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But I want to draw particular attention to the one I just finished writing today:
"I think," Alex says, "I'm interested in you because I feel like I am also an awful person, so you feel within reach in a way that other people don't. It's a terrible decision, but. Here I am."
Alexandria Rosales is extremely self-aware that they have serious issues. They've worked on them for years. But no amount of self-awareness can stop them from falling for Jaylen Hotdogfingers anyway.
(15k words of disaster lesbians. major content warnings: unhealthy relationship, PTSD, suicide)
Nobody seems to be stopping me from writing about the Houston Spies - they're not a particularly large team, they don't have as much established fanon as a lot of the more active ones - so I've gone pretty wild with these sets of numbers and the vague wiki-lore-pages people have written about them. I have zoomed way off into my own worldbuilding and, for whatever reason, people are following me. At some point I might go into more detail about that worldbuilding?I'm going to put an asterisk on this, though: picking a random air filter and taping it to a fan isn't going to work very well. Because the air filter is reducing the amount of air going in (as it needs to do, to do its job), the motor in the fan will work harder, causing it to overheat and eventually burn out. It's like trying to breathe through a drinking straw.
To be clear: if a 2 inch furnace filter is all you can do, it's still a lot better than nothing. So here's the short version, for the simplest kind of box fan filter:
Get a filter of "MERV 13" rating, which means that it at least tries to grab particles of the right size. (MERV 11 or 12 might do in a pinch, but don't filter as well. MERV 14+ are expensive and harder to find because they're only really used in laboratories and hospitals.) It should be about the same size as the fan, and as thick as you can afford. Make sure to use some weatherstripping - the foam tape usually sold for putting around door cracks - to minimize the amount of air that gets around the filter. Put it on the side that the fan sucks air in from, rather than the side that blows air out. Then tie or tape it in place.
Pictured: a box fan with a furnace filter held on by rubber bands and weatherstripping foam tape
But we can do better: let's get some more filter surface, so the fan doesn't choke. Here's another article, from the person who the reporter was interviewing, saying to use a filter that is as deep as possible - 4 or more inches, if you can, rather than 2 or 1. That'll help, because it'll provide more surface area. But what if you can't find a 4-inch filter?
One answer, from the CEO of a company that sells air filters, is this: tape together a bunch of smaller air filters!
Pictured: a box fan with a "cube" made of furnace filters sticking out the back
Someone who runs an air filter company would have a good reason to want to sell more air filters. And furnace filters in these specific dimensions might be hard to find. So maybe this isn't the best idea.
Enter an even jankier version: Tom Builds Stuff's duct-tape-and-cardboard-box version of the box fan filter!
Pictured: a box fan with two air filters on the back, all held together with cardboard and duct tape
You only need two filters for this one, and you don't have to get the exact same dimensions of air filters either. You should still do your best to get some that are MERV 13, and as thick as you can get, but as long as one of the sides is 18-20 inches, this will work fine. (This tutorial says to get 20x25, but anything from 18x18 to 20x36 would at least sorta work.) Put the 18" or 20" side vertical, and then follow all the rest of the instructions.
Hopefully this helps those of you who are being subjected to, I don't know, wildfire smoke or ridiculous management policies?
We're living in Myra's timeline.
Jun. 2nd, 2020 05:16 pm"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed."
-- William Gibson
Back in 2012 or so, as part of Replay Value AU, Zuki and I embarked on a worldbuilding project we called "Gritstuck". The idea was to extrapolate Homestuck's concept of a "pre-scratch" and a "post-scratch" world -- the post-scratch Earth being the result of the manipulation of the pre-scratch Earth to create much more competent Sburb players, at the cost of the stability of the rest of the world, and create a story about the players who came from such a world. To build this dystopia, we linearly extrapolated what we were seeing on the news at the time: political gridlock culminating in the election of a president in 2016 who finished eroding civil rights to nothingness, wealth inequality built up to Gilded Age levels, enormous shantytowns in major cities, the police brazenly patrolling the streets in full military gear attacking journalists and medical professionals, omnipresent digital surveillance making resistance terribly, terribly dangerous, Occupy on the streets and Anonymous on the web. The year we set this in was 2020.
