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He actually probably is the only Māori guy I know about if you don't count random folk I passed on the street or met bc of their job that one time I was in Aotearoa/NZ some years ago! I guess there's that MP from the video but I don't know her name. Anyone I should have heard about? its nice to discover new performers/creators etc

I know I've said this before and it's obviously not exclusive to locked tomb fandom but it sure does feel like Taika Waititi is the only Māori guy they know about

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why is ao3 is blocked on the hospital wifi????

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You can't just say that and not share it

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I mean, we basically live in that world, in that the immune system does work on cancer but basically never at the diagnosable-as-cancer stage... However that "basically" is probably responsible for the very rare spontaneous/otherwise-inexplicable remission which is absolutely a recognised phenomenon

Okay, explain the miracles received by Maureen Digan and Fr. Ron Pytel. After being researched by the Congregation for the Cause of Saints, they were deemed miraculous interventions and lead to the canonization of Saint Faustina in the year 2000

so a young woman with cancer prayed to a saint and made a recovery, that's wonderful!

how many people have prayed to this saint? how many made a recovery from serious illness? how many people recover from illness without praying to this saint? that gives us some idea of significance.

(obviously the intercession of saints only ever cures diseases which can potentially cure by the action of the immune system, God Hates Amputees etc.)

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honestly more of you should be dressmaxxing just for the efficiency gainz. imagine having to bother with multiple main items of clothing

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still in awe that Disco Elysium was such a groundbreaking and carefully crafted piece of storytelling that it got us to sympathize with two cops, although a load-bearing part of that is how it is explicitly and repeatedly stated that the RCM’s authority is limited, contingent, and murky. As with so many other things, the cruelties inflicted by police are less due to the Platonic Form of Cop but rather their stranglehold on city budgets, self-interested chains of command, capture of investigative bodies, overlapping interests of police and judicial systems, and a million other details, so “meet the cop from the land where everyone points and laughs at the cops” is an easier sell.

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@mercuryjellyfish

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I’m gradually getting the hang of this tumble weblogging.

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David Boreanez spent the whole of Buffy acting the motivation "has a pebble in his shoe but feels like it would be awkward to take his shoe off and get it right now" and context and sound editing did the rest

every time someone says “look how they’re looking at each other! they’re in love!” about a non-canon ship i just think of the kuleshov effect for a second but then i come to my senses and decide to have fun

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I basically cannot rest until everyone knows about Look Around You

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youve probably already mused about this in the past but do you think cascade could work as the actual ending of homestuck? like is there a way in which homestuck could be read as a complete narrative with a somewhat satisfying ending if we were to consider cascade or its whereabouts the place where it ends? how much retooling would it need to work that way? is it even possible?

Oh now we're getting the REAL asks.

From a technical standpoint, I actually think it's totally doable to do a cut of Homestuck where Cascade is more-or-less the ending. Homestuck doesn't have nearly as many load-bearing elements as it seems to have at first glance. For instance, I think even the trolls can be cut from Homestuck altogether with minimal structural harm, as long as Vriska's game-breaking role is shifted to Rose. Hussie claimed his original vision for the story was for Cascade to be the climax, and Act 6 to be a relatively short denouement that would mostly involve cleaning up loose ends. That actually tracks with where he left the comic when Cascade ended. The unresolved stuff at the end of Cascade is:

The Scratch has created a new universe, which the players are all heading to. This fresh universe is where they will be able to complete the game.

Lord English!

Lingering mysteries about the kids in the new universe, who have been hinted at a few times throughout Act 5 (most notably regarding Liv Tyler the bunny, which shows up with a note from Jake, IIRC).

Bec Noir is still around, even if neutralized by PM.

I'm pretty sure this is it, not counting one-off lines like Rose playing the rain that are pretty structurally nonessential and could be excised easily or brushed off with some lampshading ("Wow isn't it funny we never played the rain!" -- I think Hussie actually does specific one anyway). There are also a few hints that HIC might have a role in the new universe, but I would likewise describe these as nonessential.

