ephemeralbreakpoint

[ephemeralbreakpoint]

i might focus on johnquest later, but i also remembered something a lot less depressing and it's kind of digging a hole in my heart.

so especially in the earlier days after we won juno was a sad mess, this is a given, he is me of course. a lot of times he'd keep himself up all night crying about something and if his moirail was too busy working (which was always) then it was my obligation to make him feel better. i thought so, anyway. i was basically his on call emotional support kitty, by which i mean it was often he missed the heck out of pounce and wanted me to be his substitute, which could mean anything from laying at the edge of his bed and purring really loudly until he could sleep or mushing my ears against his gross acne riddled face while he gives me pets. i asked him one time if he was using me as a shield for the trained snipers on him and he bonked me on the head.

one time he missed hunting with her, though, so he somehow convinced me to go out with him in the woods by his creepy little murder hut and he told me to kill whatever, just as long as we use it all later. and one honestly kind of worrying realization that i am really well attuned for slaughter later, he takes me back into his room and drops everything and he starts painting blood on the walls. i'm sure most johns would have questions, but by now my bullshit tolerance was so sky high this didn't even register as something bizarre. like yeah, of course that's something nepeta would do. so per his request i help him, but i couldn't draw for shit and we were lacking in color variety (i cannot believe i asked him "how do you mix green") so it looked kind of ass. i mean. by standards of finger paint blood murals, i guess.

we finish up, and he steps back to look at it more objectively. and with the most genuine happiness i have ever heard from a dave, he just says "you know what... i dont really ever want to go back to that". and while i stand there trying to think of a response to that, he comes up behind me and rubs blood all in my hair. so i retaliate and slap him, and we keep splashing blood all over each other until we get tired of laughing about it. and by that point i had to go home and shower before the blood stained my ears, which is a thing i actually had to worry about a lot for some reason. but i have to admit it kinda disappointed me we never did anything like that ever again.

he eventually put a lot of much better looking murals in there, it was a hobby of his always. but that shitty little portrait of us stayed forever.

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suddenly a little depressed there isn't a full collection of the time junction bridge chronicles out there, from pre harmonia up to johnquest. which is kind of my fault for leaving everyone before we could ever make it, but still.

i think it's a fun time. traumatic, sure, but entertaining now that there's distance between us.

[ephemeralbreakpoint]

it's really been a hard week for staying myself. which is a shitty way to word that, but there isn't a better one. Inciting Incident aside, i think something like this was bound to come up sooner or later.

on the one hand, i'm starting to feel like i don't have as much of a connection towards john anymore. it's kind of like that part of me is moving on? i guess knowing why i had such a bizarre fixation on him and why i got such a fucking pit in my stomach thinking about the other beta kids, and getting the closure that everyone still remembered me after i died and there was a good reason i didn't trust that stupid ass cat was all i really needed to work through those feelings. i guess i feel less like i AM john and more like i WAS john. "ha ha, yeah, that. that sure was a time."

it's kind of bitter sweet. i mean, i'd rather that stuff not gnaw at me for reasons i didn't understand anymore, but also... damn. just damn. i don't have a more eloquent way of putting it.

but oh man. him. the other one. god, i don't think it's ever been harder to keep his bitch ass out of my head. that's nothing new, dirk has always been weirdly possessive of me shift wise, but GOD.

it's only recently that i've come to understand just what his damage is. i think that part of me feels like, by way of (totally deserved, to be honest) karmic justice, his identity has been ripped away from him and now only serves as a reminder of every shitty thing he did. and it sucks, because that's true enough to an extent i can't really handle seeing Any depiction of dirk anywhere at all. and this has caused a whole host of interpersonal issues i can't really do anything about. it just sucks. i haven't been able to keep out of dirk shifts for long even though i've sure as fuck been trying. and i realize the glaring irony of this statement, but i can feel my sense of self fucking eroding in real time. if john's unfinished business was to remember himself, dirk's is clearly to take his self back, even if it kills me. and that's just not possible, by any definition.

i don't know what to do but hope it goes away eventually. i really don't want... any part of what i just said to be a thing that happens.