Every single one of these things has come true. (Though I hadn't expected the pandemic, too.)
To build the characters who lived in this world, we learned about anarcho-communism and horizontal organization, about the kind of ideals that it would take to pull hope out of this situation. I consumed as many internet articles from the Left as I could get my hands on, followed /r/anarchism for much of a year as a sort of participant-observer process, and began to think. Really think. Why is our society shaped like it is? And what would a better world look like?
For a while I was trying to write this up as some sort of Sburb story. For another while I was trying to write this up as a novel. Eventually I gave up on trying. But one of the characters Zuki and I built for that setting - Myra - has remained a metaphorical voice in my head. She helped push me to face my PTSD, challenged my instinctive responses to seeing homeless people, made me watch how I interacted with the people I saw when I was in public assistance offices.
I've never been bold enough to follow in her footsteps. I can't. The shape of my childhood PTSD means that when an authority figure yells at me, I am crumpled on the floor, crying with incomprehensible early developmental terror, saying anything they want me to say. I'm not out there with the marches because I would be an active liability. So I write, like Marat in the bath. (Though hopefully without the advocating mass executions part.)
In 2016 I felt betrayed and afraid, because the election felt like it had plunged us into her timeline. But now in 2020, I'm oddly calm about it. This is what our world is now. The only thing we can do is live in it.
So I've been doing cross-stitch projects to keep my sanity. Here are some of the ones I've completed recently (links to free patterns included):
(Mod Guitar by tinymodernist, plus hemstitching)
(own saying, put through Stitchpoint's cross stitch writing tool)
Jenna Moran is kickstarting a print run of this new tabletop RPG, called Glitch. This is a cross stitch piece I did* that looks like the cover.
Glitch is about feeling permanently broken, letting people down because you don't have the energy to do any better, and trying to come to an accommodation with a world that refuses to stop destroying you. It is also about throwing all the furniture out of your hotel room so you can pitch a tent in it, explaining to an eldritch horror why people don't like kudzu, and exploring the strange and wondrous new lands in your friend's ceiling crawlspaces. I've found it to be one of those games that particularly facilitates my emotional processing through roleplay thing.
Anyway, the Glitch kickstarter can be found here.
(p.s. if you're here from tumblr please reblog this version instead! it's a proper photo post instead of a link)
*The cross stitch is slightly modified from this pattern by Therese de Dillmont.
8297 words @ https://archiveofourown.org/works/20776424
Corinne Idurre, Excrucian Warmain, is sitting at the shore of a lake when they find her. Not on the shore, oh no, that would be an acknowledgement of the base reality they are inhabiting. But at the shore, hovering, tilted back like a lawnchair. She glances at them and languidly rolls a hand in the general direction of the four Nobles. “Is the package here?”
“Jessie is not a package,” growls Rostam.
“Sure, sure, whatever.” Corinne rotates herself upright, still floating. She slinks behind Jessie and whispers something into her ear.
Jessie whips around and elbows Corinne in the face. Her arm passes through the Excrucian’s smiling form like a knife through mist.
An enemy advances a philosophical argument. Or a literal fight. Or both, because in this world they're one and the same.
(This is intended to convey what a campaign of Nobilis is like. You do not need any specific knowledge of Nobilis to read this.)
Steven Universe ficlet: Emergency Bulletin
Sep. 7th, 2019 11:15 pmWhile Steven saves the Earth, Peridot uses the best outlet she has - her TubeTube channel - to try and save the people on it.
(Ficlet. No major spoilers for the Steven Universe movie, but it spills one of the early bits.)
This is mostly Theravada.