Looking at this list, it's easy to see both why Hussie thought he could end the story quickly and why he failed to do it. With the powers at the disposal of the main cast, going into the new universe and completing the game should be trivial. Hussie probably thought he'd quickly introduce Jake, Jane etc. in a nostalgic callback to the beginning of the story, then round up everyone for a final fight against Lord English/Bec Noir/HIC to put some fireworks on the ending. Cascade really had trimmed down the expansiveness and complexity of the story significantly, which made these few lingering plot elements seem so surmountable.

In actuality, though, Hussie quickly became mired in introducing the new characters. I think his problem was that he was struggling to reengineer the emotional stakes of the story. There's a desperate reek in the early parts of Act 6 where he is pleading for readers to care about the new kids. With the original kids, he took his time introducing them and let their personalities emerge organically over infrequent chatlogs while most of the action centered on John-as-reader-insert doing dumbassery. With the trolls, Hussie treated them like jokes and gave them over-the-top personalities with ridiculous, murderous drama, which fit the speedrunny way he introduced them. But the new kids are in this limbo where he wants to get them working (like Jar Jar) quickly, yet is giving them personalities that are at worst nondescript and at best Dave 2: Davier. (Roxy is the exception here.) They wind up having a lot of very cute, very cloying chatlogs that read super forced and I wonder if their failure to immediately get off the ground is why Hussie felt the need to spend more time with them, linger on them, until Jake winds up with one of the highest line counts of any character in the story despite saying exactly 0 things of value total.

Worse, though, is the villain situation, because it's directly tied to the story's stakes. Hussie has to make Lord English a more significant threat than Bec Noir, despite working at base with only a few references to him from Spades Slick and Doc Scratch. It's from this we get the laborious cherub stuff, the expansive dream bubble stuff (Lord English being able to double-kill ghosts is his major establishing moment of threat), and the general need to make this whole section of Homestuck feel as weighty and monumental as the first half.

The problem with Cascade is that, even though it doesn't resolve the plot, is resolves pretty much all of the emotional stakes and tension in the story. The idea of going quickly from Cascade to a final fight makes sense on paper but it doesn't make sense emotionally. That final fight would wind up as flaccid-feeling as Collide eventually did feel. Hussie's kudzu-plant expanding Act 6 reads to me as an attempt to rebuild to the level of tension that existed before Cascade, one that eventually failed because he got tired with the project and phoned in the climax anyway.

So, getting back to the original question, I think if we're to end Homestuck at Cascade then it really needs to END at Cascade, narratively as well as emotionally. Cascade does an admirable job cutting down Homestuck's plot threads from 100 to 4, but it really needs to cut them down from 100 to 0. This is a lot trickier than it seems because Cascade is, in the context of the narrative, not a moment of victory but a moment of... quitting. It's hitting the in-universe reset button. It's triumphantly hitting that button, but it cannot actually achieve total plot resolution without fundamentally changing what it actually is.

You can slim things down. Lord English can, believe it or not, be cut entirely. Prior to Act 6 he exists only in a handful of lines. Doc Scratch can be reframed as the ultimate evil himself, rather than simply its servant. He already is a pretty good villain in his own right.

Bec Noir is trickier because there's not really a good opportunity for the heroes to fight him. I wonder how necessary that is, though. It's not like Homestuck was ever a story where things got resolved by flashy cinematic fights. PM getting the ring is a satisfying, climactic moment in its own right; does she have to get locked into eternal stalemate with Bec Noir? Can she maybe just defeat him the moment she gets the ring? It's an unconventional ending, but one that makes sense in the concept of Homestuck. Given Collide, that's probably a superior way for the climax to go anyway.