[ephemeralbreakpoint]

i cannot believe i have yet to talk about the time junction. except i actually can believe it, it just is a concept that makes me really feel like i have gone insane. not that any part of being kin doesn't already make me feel like that but oh man. it's really fucking cool though so i want to believe.

anyway. *A* time junction is simply a time line that happens to contain multiple other time lines inside it. it's our proposed explanation for why ultimates are a thing that exists in homestuck and nowhere else. when we were reflecting on why it ISN'T normal for every fictionkin to remember being every version of themself, it's kind of a term that just came out of my stupid mouth and i couldn't explain why it made perfect sense. in this case, the alpha time lines are the time junction(s), containing all their doomed variants within them like some fucked up non euclidean ouroboros.

there is another defining factor of a time junction however-- its time lines all orbit around a singular (spatial) body, towards which it pulls in any nearby time line. whether in homestuck's case it's skaia or the green sun or both or neither, i have no idea, that's where my time-y jurisdiction ends and the idea stops making any fucking sense to me. HOWEVER. i do think that homestuck as a whole is actually SEVERAL time junctions within a singular time junction, and that's how multiple alpha time lines can exist, so there probably are also several things the time junctions gravitate around.

under this frame work, i think that when someone ults, they become the central point of a time junction themselves, and pull in every conceivable time line in which they exist. how does this happen? why? i have no fucking idea. it just does.

except... it does get a little more complicated than that. that's how the HOMESTUCK time lines work. there is another time junction out there, with slightly different mechanics, which i don't have the wherewithal to understand despite technically being responsible for it existing. what i do know is, though, the harmonia time line is a sort of bridge between the two, where it for some reason is part of both. i don't... i don't know what the words i'm saying mean anymore.

[ephemeralbreakpoint]

it is official. the entire concept of comedy is cancelled, because this is where it has peaked.

absolute cinema.

Me and John Egbert!!!!! Truth!!!!

[ephemeralbreakpoint]

i want out

[ephemeralbreakpoint]

two things discovered today:

- if i find a timeline that's one to one with this one besides extremely minor differences, i can't actually see anything in it past the present.

- this means i can get memories from egberts who are (for all intents and purposes) still alive.

i don't know what the implications of this are.

[ephemeralbreakpoint]

see i understand and sympathize with kins who Hate It Here and don't feel like they should be human but i am so not one of them. like yeah, i miss the cool wind stuff but i am not a cat anymore and that's everything to me

[ephemeralbreakpoint]

ah yes. and then that happened. juno died, and then suddenly end of evanjohnlion.

there aren't words that really put into perspective how grim ulting was-- for me, anyway, apparently everyone else got a much better deal. well, it started kind of like a Kin Awakening-- he killed himself without ever saying a word to anyone about why, and the overwhelming sense of guilt i got wasn't that i wasn't there for him, but that i did it in the first place. and it'd put into perspective fucking everything-- why i occasionally had prescient knowledge of our timeline completely separate from the... well, prescient knowledge being a first guardian gave me, why the two of us always had issues of talking through each other (exactly what it sounds like) and not being able to acknowledge we were separate people, how i knew dave and nepeta before i actually knew them...

so, yeah. i realized i was him before i was me. and then i remembered all the timelines he had cut short via time bullshit, which led to a snowball effect of remembering unrelated timelines (where did those come from? i don't know) and i couldn't stop. at first i tried to ignore it and go on with my day, wanting to deal with something that serious after getting accustomed to my best bro being dead, but nothing i could do could shut my mind up. it was like the universe itself had grabbed me by the shoulders and shoved my face in the ground with my ontological purpose written all over it and i couldn't escape it.

it was about once i'd given up on trying to clear my thoughts that i started accessing the narrative, unintentionally. i couldn't STOP narrating so it was a lot of asking "why am i in the narrative. get me out." but over the course of maybe like, an hour or so, that cycle of remembering things and realizing facets of my existence i never should have known spiralled so far out of control i just... entirely shut down. i remember laying face down on my kitchen floor, motionless, with the most head splitting migraine ever because i was so consumed by it i couldn't even think to move.

eventually it had seemed to me that it was starting to let up, enough that i was finally coherent enough again to say as much. except not at all, because everything went black and gcat took over and kept yapping (becsprite style). that didn't last very long though. i felt my ego die in real time, and then i guess i was dead because i never woke back up.

i died alone. i thought everyone had just conveniently left me to die. but apparently, this was a canon event for some fucking reason and no one could have done anything about it. also, jade was just doing the fucking dishes while listening to me live blog my death apparently. why it is something that HAD to happen, i'm not sure either. but there is probably something there.