As a practicing Buddhist (...still having trouble getting used to that phrasing), I've been asked about things like "why is meditation so unbelievably hard?" and "what do you think about the Marines teaching mindfulness to soldiers?" and "what is with alleged yoga teachers, who are supposed to practice equanimity, getting into gigantic arguments about whether a camera perspective is patentable?"
To me, these kinds of things seem to stem from meditation being removed from its sociocultural context/religion/belief/thing.
Mindfulness meditation was originally just for monks. It was not (generally) supposed to be used by people who still have to live in the world. (Though I wish to add the caveat that there are cases where it is genuinely useful for people who are not monks - for example, borderline personality disorder is significantly helped by mindfulness.) The ones that are actually designed for normal people to be able to practice, like yoga and loving-kindness, have been removed, and this lack of context is hurting the usefulness of meditation in general.
So, there are two levels of context-plucking I want to address here:
1: Yoga was supposed to be entry-level meditation
A lot of people have serious trouble with sitting meditation - whether due to bad teachers, ADHD, or being from the modern world where everything happens all the time. The practice of just staying in a place focusing on your breath and not moving even when it becomes uncomfortable is difficult. And people knew this in antiquity! That's why yoga originally existed - to be an on-ramp that makes meditation tangible. You can focus on doing something, and work your way gradually over to focusing on more and more specific things.
Now the thing is, you don't have to do literal yoga to get this sort of training. I was in swim team for many years, where I was taught to closely focus on the position of my body to perfect my technique and form. This achieved roughly the same effect. (Swimming, like yoga, also involved paying a lot of attention to when and how to breathe. You know, because my face would be underwater.) I've observed that most other solo sports can also do this if pursued for long enough.
2: Most people were supposed to practice a specific type of meditation called loving-kindness
There are several different kinds of meditation. Breath meditation is the one that you almost certainly know about. Meditating on mantras, or via yoga, is also well-known. And some people swear by meditation soundtracks like music or nature noises. But you can meditate on other things too - visual images like flickering candleflames, or specific feelings like love.
Loving-kindness meditation is a type of meditation focused on selfless love - the thing the Greeks called agape. There are instructions for precisely how to practice it elsewhere on the Internet, so I won't go into massive detail, but here's the gist of it: You take the feeling that someone close to you should be happy and free of suffering, and practice slowly extending it towards yourself, and towards larger and larger groups of people, and eventually the world. (This is a practice that can and will take years.)
Loving-kindness increases the happiness setpoint. It fosters empathy. It is actually possible to practice without cutting yourself off from improving yourself and the rest of the world. By all rights, loving-kindness ought to be the type of meditation that is taught to people at large. But it's not.
So, I leave you with a question:
It is very interesting that the type of meditation that teaches empathy was left out of Western imports.
Who did that? And why?One of the major rationalizations of "those in the workworld must work" is that, without the furnaces, the entire settlement would freeze over. That's fundamentally ludicrous when you think about it; rugweaving and Hour processing do not generate heat. But the New Governor has not implemented a scheme to, say, have every worker get a shorter workweek and shovel coal for four hours every other day, which would be entirely sufficient for heating. And cutting the other production lines and telling exporters to go hang should have been easy: the Revolutionaries would be just fine with not being paid in sovereigns, since those are the coinage of Empire and a different sort of economy could be established locally.
Why, then, must the New Governor accept London's terms?
I have this sneaking suspicion that the workworld is kept under control by making sure that it cannot independently fulfill one of the major requirements of life - most likely that it cannot produce its own food. If it requires a continuous stream of outside resources, the resources can be held hostage until production improves. (In the real world, other examples of this kind of resource are clean water, or internet access.) And this threat is backed up by the implicit presence of other workworlds. You never hear any other workworld names, but their presence would give London an additional bargaining chip - "you are fundamentally disposable: if you decide that you don't want to bother, we can just ramp up production elsewhere and leave you to starve".
