#i remade lol whoops

[hinadori-chan]

We’ll Be Okay - Kintsugi

Keigo Takami/Reader

Description:

Depression is hard. And yet, just a little bit easier with someone else. Especially when that someone else knows exactly what you're going through.

In this one-shot, you follow your day as both you and Keigo help each other with your latest episodes. The two of you determined to see each other through the night, loved and intact.

Word Count: 8,759

Read it here!

[kittzuxp]

About me!

Hii! I remade my intro post because it was getting a bit messy and cluttered -v-

I go by Kittzu or Dreamz, any prns and a minor‼️ (2011) so please no nsfw interactions! I'm greek 🇬🇷 and just having fun on the internet... Uhm i'm also a girl liker(sapphic)and genderfluid oh also a juggalo i forgor to mention lol.. whoop whoop!!

I am SEVERELY καθυστερημένο στον εγκέφαλο (have neurological problems), so please be patient with me🙏 (not anything exact, but it's there)

Fav music artists: MSI, ICP, Will wood/ will wood and the tape worms, mommy long legs, dazey and the scouts (also literally anything lmao)(i dont support msi)

STRAWPAGE

Basic DNI (proship etc)

LINKTR.EE | AO3 | ARTFIGHT | OCS MASTERPOST | FANDOMS MASTERPOST

Discord: forknifeistrash#1419

TAGS:

Other blogs: @lovrclan-gen @ask-lovechild-au-twomp @weekly-tavjadenep

kittzuxp = reblogs and posts (fast reblogs do not count)

Kittzu doodles = any of my art

Kittzu answers asks = do I need to explain?

kittzu's ocs = working on a masterpost abt my ocs but there's this tag too

storytime with kittzu = me sharing my memories and expiriences with the world. I want to leave a mark that i was here and that my existance is not forgotten. Philosophical much?

Kittzu’s enderman plush = (i have an enderman plush, if you want any related content, i’m sorry for advertising i just love ‘em so much)

Grasping at straws = Anything related to my strawpage :) i will post any anon stuff yall send btw

VERY AWESOME SAUCE PEOPLE YOU SHOULD GO FOLLOW *NOW*!!!! ↓

@th3-4dv3ntur3-l1n3 @ang31ey3s-d3mons3edz @an-theduckin @labratboygirl @callsign-fire @sobeksewerrat @kyriakfromspace @y3aj-3002 @icarusticrat / @skrungleyscrimbo @blueberry-muncher @r0t-ang3lxz @r0ck-eat3r @sugaroto @samasri @xxcrimsn-yanderrexx @xx-a-fai13d-3xp3rim3nt-xx @mysticlilac-ec @insufferable-homestuck

[a-bombyx-mori]

poking around on spotify earlier and saw that ghost hit 1 mil monthly listeners,,, holy shit!! and their work has been a constant in my life for about 7 years now holy fuck.

gets me thinking about their impact and stuff. still have mixed emotions about everything because they sure did get good and bad attention while they were online. it's gotta be satisfying to see so many people enjoy your art and music and for them to even pay for it. then there's all the problems that come with any fanbase or online presence in general. and I've been here a while so here's just a few things that stand out to me about. everything? things I've thought about a bit?

(this became a long reflection ramble thing whoops.)

I've never really had other songs or writing at all describe the weird mental shit I've been through. yep, it's probably dumb, but ghost and pals songs helped me identity my problems. they became a source of catharsis when I was in fucking middle school and still are to this day. hell, evolve was the first thing that got me thinking I had been in a horrible relationship (along with twisted love ofc). aoapp was a reflection of my anxious attachment for a long time. I wouldn't have been able to make personal progress the past few years without analyzing songs too much.

and don't get me started on their drawings,, their artstyle has always been so charming in its own way. for a long time I tried to emulate their techniques so I could be an artist too. AND THEIR PV EDITING?? mgnghfh full course meal. I still set stills as backgrounds every so often. the fucking colorbars picture was my email background for years until google decided to stop loading it sometime last year.