That leaves the new universe kids. They can also probably be cut pretty easily. I'm fairly certain Liv Tyler is the only direct contribution they make to the pre-Cascade story. It'd take some changes to account for that, but not many. Alternatively, since we already can't get past the fact that Cascade is just a reset button press and not a resolution in and of itself, we could leave them in as characters who show up, briefly, in an epilogue of sorts, framed solely through the POV of the original kids. (i.e., forgo all the "Your name is JANE CROCKER etc.) Maybe don't even give them lines. Leave it to the fandom to come up with their personalities.

The way I'm envisioning this is that we end the story as quickly as possible after Cascade, and by that I mean literally 15-20 pages where we show everyone speedrun the new universe with their incredible god powers, maybe with a few cathartic final conversations between the surviving members of the cast. The longer you go on post-Cascade, the longer you're going to be tempted to go on, to make its new elements breathe in their own right, and when you do that it's only a matter of time before you get sucked into the Act 6 Vortex of bringing back meaningful stakes, which you have to do from Ground Zero.

I'm actually a big fan of Act 6, which is where I feel like Hussie gets a lot meaner, a lot more combative with the readership, with some fascinating results. Most of Act 6's failures stem from the failure of its ending, which is a separate issue caused by Hussie losing interest in the project after the Hiveswap debacle. But if you're doing Act 6, you gotta really DO Act 6. You can't just do it halfway. All or nothing.

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Making people with ADHD make 15 phone calls and five doctors visits to get medicine should be listed in the Geneva convention as a warcrime

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kasumi didn't anticipate her cat-like nature…

based on -> this post

bonus:

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what are you talking about rich girl.

Like the idea that part of what immigration is doing is ensuring a supply of low paid workers? Sure. Immigration policy is creating the situations that allow some people to employ illegal subminimum wage labour? Also true! But no, the average person who thinks of themselves as middle class does not know where to buy slaves and they certainly can't afford to personally domestically employ anyone because labour is fucking expensive in the country you live in. A lot of middle class people, if they're double income and/or have no kids, can afford to effectively go in with a lot of other middle class people on a time share servant who actually works for you an hour or two every other week and is employed by an agency which might not send the same person every time.

just bonkers to suggest nothing has changed. Middle class people used to have servants bc labour was really really cheap and now it isn't and they don't

the flip side of those posts about servants is that you, yes you, could get rich enough to have them, and then you wouldn't have to clean anymore. it's not that expensive! it's not that expensive to have servants who clean for you, because ensuring the access of the middle class to affordable servants is a significant policy goal of your government. what did you think its immigration policy was about? building the just and equitable world of the future? no lol it's servants

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Yeah I'm sort of torn on that one since it seems hard to imagine how putting energy into the idea of something that is a Masculinity (positive) can possibly avoid becoming ultimately just yet another instance of [look up the etymology of "virtue" some time]. Or something like the whole Rules for Talking To Women In Public Discourse which imo failed in its goals and possibly helped push a lot of guys down the antifeminism to far right radicalisation pipeline by virtue of the incoherency it possessed due to refusing to even touch the underlying assumption that Men Approaching Women is How Relationships Happen.

And yet, as you point out, some of this shit is awfully sticky and harm reduction is usually a good idea...

It's just imo vital to be extremely cautious about ever crossing that line between "the stuff that calls itself feminism that's about equality and the fundamental humanity of women" and "the stuff that [imo wrongly] calls itself feminism which posits that Women need to be Protected" because the latter is how you get TERFs, inter alia

i know there's plenty of critiques of slogans like "real men aren't sexist" and so on. but still man i see some of the ways andrew tate and etc talk about women and apart from being horrified in general there's also the sense of like... aren't you ashamed, as a man, to be talking about women like that?

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euripides was definitely kind of a misogynist (he's bizarrely insistent in his plays that married women should leave the house? maybe this was normal in his time? but it doesnt SEEM normal in the context of his plays, it seems like it was common for women to leave the house but people liked to scold them for it) but he's also a good enough writer that he's unusually woman friendly for the time. like, you cant write a good female character without understanding a woman as a full person, and "understanding a woman as a full person" is kind of a high bar for ancient greek men. its odd, to read. the empathetic misogynist