It is likely impossible to resolve this ingame, because a game can't get big enough to take this many interactions into account. But if this wasn't bounded by being a game world, I have a possible solution. London works very hard to keep time the same on every world in every corner of the Empire. Maybe they can't maintain it to the second, but it would be easy to keep every place aligned within about a day of each other. With some careful planning, a bit of extra attention paid to Royal Horological duties, and contacts in the New Street Line, a captain could get every workworld to revolt at the same time. That would put a dent in London's confidence.
This is a thing people have actually done. It is called a general strike.
2. Relatedly, I have realized that I was a practicing Buddhist all along. I can't say that I believe in Buddhism, which is why I previously could not call it a religion, but apparently regular meditation practice to the point of meaningfully altering my psychological landscape - practice I have been doing since I was 14 - counts as "having" a religion. Whups.
3. Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine is a fractal made of writing prompts. If I can wrangle my brain into a usable shape, I will make more posts explaining what this means.
4. ...honestly, "it's a fractal made of writing prompts" is already more digestible to a naive newcomer than whatever Jenna Moran wrote. This implies something, but I don't know what.
Apple Tuna Salad
Mar. 29th, 2019 10:01 pmThis recipe makes four or five-ish sandwiches, depending on how much tuna you want to heap on each sandwich.
You will need bread, two of the little 5 ounce cans of chunk light tuna in water, plain unsweetened yogurt (or I guess mayo if that's your thing), leaves of lettuce at least as big as the slices of bread (I like butter lettuce), a crunchy sweet apple like a Fuji apple, sliced Colby Jack cheese, and those adorable toothpicks with the colored frills on top.
Tuna salad1) Wash or rinse the apple in the usual manner. Peel one side of the apple and cut a decently large slice, then chop the apple slice into little tiny bits. (Please don't grate it. Even coarse graters leave you with limp apple shreddings rather than nice firm bits.) You'll want about 3ish tablespoons of apple when you're done. You can eat the rest of the apple after.
2) Take the tuna cans and drain them. Put the tuna in a bowl. Add 2-3 tablespoons of yogurt/mayo. Add the apple choppings too. Mix everything thoroughly.
3) Put the tuna salad in a covered container in the fridge overnight, so it can think about its life choices. (Also the flavors blend into each other overnight and make the rest of the salad have a subtle sweetness.)
Sandwich assembly
4) Select your lettuce leaves, and rinse them thoroughly. If the lettuce leaves you are using are way too big to fit on your bread (I'm looking at you, romaine), tear them into pieces until they are somewhere near the size of your bread slices. You don't need to be precise here, you're just trying to make sure you don't have two other sandwiches' worth of lettuce hanging off one end of your sandwich.
5) The sandwich itself goes like this: Bread slice, lettuce, a glop of tuna salad, cheese slice, lettuce, and another bread slice. The lettuce prevents the bread from going soggy.
6) If you want to be fancy, cut the sandwiches from corner to corner and stick the toothpicks in. On one occasion when I wanted to be really fancy, I cut apple pieces into little heart and star shapes and speared those on the toothpicks before driving the toothpick into the sandwich itself. You know, like the thing they do with the olives.
Serve with sunglasses, shrieking children, and pink lemonade.
AW-like Principles
Mar. 8th, 2019 11:09 amAn exercise recently posed in the Jenna Moran fanclub chat was to write Apocalypse World-style principles by reverse-engineering them from your own writing and GMing. So here are some of mine:
- Pretend you did it on purpose. Backfill the reasoning and logic leading up to it later. So maybe you did something on a whim, or declared some piece of lore without fully thinking it through. Retconning something that already happened ingame shakes the players' trust. Coming up with a reason why an exception happened is great for worldbuilding and makes you look like you're prepared.
- Prepare NPCs, not scenes. Don't presume that the players will act a specific way around your NPCs. They will not take your bait. If you build NPCs with motivations - even if the motivations are one or two sentences - their reactions to the PCs' actions will make interesting things happen.
