Homestuck Re-read Part 7: THE RETURN
Upd8 came early today! This works great for me since I'm watching Weapons later today with a friend. I've been looking forward to watching this since one of the trailers got posted to the delta green subreddit and just captivated me with the concept. A full school class of children vanish; Leaving their homes and walking out into the night, the last time any of them are seen is on CCTV and video doorbell cameras. It's a horrifying concept.
Oh heres an update on that bug I had with my fan game yesterday. It wasn't the camera being pinged of into the void, but that I had somehow improperly initialized the offset floats at NaNs. Everything is actually working now, so I think next step is to bring in the collisions from the tiled map. I think once I've got like, all the basic stuff for moving around in a scene done I'll go back and just, revise and clean up the code. I have some parts I think I'll extract to make reusable. But that can wait for a while, I have an upd8 to read. Another 101 pages for today.
EXPENSIVE NINJA SWORD
I think realizing Dave's bro was still around at this point and wasn't off somewhere else faked me out about Lil Cal on my first read. Surely Bro was the one moving him, the paranoia Dave had was just misdirected because Bro was too fast with the ninja shit for him.
Actually, looking at the next page does show it's Bro moving him around. I'm not sure if it was always Bro? I seem to remember that Cal was able to do that on his own. Maybe he can later?
I didn't know anything about SAW the first time I read Homestuck. So this page meant very little to me. It was still pretty creepy and off-putting though. I think that seeing the same fucker record a snuff film of a puppet later may have filled in some gaps for me though.
Fetch Modus Sylladex Shenanigans as Dave thinks of new names for objects to avoid hash collisions using a very weird hash function. If I'm not a total hack, I'll remember how I setup inserting small javascript and html snippets into my blog at some point so I can add a hash function calculator for all the functions he ends up using. I always like when blogs have random little bits of interactivity in them that you don't expect, it keeps life interesting.
We get to see the back of a fetch modus. With the currently available hash functions (Constant=2 and Vowel=1, Constant=1 and Vowel=2, alphabet letter positioning) as well as an eject button. We get to see that it includes a confirmation popup, which is good user design for such a potentially hazardous interaction. Always nice to see developers care about UX. There's also a box labelled "detect collisions", presumably to stop people shredding themselves when they have an inventory full of sharps.
We also get another hash function for me to implement later: Scrabble points. I have no idea how scrabble works as a game, I've always wanted to play it.
PUPPET BASED VIOLENT SEXUAL IMAGERY
We get to see this conversation again but from Dave's perspective this time. It's fun to see it coming after a fuckin serial killer-esq message provokes him to just cluster bomb himself with shitty puppets while trying to get to the roof. And that it precludes a second message challenging Dave to a rooftop fight to the death.
AS ABOVE, SO BELOW
Back to John as he experiments with the alchemy system in sburb, carving the cruxite dowels into encoded totems representing his items. I do find it interesting that the captcha codes are translated into the dowels in the same way as a key code is translated onto a physical key (or at least is based on my very surface level knowledge of locksmithing) where the digits represent how deep to cut into the dowel. It does also seem that they smoothly interpolate between them, based on the shape of the dowels on this page. I wonder if the alchemitor would accept a hand carved totem, if done with enough accuracy and precision.
The slimer pogo ride is the first item created that costs something other then just build grist. I know that later on we learn that somehow similar items are able to share captchalogue codes where the grist used in production affects what variant of the item is made. I wonder if the alchemical system could be broken down into a collection of base elements much like western alchemy (again, I think. I'm not an esotericist I just enjoy some lectures on it for entertainment.)
Then we get to see the result of the random card: Jetpack with random crap embedded in it. I still do not understand how captchalogue codes work, they are shrouded in mystery to me. I have so many questions.
Here we see the first part of captcha code bitwise manipulation enter Homestuck, something that will not cause logical errors further down the road. Overlapping the cards provides a bitwise AND of both codes, somehow producing an item with less punched codes that is more specific and combines traits of the two cards used in the operation.
Oh hey, night court. I've been meaning to watch that for a while, but I sort of got the feeling that it wasn't really what I was looking for when I was recommended it. I wanted something more in the vein of Midnight Diner but it seems like night court is more of a wacky comedy then I really wanted. Good to see it mentioned though, I should give it a try soon.
John takes a quick nap while staring up at the first gate.
We get to see that not all captcha codes are created equally hard. There's no reading that one. I was going to foreshadow the laser thingy that lets you read them here, but I just noticed something; the background of the code is checkered like a chessboard or the battlefield. I wonder if that's intentional, maybe the captcha codes are physical and exist somewhere on Skaia like minecraft map art.
JADE ! ! ! !
Its her again, I love her. Jade is back everybody. We get to see more of Jade's precognition/freaky Knowing ability that is as of yet unexplained. Except to John, who knows it's because someone else told her. That settles everything and there is no more mystery about this strange girl. I always appreciate a good "WAKE UP YOU HAVE TO WAKE UP" bit, even when it's distressing or not. John just needs to get out of bed and fight some imps or whatever they say in self help books.
A giant imp ascends John's home to beat the fuck out of him, presumably.
Now a final page, where we learn the giant imps are named ogres and that I've just been using the wrong term. Oops, oh well. Surely this won't be interrupted by a second rooftop battle happening at the same time in a way that will build the groundwork for some truly epic flash animations (flanimations) to come.
Wait, thats not all? Holy shit
SWEET BRO AND HELLA JEFF
IT'S AVAILABLE!
And the previous ones are available too! It's good to see you again. I think the first time I read Homestuck I didn't pay much attention to sbahj, but I wish I did.
Thank you for joining me for today's upd8.
ADDENDUM
I don't know if I missed it or something else happened, but there is an extra two pages on this upd8 now?
[\S] Dave: Ascend to the highest point of the building.
If I remember correctly this is a fairly significant flash. Dave takes Lil Cal to the roof for his duel with his brother. The sky is blood red and raining meteors. These two will fight one last time while the world ends around them And OH MY GOD ITS JADE GUYS ! ! ! ! And oh hell yeah wayward vagabond time ! ! ! !