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homestuckhiveswap · 6 years ago

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Land of Fans and Music: the Homestuck fanmusic scene

by /u/DrewLinky, previous article here.

Introduction

Homestuck, operating as a multimedia webcomic, utilizes many different forms of media over the course of the story. Music is an enormous element of what makes the webcomic enjoyable, for many people even being one of the main attractions of the entire story. As I’ve written about previously, Homestuck even had its own Music Team dedicated to creating works that could be incorporated into the comic.

Alongside this, however, there is a burgeoning fan music community. Innumerable people who were either too late or otherwise unable to get onto the Music Team proper were undeterred, sharing their musical creations with one another on the forums...

Their works were more often than not hosted on the website tindeck, and it was so heavily used for this purpose that the website eventually included “homestuck” as its own category. A quick glance shows that, at the time of writing at least, there are still people who upload their own Homestuck music projects there—quite the dedication.

There was one such person back on the forums named OJ who was involved in this process: for some time they were happy enough to share their music directly with others in lieu of getting on the Music Team, but after a while they conceived of the idea of compiling all of the fan music thus far into an album of their own. People would be allowed to nominate themselves and others, assuming the authors of the work in question could be contacted and were okay with being included. It was in this ad hoc manner that the Land of Fans and Music album was born.

I was given the opportunity to speak with two massively influential figures involved with the Land of Fans and Music group, or LOFAM, over the course of the last several years. Ndividedbyzero (more commonly known as Cait) and Lambda have both seen and done a lot to help LOFAM along in its several year history, and they were so helpful as to sit down with me and laboriously explain the project, and the various elements involved with its development.

Cait and Lambda themselves warrant some description. I’ve already written about them at length individually, but together they’re another story entirely. Throughout the entirety of our conversation, they would unabashedly begin talking about completely unrelated things ranging from the mundane to the spectacularly weird. In one breath they could go from describing the complicated interpersonal politics of musical development to the nature of blue raspberry flavoring and back again, not to mention the insertion of some rather shocking types of pornography at various points (this latter behavior being solely attributable to Lambda).

The exchanges between Cait and Lambda themselves were actually fairly interesting to watch—they play off of each other well and together were extremely helpful in piecing together the history of LOFAM, especially the later parts that they were directly involved in. They weren’t actually involved in the organization of the first album, but they were no less informative on the subject.

LOFAM1 - Beginnings

This first album, also known as LOFAM1, was a different experience from its successors. OJ was the main person who organized it, alongside a prominent Homestuck musician from the team named Solatrus. It was organized openly, with participants posting their songs and album art directly in the forum thread dedicated to the project.

For some time, the main page dedicated to unofficial MSPA music was Homestuck Gaiden, "where a few album projects that weren't greenlighted by hussie went between 2010-2011" (Cait). Most albums there were made by the Music Team or people very close to the team, and then LOFAM1 was included there.

Released in July of 2011 with 53 tracks (giving it the second greatest amount of content in any Homestuck-related album at the time), LOFAM1 introduced a plethora of fanmusicians for the first time. It also became the technical standard in terms of organization and setup: “it set the precedent for basically every fanalbum to come” (Cait). It did suffer its problems but Lambda remarks that the quality of the music submissions overall were pretty good at this point, saying "there was WAAAAY worse [submissions] with the other lofams" that they ended up leaving out, with the other albums to be described later.

LOFAM2 – Stupid o’ Clock and the UMSPAF Bandcamp

Unfortunately, Homestuck Gaiden ended up being shut down sometime after the release of LOFAM1. There is some speculation on why this may have happened, although none of it can be verified: one commonly suggested theory is that Hussie didn’t want fans to think that the albums were official and that he wanted more control over music production, among other reasons. This would make sense: "the music team ended up really really having to emphasize the whole UNOFFICIAL bit" (Cait), and if it proved not to be enough then they would have been asked to stop. Regardless of why, this development mixed up the fan music scene for a while.

Lambda describes that this is about the point where her involvement began. At the very beginning of 2012, there was a community stream celebrating the release of Bowman’s album Ithaca. Lambda began conversing with the people in the stream chat and then later outside of it. At some point she was thusly invited to a group jocularly referred to as the “Stupid ‘o Clock Chat”.