- Prepare settings, not scenes. You can make places, and associate NPCs with them. But don't prepare several NPCs to have specific interactions with each other in a specific place, because then you will be tempted to force the PCs in that direction. (For example, don't make specific NPCs have a pre-scripted barfight.) Leave yourself the option to move around some of the NPCs if the PCs' attention wanders.
- Round uncertain results in the players' favor. If your system has wiggle room, or you're not entirely sure how someone or something will react, you usually want to round the result towards the players. Doing so makes them feel like they're getting away with something. Not doing so runs the risk of being seen as unfair and capricious.
- If they're paying attention to something, it's important. Insisting that something is "unimportant" will just make the players more suspicious. If the players are focusing "way too much" on some random object, stick some backstory on the object and make it have plot.
- Glue together existing pieces in a new way. True originality doesn't actually exist, so please feel free to steal fragments from other works or scenario-books. (Or even base some NPCs on actual people with the names swapped out.) But see "prepare settings, not scenes" above: trying to replicate vignettes or plots wholesale will feel forced and/or tip off players who are familiar with said works.
- The players don't already know. If you want to have a Deep Secret in the heart of your setting, trying to only give the players tiny hints will often result in them completely missing the hints. Play out all the consequences of the Deep Secret, hint very heavily at it repeatedly, everything short of actually saying it outright: this gives them a realistic chance of figuring it out, or at least of realizing that you were indeed foreshadowing things when you finally reveal the secret. (An example of this would be the Pink Diamond shenanigans in Steven Universe.)
- By definition, it's already symbolic: of the inside of your brain. Don't force symbolism or philosophical questions. If they're relevant, they will come up naturally, and have real resonance because they're likely based on real problems you ask yourself about. If they're irrelevant, trying to add them will seem preachy and out of place.
This does not have pictures in it, because I learn best from text descriptions. Also I don't have anything handy to make good Tetris pictures with. If someone else wants to do that, be my guest.
So I see a lot of people interested in Tetris 99 that want to know how to play Tetris. Yes, there's a whole lot of tutorials, but if you're still in the stage of "I'm just putting the pieces where they can fit and they're leaving holes", the tutorials probably won't be helpful to you.
What you want to learn first, and practice, is keeping the top edge of your stack almost horizontal.
- Do not try to make the shape with a long canyon to try for Tetrises. You need a good foundation, both literally and metaphorically, before you will be able to pull that off consistently. Just clear single lines for now.
- Leave at least one two-piece-wide flat spot for the yellow O piece to land on.
- Leave at least one little bump for red Z pieces or green S pieces to land on.
- If you have a canyon that is two blocks deep, try to put the orange L piece or the blue J piece into it before it gets any worse.
- If the canyon is three blocks deep or more, put a cyan I piece into it.
- Use the purple T piece to solve any other alignment issues. Seriously, that thing is super useful.
- If you do end up with a buried hole under the surface layer, try to stack as few blocks as possible above it, so you can dig for it more easily. (This also applies if you get gray garbage blocks put underneath you.)
So: Almost horizontal.
After you master this - once you can keep your top edge flat for a while - then you can start trying to learn the other forms. But don't rush it.
Space Elves
Feb. 12th, 2019 03:05 pmEragon was one of the first big book series I ever read. And Eragon's atheist science elves were a serious missed opportunity.
Okay, so they didn't have magic until the dragons came along. But the elves in Eragon have a thorough understanding of biology (having at least one spell that thoroughly describes how to repair flesh on a living being, magic-based morphological freedom) and physics (knowing the existence of vacuum, wave-particle duality). They also have at least some of the prerequisites of air travel (a spell that compresses air to the thickness needed for lungs to breathe it in the extremely thin upper atmosphere). They can sing houses and caverns out of living wood, have artificial lighting, can create batteries, live indefinitely long.
