Homestuck Re-read Part 81: COLLIDE

Today's upd8 is not going to be out for anotherr, 3ish hours from when I'm writing this. I am still not sure if I'm expecting this upd8 to go all the way to the credits or if we're going to stop after just Collide. Either way, there isn't much left. I think I'm definitely going to read the epilogues and homestuck^2 after. I did promise a friend I would read sburb.exe after Homestuck too, so I might blog that. I have a weird kinda, essay-thing(?) I'm writing that I want to work on at some point.

LATER

So, I'm back. The upd8 dropped 5 minutes ago and it is just [S] Collide. There will be, another upd8 at the very least.

HOMESTUCK.

So it is now, 23:32. I did watch it earlier, like, a lot earlier. I actually got in a discord call and watched it (and then spent a few hours fucking around with) my friend Serena And, I think instead of trying to give a beat for beat recap or my rare attempt at presenting my thoughts on Homestuck, I'd use this upd8 post to rip off something she said which, I quite liked.

We were talking about how there will never be anything quite like Homestuck again, and that the closest thing to Homestuck will probably be something completely different. Because Homestuck is more then just being a coming of age adventure webcomic with programming jokes and user interaction and flash pages and music. Which is when Serena said something like

SERENA: Homestuck is as much a time and a place and an experience as it is a web comic. There's no way you could recreate homestuck today because there just isn't the kind of places online anymore where people would go to see Homestuck.

Which, is true. Neither of us are exactly the first person to bitch about how the internet feels like it's just 5 sites that endlessly carousel posts between each other with effectively nothing unique about them. If you aren't posting on those sites, you might as well not exist as far as most 'internet users' are concerned, and I don't think that you'd be able to grow a new mspaintadventures on twitter/bluesky/facebook/tiktok. It feels like something that could only have come from forum culture and growing into it's own dedicated corner of the web.

Anyway, I did have a slightly happier thing I wanted to bring up about, Homestuck being more then just a web comic. Homestuck very much is also just, the friends you make along the way. The only reason I know, essentially everyone that I talk too on a regular basis today, is because I met them on Homestuck Twitter in like 2020. I think the only person I talk too often that I don't know through Homestuck in some way is my owner, who I already knew. And, every one of them are the best friends I've ever had. Nothing else since has really had quite as profound an impact on my life. It's why Homestuck is, and I think always will be, my favourite piece of art of all time.

Thank you for reading. I think tomorrow is the final upd8.