENDING
There is no outro for this upd8.