So why are they not in space? I guess the ones we still see could be the ones left behind after all the explorers have gone, you know, Space Amish-style.
But imagine! Imagine the more restless of Eragon's elves among the stars, in great ships sung out of living wood, with solar sails and nuclear power and gemstone-based instrumentation studding the hull. Imagine their calling is preserving the biodiversity of the cosmos, with vaulted halls inside their many ships simulating alien rainforests and tundras and oceans. Imagine them using magic mirrors to communicate across untold lightyears. Imagine them landing among new worlds, coming in little pods strapped to the backs of dragons. Imagine portable life-support within those pods, toughened glass tanks filled with specific plants, scattered with spelled artificial diamonds to make those plants give a whole life's worth of air and fruit within perhaps two or three days. Imagine exploratory parties molding themselves lungs and eyes and skin suited to surviving the new worlds they discover. Imagine researchers collecting oceanwater samples in delicately filigreed canisters, or taking color plates as their cohorts use magic to encourage local plants to flower and fruit and seed. Imagine landing a tree-ship on a dead world, using it as the center of a new colony, terraforming the surrounding area with algae and fungus and amoeba, reeds and ferns and ants, birch and pine and birds.
I've written various descriptions of Homestuck over the past few years, in various places, for various people. The more I've written them, the closer they've converged to the description you see below.
I think I'm done repeatedly rewriting the description from scratch every time. I'm just going to put the entire thing here for future reference.
Homestuck is a Multimedia Internet Thingy by Andrew Hussie (mostly), that broke the bounds of being a webcomic almost immediately, and eventually became an anime.
What It Is
Okay, seriously, though. Homestuck is a work that takes full advantage of existing on the Internet. The prose and storytelling of Homestuck are presented in an unorthodox format that utterly defies description... and would still be a compelling story if stripped of the "gimmicks" (not that you could strip Homestuck of the gimmicks, they're integral to its identity). When averaged out across its entire run, Homestuck contains more text than the Bible (...ish; counting the exact amount of text in Homestuck is very difficult since a large amount of it is locked away in point-and-click adventure Flash pages and Homestuck is exceptionally good at visual storytelling) and updated more frequently than any other webcomic in existence. The music much of this story is set to does not understand genre, and is all the better for it.
Trying to describe what Homestuck is about is equally impossible. Is it a creation myth? A ludicrously complex time travel tale? A handful of teenagers whose internet friendships with people they have never met are treated as real and valuable? A story about the essence of identity? Science fiction with fascinating worldbuilding and aliens? An allegory for the increasingly all-consuming nature of digital reality? A meditation on the nature of free will? A dumb joke about Con Air extended until it has gone thoroughly dead, revived, and then milked dry again? All of this and more.
Homestuck has been called the first true example of a "hypercomic" - i.e. a hypothesized comic-related entity first theorized about in the earliest years of the Internet, whose previous examples were all Art rather than attempts to tell a story through the medium. (I prefer calling it a "multimedia internet thingy".) Homestuck has been compared to James Joyce's Ulysses. Andrew Hussie has denied that he ever wanted to create anything deeply groundbreaking or artistic, he just wanted to create what was in his mind. Honestly, I believe him.
Fandom
For several years, Homestuck had one of the most rabid fan communities out there, rivalling even the fans of mainstream works like Doctor Who in sheer energy, depth, and prolificness. Homestuck was partially written by its fans, with Hussie frequently taking fan suggestions and fan theories and tossing them into canon, increasing engagement and adding further depth to disparate elements that would have been one-off jokes in other works. Canonized fan speculation includes LGBT relationships, which were added to Homestuck years before mainstream acceptance, and are integrated well into the narrative. A notable Homestuck update (i.e. significant content dump) from 2011 broke Newgrounds, Megaupload, Livestream, and Tumblr, in that order. Even now, when something Homestuck-related is released, a thousand thousand people throw aside the trappings of normal life and become screaming fans again for a couple days.