Hosted on Skype, Stupid ‘o Clock (SOC) contained innumerable people. In its greatest incarnation—of which there were many due to Skype’s tendency to crash or fail outright—it held approximately 80-90 people, which was almost certainly part of why it would crash periodically. Many of these people were important names in Homestuck music, but it also held some art people and a smattering of others.

Time passed in SOC, and in April or May of 2012 Lambda asked around if there were any plans to make a LOFAM2—people were still creating content, and OJ had neglected to step up after heading the first project. The vast majority of responses to her questioning indicated that there was interest in creating another album, but there was basically no desire to organize it. It was then that Lambda took it upon herself to do so.

Lambda recruited a person named Liza—who currently heads the official Bowman Discord fanserver—to help, and together they led the organization of LOFAM2. Lambda was fairly young at the time and inexperienced with coordinating such projects. Between this and other influences, the album’s development was fraught with problems: "i think lofam2 ended with like / at least one person saying 'wow, never doing that again'" (Lambda), a sentiment echoed by Liza themselves.

Before LOFAM2’s release, a user named Shadolith—more commonly known as Marcy Nabors and who currently works making sound effects for Hiveswap—was working on a fanalbum called SBURB OST. With Homestuck Gaiden rendered unusable, a new place was needed to host music. Thus, in November of 2012, SBURB OST became the first album to be released on the unofficialmspafans Bandcamp page (graciously shortened into the acronym UMSPAF). At the end of the year LOFAM2 was also released. For unspecified reasons, perhaps general lack of activity due to technical problems, the Stupid ‘o Clock chat was abandoned by the end of 2012.

LOFAM3 – Administrative Delays and the Hiatus

Due to the difficulties of making LOFAM2, making another album seemed unlikely at first. However, this quickly changed: "[making LOFAM3] was only unsure for like 3 or 4 months" (Lambda). Before long, LOFAM3 was being organized. Cait comments: “the head organizer for LOFAM 3 was VeritasUnae, who was a major contributor on Sburb OST, frequented the music thread on the MSPA Forums and worked on the UMSPAF website”. As with LOFAM2, songs were nominated by being posted in the relevant thread on the MSPA forums, or by sending an ask on Tumblr.

Cait had been friends with Lambda, Liza, and others, and herself was around for the creation of LOFAM2, but she claims she didn’t have enough skill to get onto that particular project. Despite this she was still heavily invested in LOFAM2 and was disappointed in the way it turned out: "i was an extremely active follower but not a major player, so i remember being real sad when i heard all the sentiment about drama on the lofam2 end" (Cait). When LOFAM3 started being developed, Lambda asked Cait to be a music judge, meaning she would get to determine which songs got on the album. She says she "was pretty surprised but definitely above all grateful for the opportunity".

Unfortunately, in late 2012 and especially 2013 the webcomic began to suffer in earnest from hiatuses: "homestuck died for 2 years" (Lambda). The decline in updates led to a subsequent decrease in fanworks, and fan music in particular languished considerably. There were very few albums released in the ensuing pauses of the story. Despite this, work on LOFAM3 continued for much of the year, with Cait estimating that there were nearly 100 contributors.

The overall process was smooth but festooned with numerous delays due to the sheer number of people involved. Finally LOFAM3 was released almost exactly one year after LOFAM2 on the 15th of December. Due to the lack of other albums in production at the time, it was a chronologically isolated event. There was a small stream to commemorate the affair, but this only heralded an intense quiet to follow after: for two and a half years, LOFAM3 was the last album to be released by the unofficial MSPA fan group.

Beforus – Decline and Resurgence of the Fan Music Scene

As mentioned earlier, Homestuck’s numerous pauses led to a drastic decrease in fan music production. Most of the so-christened “old guard”, the original members of the fan team, had moved on even before LOFAM3 came out. This trend only worsened over time:

it's hard to get inspiration for fanmusic when the music team itself has resigned to fate / ... / homestuck being on break drastically correlates with breaks in fanmusic production / except after homestuck ended / for some reason (Cait)

In this manner, the fan music scene for all of 2014 and part of 2015 was essentially dead.

At some point in 2014, however, a spreadsheet for LOFAM4 was created. It began relatively small, with a smattering of general concepts and "whatever we pieced together from the ashes" (Cait). At first, progress on developing LOFAM4 was extremely slow. There wasn’t a lot of material to work with and musical creativity was at an all-time low, so naturally LOFAM4 lay dormant for some time (although it was gradually building up steam, according to Cait).