[ephemeralbreakpoint]

i've been thinking a Lot about harmonia again, considering the john that ult-ed is the one from that timeline so i guess it's my actual canon by default? i'll probably bitch more in depth about what happened later but i think the most important context is thusly-- we didn't scratch, so instead we left our session and went to a different one. except getting out of our session required a really strange and convoluted plan that involved dupe glitching me, using him to make fucking johndavepetasprite (who, understandably, changed his name to juno right after), and having him use heir of time bullshit to hold off the reckoning while jade and rose lured jack noir out to a third session and fucking died. but then i killed him and after we all went on a WACKY AND COMICAL ADVENTURE through all five sessions (for some stupid reason) we won so it's ok.

anyway Erm Uh Well That Just Happened and then it was over and we lived there. i have approximately 0 memories of earth C because every john that made it there is cut off from me and i try my god damned bestest not to remember Dirk Things, but out of everywhere else i lived Ever harmonia's still the place i think about most. after SBURB we just showed up there at a random point in its chronology, and there was this weird period where i and juno and a lot of us actually just went back to school until we were all adults.

we were venerated as gods and all, but most of us really didn't want to be, so there was this general understanding people had that "the gods are just around, living their lives and you shouldn't bother them." this didn't stop anyone from bothering us obviously, but i kind of flew under the radar of everyone that didn't just want me to get carlyn to do them a favor or wasn't uh, a furry. i got... i got hassled on the street by a lot of furries to be honest.

even without any earth C egberts in my arsenal i can feel via KINTUITION (sorry) that the inevitable end result of every post SBURB john is super depression. i, however, completely evaded this, which i can only assume is the result of juno stealing my depression energy because man was he a constant wreck. our timeline never had lord english to begin with, so once we won i felt like i had fulfilled whatever Purpose SBURB bestowed upon me and really just wanted to regain the sense of normalcy i lost when the Incident started. and i managed it, for the most part.

i had a really simple day to day of being shitty at my job (at home), walking downtown to get breakfast or something, trying not to murder my pet rabbits, and then going off to see juno to make sure he does even the barest of self care. sometimes carlyn hung around, sometimes jade did, sometimes i was by myself and that was usually when the Depression started creeping in, so i'd unwind by fucking off into the ocean and pretending to be a hurricane for a while. if i got bored? i'd go see what juno's crazy ass moirail was brewing in his evil little mystery shack or, if i REALLY hated myself, go and check on the alpha kids in their... special area. and nothing about that routine changed in the better part of 2000 years. which was totally fine with me.

and then juno very suddenly goes dark for a few months before killing himself, and this sets off the chain of events that leads to a couple more of us dying-- including me, because i ult-ed and for some fucking reason it killed me.

[ephemeralbreakpoint]

non descript rambling about minuscule details and stuff, cuz i feel like it. awesome.

- ok so first off, none of the text command stuff was real. i didn't ever contemplate shitting on my desk, i had a name already, etc. etc. i think that much is obvious though. WV's commands, however, were totally real, and it was super weird because i couldn't hear them or anything but i still knew somehow what he was saying to me.

- the sylladex shenanigans were mostly real though. that happened EVERY TIME i tried to use it i was really just THAT comically bad at it. with carlyn as my witness i never got better

- i met dave, rose and jade forever ago, when i was like, five or six. like, as soon as i could read text on a screen dad set my ass down in front of a computer and didn't monitor my internet usage in the slightest. i don't remember how i met them but i don't think we started on pesterchum.

- we HAD been using it for a good 4-5 years at least by then though, and i remember mine was always super out of date because i refused to ever update anything ever unless i literally had to to keep using it. same deal with typheus, i liked to PRETEND i used it because it was old but really i just didn't want to learn a new one.

- wacky RL game mechanics aside, there weren't really many differences between homestuck earth and earth Real. besides of course, that mostly everything REEKS of being written by hussie. i don't know how else to describe it. my school work read the exact same as that fucking book i had, like everything around you just hated you and made sure to let you know in explicit, wack ass purple prose-y detail. any media that didn't sound like that, i now realize, are all things that exist here also. i don't... i don't want to unpack what that means.