Homestuck itself could be described as being a "cult classic", I suppose, but even now the influence of Homestuck still bleeds out into the greater cultural sphere. The fact that Homestuck was arguably partially written by its fans encouraged said fans to branch out into creating their own works, and many of them have since become extremely good and high-profile. Undertale is by Toby Fox, a Homestuck musician. (According to folk legend, Undertale was conceived of in Andrew Hussie's basement. I have been unable to either verify or disprove this.) The maker of those virally popular SCP horror games, Mark Hadley, was originally a Homestuck musician. Many of the people who work on Steven Universe are fans. Alexandra Douglass, previously a Homestuck artist, was employed drawing for the Sonic Mania webseries. A good portion of the soundtrack for Starbound was composed by Jeremy Iamurri (Solatrus), who was also a Homestuck musician. I can keep going.
Miscellany
A couple years after the ending, Homestuck (intellectual property, website, and all) was sold to Viz Media. After some initial consternation, most of the fandom has settled into some level of acceptance. For a long time, Homestuck being an anime was a common fan inside joke. The new involvement of Viz, which is an anime-property-related company, makes that some level of reality.
Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff is a "webcomic", ostensibly drawn by a character from Homestuck, that is a spoof of poorly-drawn amateur webcomics and a source of in-universe memes. It is filled with purposefully bad image editing that douses everything in JPEG artifacts, obnoxiously bright clashing colors, exaggeratedly poor anatomy, and gratuitous and uncontextualized NSFW material. This is where the "I told you about stairs" jokes are from. There was a recent Kickstarter for a Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff book, with all-new material not previously featured on the site, and KC Green and dril (yes, that dril) as co-writers.There is a Homestuck-based videogame, or videogame series, or expanded universe, called Hiveswap. Its Kickstarter raised something like 2 million dollars, which was the highest-grossing Kickstarter for a video game at the time (this was in an age before Double Fine Adventure, so it didn't have much competition at the time, but still). The studio originally contracted to actually produce the videogame may or may not have committed fraud with said Kickstarter money (details are unclear, and probably under NDA anyway), so it was delayed multiple times and is coming out episodically. Hiveswap is a point-and-click adventure game (mostly) that delves further into Homestuck's worldbuilding and contains much of its idiosyncratic writing style and charm.
The Hiveswap Friendsims are a series of bite-size 99-cent visual novels about making friends with many of the trolls that are supposed to later be featured in Hiveswap. (They are of dubious canonicity. You play as the blank-faced "MSPA Reader" and there are many mutually exclusive routes.) I think they are supposed to fund the production of later Hiveswap, but I'm not sure.
There is a persistent rumor that Andrew Hussie is the mind behind the erotic writer Chuck Tingle.
The musicians behind Homestuck have been undercredited. There are several albums with "outtake" music that never ended up in the comic proper. Probably the most notable of these albums are P[S] and Stuckhome Syndrome. Go listen. Maybe pay them money.
Conclusions
Some people say Homestuck peaked around the end of Act 5. Some people say Homestuck's ending was incredibly poor. Some people even refuse to acknowledge the canonicity of Homestuck's ending. I'm not sure I agree. Updates became ever less frequent after the end of Act 5, and there are arguments that the subsequent plot descended into incomprehensibility, but I do still think the writing and charm remained until the end. Andrew Hussie brought in increasingly many people to help produce Homestuck, first with music, then with art, and eventually with everything else. In the end, I think he gave its future to the fans. Which is fitting.