I still admire them so much.

but there's also things they did that feel off. like I'll never get over how the new chattering was supposed to be a joke. you can't go and make a polished banger showing off your improvement and then say "yeah lol I only did this cause my friend joked about doing it so I said bet." or smth along those lines. (ghost said they remade it cause creep-p joked about it. in a tweet I think? gotta find it.) at that point, it also becomes a slight against your fans. you can't act like everything you make is (essentially) worthless without unintentionally shaming those who enjoy it. it's like that one mirror reflection picture thing.

the whole deletion of specific songs/most of their old discography is also it's own complex beast. ideally, an artist should be in control of when their art is displayed, but you give up that agency when using the internet. hell, there's mirrors of my old Instagram pages, and I'm nowhere near ghost's notoriety. thats the nature of the internet. shit is saved and copied and reuploaded all the time. the only way you can prevent that is by not uploading it at all or going through copyright law/terms of use/etc.

when I first started listening to ghost, they had their old work in an unlisted playlist. cool. then another channel I believe? then later on there was no official way of getting them so ofc people reuploaded them. was that the best thing to do? nope. but people enjoy their old songs and wanted access to them. and not everyone has a local back-up of music cause they're afraid it'll become inaccessible lost media.

them deleting most of their music vids is similar. this happened around like 2018ish? people started reuploading their current songs because. guess what. they weren't officially avaliable. people were thanking translators and such who had the pvs on their channel because they had access to it again. I believe something like this happened a second time but I don't remember for sure.

THIS DOESN'T EXCUSE ANY OF THE PATREON LEAKS BTW. those were paywalled benefits so that's a fundamental breach of privacy (and site rules, I'm p sure).

also less serious thing but they set up a premiere at the end of 2019 for a new song or whatever and it turned out to be a fucking joke too. just like a dr phil picture or smth. only upset at that cause back then I'd get the biggest fucking adrenaline rush whenever they were about to release something. then again I was also depressed as hell so that's an old me problem imo.

there's probably other drama or whatever I'm completely forgetting about, but probably for the better. in the end it's all about the art we're here for in the first place, and the artist behind it. I hope they're doing well after detaching from social media.

uh. long essay thing over now. I think

[alexicollins]

I remade Operation Phoenix's cover forever ago and forgot to post it. Whoops, lol

[amadeusgame]

My goal for this month was to completely remake the demo with my new mechanics and have it in the private playtesting phase.

Actual status: the demo is currently about 90% remade, and I should have it in front of playtesters next week. My excuse for not completely meeting my goal is I have also been spending this month producing and mastering the GameBoy Advance-themed concept album THOUSANDS OF PIXELS IN YOUR HANDS, which drops 1/1/24! My piece for it samples sounds from a GBA cartridge surgery and is based on the Castlevania: Circle of the Moon soundtrack.

That aside, I am happy to announce that;

A new demo for Amadeus will release Friday, February 2, 2024!

With the upcoming demo, this itch.io game page will be rebranded and renamed to reflect the title of the full release - A Riddle for Thee ~ Episode 1: Waltz. I didn't think too far ahead when I initially named this page, because releasing the full game felt very far off back then. But at this point, it's definitely going to be a reality. I've spent about 6 months laying the groundwork I need to make it happen, so I want the new demo to lead smoothly and directly to the release of Episode 1 (and beyond).

There will be several changes and additions in the new demo in addition to all of the new mechanics. The currently live project was a proof-of-concept; this new project really is a demonstration of what the full game will be. Look forward to it!!

The main point of this devlog is just to announce that. So mark your calendars! ...For those interested, though, I'll still go over the following topics in more detail below:

Rebuilding The Demo: Process

Rebuilding The Demo: Current Status

Recreation/Inspiration (as always!)

Resources: linktr.ee/amadeusgame | amadeus-game.com

Details below the readmore!

Rebuilding The Demo: Process

The overall process can be distilled to a very simple (lol) 3-step process:

Take a hammer to the old demo

Rebuild and take notes

Use the process of rebuilding to finally fix big underlying problems you've ignored for the past year and revel in how much easier your life will be moving forward now

1. Take a hammer to the old demo

Dismantle everything dependent on the old scripts that are all connected to each other. Purge.

This part was difficult. I had built so many new mechanics in my test scene, but in order to implement them in existing scenes I had to replace all of the old scripts that were all hooked up to each other and reduce the game to an unplayable state before I could start rebuilding. What made this so difficult was that it felt like moving backwards: I was turning a playable (if obsolete) scene to an unplayable (but necessary to add all the cool new stuff) state. In the middle of this it really felt like I wasn't accomplishing anything at all and that I was moving farther away from my goal, even though that is completely untrue.