Then in early 2015, a member named Josie began organizing a new fan album conceptualized as “the Beforus project”. Without going into too many details, “Beforus” refers to a portion of Homestuck that is oft-debated as being one of the worst facets of the entire story, so the subject of the album was already of major contention. To make matters worse, there appeared to be no quality control exercised throughout the album’s development, which lead to tracks that were extremely unpleasant to listen to, if not literally painful to the ear.

While many of the songs seem to have missed the mark ("i'm pretty sure like everyone on lofam4 was like ‘yeah, we'd... never let this touch a lofam’", said Lambda), Cait stresses that some of the songs were good or even great. Regardless of how one perceived the album’s overall quality, people who were fans of the subject material ate it up indiscriminately. It signified a new beginning for the fan music scene: scores of fresh artists and musicians were drawn in, and this lead to LOFAM4 being kickstarted into serious production: "in terms of lofam4, it absolutely helped us with contributions" (Cait). From there, the pace only seemed to quicken in leaps and bounds.

LOFAM4 – Conflict, Reconciliation, and Success

Following the release of the Beforus album, there was a significant upswing in activity: "the bottom line is that basically, starting in early-mid 2016, A Lot Of Shit Was Now Happening" (Cait). Not only was the fan music scene picking up, but this all happened to coincide with the release of Homestuck Volume 10 in June of 2016. "this was important specifically because we'd decided long ago that lofam4 shouldn't be released until homestuck volume 10 was" (Cait). Thus, with a significant personal barrier out of the way, speed picked up exponentially.

Some setbacks in the form of real life problems for many members of the team manifested: "this caused a few problems, namely that judging all the songs was a months-long task" (Cait). As soon as they caught up on their workload, more songs would be submitted that made the cycle repeat: "it was clear that some things had to change / luckily, things were changing whether we wanted them to or not" (Cait). This change would come in the form of the Cool and New Music Team (CANMT).

CANMT’s first album, cool and new voulem. 1, was released on the 2nd of July in 2016, serving as a second wind for the fan music scene. Ost, the founder and then-leader of CANMT, was later invited to be a judge for music submissions on LOFAM4 and were extremely active with the work, "which was exactly what we needed" (Cait). Makin was similarly invited to work on LOFAM4 about a month later (although he claims, perhaps appropriately, that he bullied Lambda into letting him on).

The first LOFAM Discord server was created on the 11th of November, 2016 as a replacement for the Skype chat that the group had been using. This switch happened at Makin’s urging, because Skype is generally regarded as an inferior program that people were very eager to drop. With an enormous group project like LOFAM, it was clear that more space was needed to facilitate their work just as organizers, let alone the countless content producers that would eventually be involved. Makin also suggested that switching to Discord would lead to an increase in popularity for LOFAM.

Unfortunately, at this point a rift grew between LOFAM and CANMT where some members of the latter group felt bitter about involving themselves with the former. CANMT had built itself a reputation as a music group with less of an emphasis on sheer quality and more on working with a theme, namely the Cool and New Web Comic (CANWC).

CANWC is a loose retelling of Homestuck in the style of Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, which by nature connotes an outward shittiness that has carried itself forward in CANMT’s music. This is all completely appropriate: much of the early music in CANMT consists of bastardized versions of original Homestuck music and is predictably difficult to listen to, which is thematically appropriate. However, as time went by the music became less thoroughly dedicated to shittery and began actually improving. When their seventh album was released, it contained a significant number of songs that were considered of decent enough quality to be put on LOFAM4.

However, there were a select number of people who felt that working with LOFAM was inappropriate:

when canmt started to develop a distinct culture, there was definitely a subgroup who felt either that lofam was the establishment, or that the songs in 2/3 were too boring and canmt was better / so amongst people (i have no idea whether this was common opinion or a vocal minority) there was an idea that submitting to lofam4 would be to give away your True Loyalties (Cait)

This behavior ended up frustrating even the CANMT members who were working as judges for LOFAM, such as Ost.