- i did not game. i do not game. i have been pretending otherwise since the dawn of time but anyone with eyes knows the truth. ask me how many SBURB sessions i have ruined due to lack of gaming

- not everyone ults. actually, i am like, the only one from my main timeline (harmonia) i know of that did within that same timeline (besides the ones who did while we were still playing). and we were five sessions playing together, so there were like, 30 of us total, soooo.

[ephemeralbreakpoint]

the thing about being an ult that is fucking weird is that, OBVIOUS EXCEPTIONS ASIDE, i can remember being very literally any conceivable john(/dirk). and man is that a double edged sword and a fuckjing half.

this gives me the ability to essentially force timelines into existence-- i can put myself anywhere, at any time, in any universe so long as i have a decent enough excuse as to why there is an egbert there (the criteria as to what makes a valid egbert are arcane as fuck and honestly i don't fucking get it, rant for another time). obvious downside being, think of the wrong thing and oops, now you remember the most cursed shit imaginable. it makes reading fanfics kind of impossible unless i'm REALLY REALLY SURE i want to remember existing there.

it does have its uses though. i can't really rig them to my benefit, just make them exist, buuuuut being able to self insert into literally anything ever fucking RULES. just... as long as i forget about it before i get hit with the baggage of an extra life i'll never get back, another set of friends i'll never see again but i can stick my past self into a universe that still has ecto cooler so who cares.

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i think it's kind of interesting that the Awakening TM hasn't really changed the way i view homestuck or the fandom or anything like that. like, it's surprisingly easy to separate myself and what happened to me from silly blue guy from my comic. i don't get why i am this okay with engaging with a kinda-accurate-but-not-really simulacrum of my friends and my lived experiences but for some reason they just don't feel the same.

but at the same time... it's really depressing. it freaks me out that i'm so nonchalant talking about people i used to know like they're just characters in a story. i can't complain about how underutilized i feel like rose is in A5A2 without feeling really shitty about saying that about one of my best friends. i dunno.

most of the time i try not to think about that but sometimes it just hits me how fucked up it all is. i remember it hitting me like an 18 wheeler one day and saying to my RP group "isn't it creepy that we're playing with our old friends like puppets?" and yeah. yeah, it kind of is.

[ephemeralbreakpoint]

100% effective dirk summoning chant

ok i guess its my turn uh

if 8eing kin has taught me anything its that vriska did nothing wrong

[ephemeralbreakpoint]

it's kind of funny to me how john shifts, whether that's canon john, catboy john, the fucking abomination, or what have you are always so slight. like, they are disruptive but they're polite about it. maybe i forget what my name is, or i keep forgetting how many limbs i have or something silly like that (thanks juno).

but then dirk shifts are like getting turbo hijacked by the ghost of striders past and having to channel him like a fucking Z list medium. he just takes the fuck over. i go to hand him the mic and he rips my arm off and walks away with it. i did not even know how deep the pool of phantom sensations went until fucker sat me first class on a trip through like, the entirety of act 6 and somehow that was my brain's takeaway

it's hilarious how powerful it is but it's actually kind of frightening. i can make fun of dirk for being the fucking loser that he is all damn day but it is far too easy to unconsciously slip back into his loser ass mindset for my liking

[ephemeralbreakpoint]

If being kin has taught me anything its that nothing is eternal and everything can be predicted. And if it taught me anything else, is that you should live your life having fun instead of trying to move around life to attain your goals.

Believing youself to know everything, even if you do, will leave you to stop seeing people like themselves. It's the human unpredictability that helps you know that you're alive. That this is real. Enjoy every moment of your existance, have fun, make friends, family, create memories that, although they wont last forever, will follow you wherever you go.

Never stop being yourself. Because the second you stop seeing people for what they are, you'll lose yourself. You'll lose what makes you human, and you'll become nothing but a cold, unfeeling being. Incredibly hard to stop, yes, but alone.

That loneliness will grow, until eventually it'll consume you from the inside. Don't let it win. Live life by Living, not by calculating how everyone else lives.

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if being kin has taught me anything as a writer it's that you should always treat your characters with respect

you never know when they're going to show up right behind you and start writing essays about what a piece of shit writer you are