Homestuck Re-read Part 6: PUNCH CARD
Starting today's upd8 a bit late today compared to the previous ones. It's 20:41 right now. I spent a lot of time working on the pokemon fan game; I've actually got some animations playing from a spritesheet and the player can move around. Granted, it's not working properly just yet. I'm trying to implement an FSM for the character controller to lock the player out of Doing Things while moving but for some reason my current version causes the renderer to throw up a black screen. Well, I think it's that a logic bug is throwing the camera (not really a camera, more just a rendering offset) out into the void. I haven't started debugging it yet though so thats just a guess.
Anyway. Homestuck.
Homestuck
There is a bit less then 100 pages in this upd8.
Dave is having a completely normal time thinking about Lil Cal. He's not freaking out about the puppets. Homestuck has a lot less violent sexual description of puppets compared to what I remember. Puppets are still awesome. No problems with them or anything. Oh Lil Cal, what a scamp.
Rose has deployed the PUNCH DESIGNIX for John. I presume this means the inscrutable and paradoxical nature of the captcha codes on the back of the captchalogue cards will be 'explained' soon. John is no longer under the influence(? It's unclear how much actual influence the computers on Earth hold over the kids vs just being a very captivating annoyance) of Wayward Vagabond and can reply to Rose.
Rose begins to build up towards the first gate.. I think everyone who reads Homestuck probably on some level imagines what their house would start looking like at this point. I always presumed that a 'typical' version of sburb would result in you building your home into a towering fortress/base where you spend time between mini adventures and socializing, so I sort of assume that the kind of extensions to my client player's house that I build would be similar to the kind of bases I build in minecraft. Except in minecraft I normally build giant subterranean rat mazes that sprawl deep underground with secret entrances and exists into places people probably wouldn't want me to have them. I imagine the sky version of that would essentially be what Rose builds for John, just with more horizontal expansion over time as well.
I always imagine that a sburb session would take a long time, months to potentially even years. So I imagine it'd be something you could slowly work on and build out to be exactly what you want without much in the way of time pressure. Plus you'd have time to explore your land and meet with all the creatures that inhabit it. I wouldn't want it to be as time sensitive as the session presented in sburb. I've always taken the view that roughly everything involving their session is aberrant from very early on; From what I remember that seems to be essentially stated as fact but I'm not all that sure. I guess we'll find out later.
INFESTATION
Theres so many fucking imps. The place is fucking lousy with them and their black goo and their cruxite dowels. After trying to eliminate them, we get to see some commands from a more polite Wayward Vagabond. Although it's entirely possible it's just because he's less hungry.
Rose post's some screenshots to her walkthrough. All appropriately arc-numbered.
We get to see a closeup of the punch designix. It appears to involve typing something from the reverse of a captchalogue card. Surely there is no way to guess how this may fit into the alchemy system established with the lathe and the alchemiter.
Ah, puppet based violent sexual imagery, I've been expecting you.
CAPTCHA
Here's a part that confuses me. John shows us the back of a captchalogue card. There is a (very difficult) captcha inscribed on the back. "DQM?JLeK"(I think) that somehow represents the slimer pogo ride. We also get to see the code for the hammer card in the strife specibus: "nz7un6BI".
John remarks that these codes have always been present on the back of the captchalogue cards. We soon learn in the comic that they're used to represent an item in the alchemy system, but why are the codes there before sburb? Did anyone in the regular Homestuck Earth have, a use for these? Who manufactured captchalogue cards, or the sylladicies(?) and the fetch modi?
I have so many questions I will never get an answer to. I'm almost certain it is somehow retro-causal or something to do with skaianet industries but no actual answers.
PUPPETS, AWESOME.
Sudden and intense architectural change. John's house is starting to look like fucking swiss cheese.
We see some collected and saved newspaper clippings about meteorites. I wonder if there is some like, symbolic/thematic meaning you can draw from it always being meteorites with sburb. I mean yeah almost certainly, but for some reason I'm feeling compelled to compare them with angels. This is probably from recently enjoying a handful of videos from the Esoterica youtube channel specifically about angels and the occult recently. But considering Homestuck will later contain it's own (but very unexplored) version of angels later on, I'm not sure.
END ENDING
Tonight's upd8 draws to a close, as John fails to climb stairs, a larger imp draws near, and Dave seeks his brother's copy of the sburb beta.
This was a fun upd8, I feel like it took a lot less time, probably just less text to read and I wrote less. I think the important thing is actually keeping with reading it and keeping up with the upd8s. If I fall too far behind, I won't catch back up and I'll probably just stop so, it'll be important to avoid that.
Thank you for reading.