Despite these naysayers, in 2017 LOFAM4 kept growing in intensity. Further elaboration:

on january 17, 2017, the second LOFAM discord was created, this time to facilitate contributors to the album instead of just the organization team. as makin had deduced, the floodgates opened fast and dozens of potential LOFAM 4 musicians + artists began joining, now under a much more conductive environment for sharing work, receiving feedback and communicating in general than the previous decentralized approach. many of these musicians, as it happened, were from CANMT, which eased the apparent problems between our two groups significantly (Cait)

In this way, the first half of the year saw the rate of development for LOFAM4 rise from already-quick to nothing short of a fever pitch.

Team restructurings happened: with such a dramatic increase in the number of people available for projects, the scale of projects they were willing to pursue increased substantially. LOFAM4 was of course being actively pursued and was wildly hyped up for release, but team members also began work on the Xenoplanetarium album. The music scene in general seemed to escalate in intensity, with another group known as FLSA creating a Problem Sleuth album known as Weird Puzzle Tunes.

FLSA itself is “perhaps best described as a short-lived music collective branching off mainly from the members of CANMT, but others such as myself also joined” (Cait). FLSA was the group that conceptualized Xenoplanetarium, but eventually they realized they were being subsumed into the larger group. In this way, “WPT could be said to be the first album released under the reinvigorated UMSPAF banner” (Cait). For the next several months, things ambled along at a fine pace with some unelaborated-on personal drama (never threatening projects), and a few amusing or exciting projects independent of LOFAM4.

Rather unexpectedly in June of 2017, a new album was uploaded to the bandcamp by Jamie Paige and Marcy Nabors. Entitled 『H☯MESTUCK VAP☯RWAVE 2016 RUH-RUH-RUH-ＲＥＭＩＸ』アンドレア・ヒューシー・グーグル翻訳 (seriously, go look at it yourself), it’s “mostly full of ironically shitty vaporwave remixes of Homestuck tracks by Jamie Paige and Marcy that was first uploaded to Soundcloud in 2016” (Cait). This was followed by another project called Ancestral; headed singularly by a person named Josefin at first, UMSPAF eventually stepped in to help master the album and upload all of the songs to bandcamp.

All of these things were happening quickly, and then suddenly in August a bombshell was dropped: act 1 of Hiveswap would be released on September 14th of 2017, only a month away. “This posed a problem…: LOFAM 4 was… probably going to be released in September, but if it were released after Hiveswap, there was a huge chance of the album getting buried in the hype surrounding the game.” (Cait) Thus, the team officially launched itself into overdrive to try and get the album completed before act 1 was released.

This proved very stressful at times, and it can't be understated that we were working hard; by the final 2 days, I had gotten in about 3 hours of sleep within 48 hours. But the deadline was met. On September 9, 2017, Land of Fans and Music 4, which ended up at a truly unprecedented 105 tracks spanning over 6 and a half hours in total length, was streamed on Twitch, then released… Seeing this many people react to the work that we had all compiled and worked on for years with hype and praise was a vindicating experience, to say the absolute least… A significant chapter in the Homestuck fanmusic community- and oddly enough, my personal life, as well- was over. (Cait)

Naturally, with this momentous occasion now passed, the group began to slow down in its efforts.

Xenoplanetarium – The Current Day

For a while there was some quiet, but eventually the aforementioned Xenoplanetarium album was published in December. “… the smallest in the discography by design” (Cait), it featured only 12 tracks, but was very well received in general. Another, less serious album called Gristmas Carols was put out by Christmas (even smaller at 9 tracks). As of this writing, Gristmas Carols is the last album the UMSPAF group has put out.

Aside from Xenoplanetarium and Gristmas Carols, the peaceful quiet post-LOFAM4 has lasted well into 2018. However, Cait assures me that UMSPAF is hard at work on its next project, labeled “Cosmic Caretakers”. She further describes that everyone is anxious to see it done, as it’s been “in the works for quite a while now”. Whenever it does happen to release, there will undoubtedly be a community stream and a large number of eager fans waiting for them.

Looking back over nearly a decade of community history is no easy feat, and something as richly storied as the LOFAM albums is something else entirely. The fanbase’s reception to these works and the group’s fierce, unmitigated dedication is quite something to behold. A community thrives when its members are creatively engaged and passionate—more than almost any other group I can think of, UMSPAF is exemplary of these qualities. Cait made a remark about the upcoming album, but I feel that it also serves as an excellent summation of LOFAM: “it's shaping up to be quite an experience.”