2. Rebuild and take notes

Start inserting new scripts and prefabs - taking notes along the way. INCLUDING notes that go "whoops, I didn't realize from my test scene, but X is broken now."

I cannot over-emphasize the importance of taking notes at this stage. I was adding interact mechanics, text mechanics, movement mechanics, UI updates. There was so much to rebuild for each scene, and the only way to make sure I was rebuilding each scene the same way was to take notes of my process and follow it for each new scene.

Please don't actually read this image, as it reveals a lot more than I would strictly like it to in terms of how well put-together this game is.

I started with the "simplest" scene (one that is a pure visual novel scene, only relying on the text and UI stuff with  no movement or player interaction save for advancing the text) and took step-by-step notes of everything I needed to do to make it playable again. What prefabs do I drag in and where? What reference objects need to be dragged in to which scripts? Then, once it was rebuilt, I moved on to the shortest interactive scene and made additional sections in my notes for movement and interaction mechanics. I also - VERY ESSENTIALLY - created 2 more sections: "Bugs (game-breaking)" and "Bugs (quality of life)." Here I jotted down everything that was messed up or broken in these new scenes that I didn't anticipate from my test scene.

Because, boy, even if everything works perfectly smoothly in the test scene, there will be new bugs that arise when you go to implement in other scenes. There was one issue with handling transitions from full-body screens to "close-up" screens that only arose in one scene that has specific properties the others don't. It took an absurd amount of time to troubleshoot and, in the end, was solved by adding two lines of code to one script changing the value of a single bool. That was one of those problems that wasn't satisfying to resolve... it just made me salty that such a persistent problem had such an obvious solution. On the plus side, I am now much more practiced with using the animator to isolate/identify problems, so next time a similar issue comes up it should be resolved much more quickly!

When rebuilding, I learned to first try to get everything mostly working and just write down the bugs I knew of to deal with later, not letting the process of troubleshooting every issue interrupt the primary task of Putting Everything Back Together But Better. If I let fixing bugs stand between me and finishing the rebuild, I would never finish the rebuild. Write it down and fix it later.

3. Fix big underlying problems

As a lazy person, I am not incentivized to fix big underlying problems if the game works as it is. This is why there is a lot of spaghetti in my game's code.

However, also as a lazy person, I am incentivized to make my own life easier when I don't feel like doing repetitive things over and over. So in the process of rebuilding the demo, it became clear that I was having to do certain very manual things way too often. Like manually resizing the text box for every individual line of text in the game. (Yes, that is really how it was put together originally...) Since I had to figure out how to use vertical layout groups for my scrolling text backlog that grows as you read more and more text, it was much easier to use the same principle to make a textbox layout group and just have all of my text objects as children to that parent, which would automatically resize them to the proper dimensions. So much easier to implement, and ALSO so much easier to tweak moving forward if I need to!

This is just a single example, but there are a lot of things like this that I never would have fixed if I didn't do the important first step of taking a hammer to the old demo and rebuilding. Everything was too interconnected and too dependent on the way I did things originally, bad habits and all. But since I had to tear it apart anyway to add the new mechanics I built, it ended up being easier to fix a lot of big issues like this, too.

Most of these fixes aren't going to be immediately obvious to the player, but I'm hoping it'll be obvious in aggregate that there's a bit more elegance in how things are put together now. A seasoned programmer would still look at my code and pass out, but compared to before, it's all much more wisely constructed. Hooray for learning!

Rebuilding the Demo: Current Status

New mechanics are implemented in every scene except for 1. That last scene should not present new problems that haven't already been noted or addressed from the previous ones, but never say never as I have learned. I still anticipate this going quickly, at which point I'll put it in front of playtesters for feedback on how it all feels and fix what's still egregiously broken.

The meat of the next month and some change will then be dedicated to art, narrative, and polish. I have already spent more time than I really hoped to purely on the mechanics, and now that I have baked my cake so to speak it's time to decorate it. I want to replace and update a lot of art assets now that I have a concrete concept for art direction. I want to tweak certain dialogue and descriptive text to foreshadow and set up plot points I've decided on. I want to add more fun things for the player to click on. I don't know how much I'll be able to add before the demo release, but at the bare minimum, there are many art assets and at least a couple music assets I'm excited to work on.

Even if it's the same core game, I really want this new demo to feel like a whole new experience. I'm really excited about it. I hope you are too!