Do I recommend Homestuck for reading now? I don't know... sort of? Homestuck itself is so large that it would likely require a week-long bender to read in anything approaching its entirety. Its beginning is actively misleading as to the nature and depth of the narrative it eventually becomes. Starting anywhere other than the beginning is sometimes recommended, but results in losing a good fraction of the context provided by the beginning sections. Later on, the tone fluctuates wildly. Retcons, as in rearrangement of previous canon to better accommodate later story, are an actual plot element. Being associated with "Homestuck fandom" is not nearly as much of a stigma as it was for a while, but the fact that I have to bring this up is itself notable. Reading Homestuck is a fundamentally different experience after the fact compared to what it was at the time, because we are no longer in the heady days of reader suggestions and Homestuck-could-update-at-any-time culture. Even with all these disclaimers, though, Homestuck is a fascinating story, told in a unique medium and style that still only has a single-digit number of examples. It has had an outsize influence on much of fan-culture, the videogame world, and (to a lesser extent) culture in general.
I have been a Homestuck fan since 2009. I will likely remain a Homestuck fan for the rest of my life.
So, there's this old problem that's been going on for a long while. How exactly do you represent the sheer insanity of Problem Sleuth and early Homestuck in a roleplaying game? I mean, the obvious answer is "you don't", but I took a cue from the fact that both these works rely heavily on references to earlier parts of themselves, and made it so that you can track these references and reuse them via index cards.
It's a tabletop-roleplaying-ish game where you stack nonsense and self-reference in equal measure. Also, plot is a failure state.
Here you go. Have fun. Let me know what you think.
Reviews:
Okay then.
-- Lisa
If you are the sort of players who will introduce gratuitous time travel the moment you run out of ideas, and then spend the rest of the session debating how time travel works in this setting...
... when it's not even a time-themed game...
... this may be the system for you!
-- Toph
Given a rigidly constrained set of plot elements, how long can you spend faffing about and not advancing the plot, like when you get the airship in a JRPG and spend a full ten hours watering people's plants for gimmick equipment you proceed to never use?
And by 'rigidly constrained,' I mean 'write words down on an index card, now it's a plot element.'
-- Polter
Stardew Valley's free coffee
Jan. 6th, 2019 10:02 pmI have found what is quite possibly the dumbest, least interesting way to make money in Stardew Valley. (Or, at the very least, it is in the competition for such a title.)
So there's this midwinter festival, introduced in version 1.3, called the Night Market. It starts at 5pm on three consecutive days and lasts until you go home or pass out. There is a merchant there that gives you free coffee. You're throttled to one coffee every ten in-game minutes.
Realistically, you can get to the merchant by about 5:30pm, and - if you use the mysterious guy in front of Willy's shop who has a farm warp totem - you can safely farm coffee until 1:30am and then get home in time to go to bed (i.e. so you don't pass out outside and get billed for someone dragging you home). This means you can farm free coffee for 8 in-game hours, netting you 48 coffees per night (144 coffees if you do this for all three days).
If you chuck (brewed) coffee into the sell bin, each one sells for 150 gold. This makes the entire hustle earn you 21600 gold. This is not great, especially compared to the profit margin of farming in Stardew Valley, but this festival happens in the middle of winter - the part of the year where farming is almost entirely off-limits. (Unless you use Winter Seeds to grow forage items, but those only give you foraging XP, not farming XP, so I don't really count them.) That makes this method almost, sort of, slightly, viable.Ten in-game minutes takes six real-world seconds; round that up to about 10 real-world seconds to account for the short brewing cutscene and the associated text. So you can get those 48 coffees in something like 5 real-world minutes. Note that you can't accelerate in-game time in any meaningful way, so you have to spend about 12 in-game hours per day messing around before you can do this. I guess you could go chop wood or something to pass the time.
Realistically, coffee is much better as gifts for people in the village (it's Harvey's absolute favorite thing, and most of the other adults and bachelor(ette)s at least somewhat enjoy it). But if you want to completely turn off your brain, I suppose it is theoretically possible to use this to farm money. You just won't enjoy it very much.
To explain who I am, a bit
Dec. 17th, 2018 03:52 pmIf you want more details or possible previous connections, let me know.