#homestuck #hiveswap #hs #fanmusic #article #lofam

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writinggeisha · 6 years ago

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Chapter 2: Plagiarization and You

Plagiarizing and you

Or : how some really clear-cut rules and examples would be really nice

Also, some things are plagiarizing and some are copyright infringement. There is some difference between the two, so do your research as good as you can.

So, you really love this one show and you're going to write a story about it. Which is nothing to be ashamed off, but there are some pitfalls you will have to be careful about. First of all, let's start with the two biggest no-no's out there. Why are they the biggest? Because these are the only two that I have found conclusive and uniform agreement about that they are bad, even in FF's rules (which really could use some extra work as well.)

No-no 1 : Completely copy-pasting (or typing with the original source next to you, whatever) an entire work, only changing a few names along the way. Seems like there are a lot of people out there who do that (some call it novelizing a movie, but it's still not okay unless the creators of said movie actually asked you to do it and you've signed a contract and shit)

Why is this bad : because you can't really call it writing anymore, now can you? It's like when I really love an online novel with the main characters Adam and Steve and I change their names to Morticia and Eve and that's it. This is not writing fanfiction.

No-no 2 : adding the lyrics of a song to your work. This doesn't go for all songs, but let's call it safe and say pretty much every song you have on your ipod or playlist or whatever belongs to this category. Why? Because you are once again distributing material the creators would ask money for. Only songs that are in the public domain are 'okay' to be used, but you should still inform people where you got them from.

Why is this bad : because you're giving away for free what your favorite band would actually like to sell - or give as a bonus with purchased items - and it's bad for their sales. If you love a band, don't steal their money.

BONUS : If an author doesn't want fanfics made about their work, respect that.

Time to go into the greyer areas. I call them grey because from here things just get pretty hazy because nobody agrees on anything. But I did find two sets of rules that are pretty important, since they get quoted a lot.

Set of rules 1 called fair use, from the organization of transformative works (I have copied these from their website, yes) :

Note : these apply mostly to the US in one form or another, so perhaps check the dealings for your own country as well.

Fair use favors uses that

(1) are noncommercial and not sold for a profit (as in, you are not making any money of your fic. Because you have based your work on the original and it is still recognizable as being based on it, ergo, don't sell it.)

(2) are transformative, adding new meaning and messages to the original (Did you copy-past? Then you're not being transformative. Being transformative is more than just changing events and supplying different names. What do you want to tell with your fic that wasn't covered in the original work?)

(3) are limited, not copying the entirety of the original (again, did you just copy-past the entire thing and leave it at that? Not good!)

(4) do not substitute for the original work. (Is your work replacing sales that the original would have made if your fic didn't exist? If the answer is no, you're good. If it's yes... well, apart from having done a smashing job you also broke the rules. Delete it and write an original work, which is bound to be great if you're capable of replacing a selling author)

None of these factors is absolutely necessary for fair use, but they all help, and we believe that fanworks like those in the archive easily qualify as fair uses based on all these factors.

And this is a set of rules from the school of law website in San Fransisco - they also compared the rules with 50 Shades of Grey and Harry Potter fics - that are pretty much the same but worded a bit differently :

If a writer of fan fiction is sued for infringement the writer can make an argument of fair use. Under fair use, there is a four factor test that the courts apply:

1) the purpose and character of the use (commercial in nature or nonprofit educational purposes) : the same as the previous rule 1, but it never hurts to remind people you cannot sell fanfiction. EVER.

2) the nature of the copyrighted work (this refers to transformative but in the case of some types of fanwork could also apply to their content. People often make the case that Rowling supports fanfiction but forget that she has had several taken down that were sexual in nature.)

3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work : one group called this the 25 and 33 percent rule. The 25 percent is how much of the original work was 'copied but still credited to original author' that is consecutive in a work (For example, a chapter). The 33 percent rule dictates that if you have over 33 percent of copied material in your entire work you are in violation.

and 4) the effect of the use on the potential market of the copyrighted work : the same as rule number four above.

Go over this list, keep it in mind. The entire area is one huge grey zone, but you have to keep one thing in mind. If an author ever says they don't want fanfics made of their work, you respect them.

Also, if there are things that should be modified inform me. My source for this was the internet in general and a chat group concerned with this kind of thing. Accurate information is also important, since it drove me crazy to know if I was correctly accused of plagiarism. I'm glad to know that I was not, which would have surprised me, but that copyright infringement might (and always will be) a possibility.

#advice #tools #links

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