Recreation/Inspiration

It never stops being important to acknowledge other media that inspires and influences me! It also never stops being important to do things for fun even when you're busy.

Truthfully I did not read more of Tsukihime this month like I expected to. I had a lot of Christmas presents to make and no time to dedicate to that much of A Commitment. Instead, I DID set aside time to check out a couple other indie/solo projects on itch - ever since I met and talked to a bunch of small indie devs at Seattle Indie Expo, I've really enjoyed looking at the work of other small & solo teams. It's affirming to know other people are also out there doing a ton of work by themselves, and that a one-person team can still make really incredible games.

This month I checked out:

- It Paints Me by Endysis. A short gothic horror VN. I really enjoy visual novels by creators with strengths that I lack, I find them both inspiring and insightful. The visual and sound experience in this was really cohesive in a way that none of my work is (I am, for better or worse, very much a "go in thousands of directions all at once and see how it comes together" kind of creator) - the illustrations and sounds were incredibly effective in coming together to set the tone of the story.

- Karambola by Holy Pangolin. A very unique point-and-click puzzle game. I was immediately struck by the way this game uses two distinct styles of illustration "against" one another, which is exactly what I intend to do in Amadeus. It was also a really good reference for communicating feedback to the player using audio/visual cues and not words. I will of course be using many words, since I am writing a visual novel, but in games learning how to communicate gameplay without a wall of text instruction manual is of dire importance. This was a really cool experience.

- Kit (demo) by Endysis. I had this on my radar since I liked It Paints Me so much, which was made for a game jam; I wanted to see what this creator would do in a project completed on their own schedule. I was absolutely enamored. I meant to only start it out at around 10pm and ended up bingeing the whole demo because I simply couldn't put it down. There are, in fact, many things from this game that I am also exploring in Amadeus, but elaborating further risks spoiling one or both games. The use of music in storytelling in particular was both moving and inspiring. If you like gothic horror I cannot recommend this enough.

That is a wrap for this month, and this year. I hope you all had/are having a wonderful holiday season. I don't think I'll be posting another devlog before the new demo drops, so... I hope you enjoy it when it's ready!!

[ebermoren]

The old uniform was an over-saturated mess, so I remade it into this. Here comes a text dump-

The patterns are too intricate to replicate easily, so I’ll probably only use really simple versions of them should I need them again.

They were also the single most painful part of drawing this- simplicity is definitely going to be preferred lol.

Previously, the entire shirt was the team color. Now, it’s just a band along with a patch showing what form of magic a student uses.

The shirt is a darker color rather than white because the colored band looked odd with the white to me- idk it could’ve been just me.

Now I need to figure out the non-magic students’ uniforms and other accessories the school has- whoops. Maybe I’ll just make it up as I go instead

[esmorothfallen]

//My ulterior motive for reviving this blog is to remind people Infinity Train exists.

[princerevelucide]

follow me at @_revelucide_ on twitter btw for More Active Posting from lil annoying old me if u want (>-v-.)^ since im still beng lazy here

[themadnerdwithahat]

Guess who did the thing! This gal! 

@benhargrieves​, you said to tag you, so tag

It was fun and these are cute and I enjoy these. Thanks :)

If you would also like to do the thing go ahead, here is where you can find the things… credit is nice also and good? So do that to. 

1 / 2 / 3 

4 / 5 / 6

7 / 8 / 9

BONUS cause number 2 was weird with WORDS but then it was not weird? But I had still made this one.  

Pst @bluetonguedskinkthings​, do the thing? 

[karnakian]

anyway follow me on twitter @/terrxn

[detectivezane]

Happy Ninjago Oc Day 2021!!!

I think this is my first oc day on my Ninjago side blog? I also just realized that I only draw my Ninjago ocs once a year??? And I don’t even draw all of them?? Whoops.

Let me give you a quick run down on who we have here.

Thorn is a Hypnobrai & Fangpyre hybrid, the master of Teleportation, and is the purple ninja. Thorn comes from an island called Serpentine Isle. I’m kind of thinking that I might ship him with Lloyd?? Idk.

Next we have Charai Smith, or Charai. Charai is the oldest of the ocs, I’ve had him for 2 or 3 years now.

Charai is Kai & Nya’s older brother, the master of Steam, and a blacksmith. He ran their parents shop until their parents came back. After that he moved to Ninjago City, and started living with Mila. Charai doesn’t understand technology (and he hates revolving doors), but Mila is all about tech, so she helps him out.

Speaking of Mila, she’s who we have next! Mila Borg is Cyrus Borg’s adoptive daughter & Pixal’s sister. (Cyrus created Pixal, so she’s basically Mila’s sister.) Mila’s left leg is a prothesis, btw. She loves tech, girls, bowties, and dogs. Basically she’s a science lesbian. She has a crush on Wisteria’s sister Lavender (Wisteria & Lavender aren’t shown here). Oh! And Mila has a dog named Gear!

Last but certainly not least is, Nico!!! Nico is actually a remade version of my oc Kamari. So, like Kamari, Nico is Clouse’s son & has dark magic. But, Nico also is a quarter Oni! (His mom was half Oni.) I think I ship Nico & Kai. Might be cute?

Most of my ocs have some connection to each other or the Ninja, lol. I have more, but I didn’t draw them?

Anyways, thanks for reading? Have a nice day!

[boxlunches]

obligatory Final Fantasy VII Remake rant, **spoilers ahoy**

I find it pretty depressing that even as most people have become aware of Final Fantasy VII Remake’s ending, there are still optimistic fans out there who think the sequels are going to follow the plot of the original. “I can’t wait to visit Cosmo Canyon!” “I can’t wait to fight Jenova on the cargo ship!” “I can’t wait to see how they handle Aerith’s death!” “I can’t wait to see Tifa slap Scarlet across the face!”

ya guys,

my friends,

a story doesn’t shoehorn in a big twist like “Our Heroes Kill the Ghosts Who Are Managing the Timeline Proper” if the intent is to keep the story the same as the original. A game doesn’t end with “The Unknown Journey Will Continue” as a hook if it’s just gonna be business as usual. 

The dudes at Square wrote that in so they can cut corners and write whatever fanfic they want. They blew their load spamming in Sephiroth and Zack and Jenova because they’re not even gonna reveal these mysteries in their due time. The crew behind this is of the mentality that oh, everyone already knows what happens in the original game, so there’s no point in keeping anything a secret, there’s no point in treading old ground. Only thing that matters is subverting them expectatiiiiooonnnssssss which is the cancer that is killing storytelling today

There are lots of people who are excited about the prospect of everything being new anyhow. Okay then. Cool. That’s what you’re probably gonna get. But the fans who think they’re gonna get the rest of the original game? y’all. I’m so sorry. It is so, so likely you are not.

Because even if they technically hit all the same story beats and go to the same locations, and put as much detail into the rest of the world as they did into Midgar (I seriously doubt they will), it’s already apparent that the core of the story and its themes are not gonna be the same. You might still get your cosmic horror and corporate greed and permanence of death (maybe), but all of that is just undermined completely when you bring in destiny and timelines and fighting fate, which the original FF7 was really not about. Characters like Aerith and Sephiroth are already acting differently because they know things they didn’t the last time around.

You can like this kind of thing, the meta time wankery, the prospect of being surprised by the story. That is fine. But at least recognize that surprising and blindsiding your audience should not be the only thing a piece of media cares about. 

“Why do you want to see the original game remade faithfully anyway? You already know what happens!” The long history of FF7 Remake rumors and fan hype aside, it’s about execution. Do you know why some stories get adapted again and again while keeping the plot the same? It’s because that plot was good, people like that plot, and they just want to see it being executed in a new and fresh way, and usually in a way that wasn’t possible before. FF7 had a serious and complex story and phenomenal music that didn’t jive with its archaic visuals, it’s as simple as that.

Surprising people is easy. Just pull something out of left field. Executing a plot in a way that resonates with people, meanwhile, is an art. There are people out there (people like me) who love media not just for what happens in it, but for the way its concepts are executed.

I recognize that I’m just a bitter old person. I loved and obsessed over FF7 as a kid in the 90s and a teenager in the early 00s. I moved onto other things, and I had absolutely no love for Advent Children. The compilation never did it for me either. And I was skeptical about a remake. So I’m not like, scarred by this. I haven’t been dreaming about this remake exactly. And it’s clear now that I wasn’t the target audience.

Buuut for a hot minute, the advertising kinda grabbed me, made me feel a little hopeful. It felt like finally, maaaaybe?, the fans of the original and just the original were gonna get something, like maybe we WERE the target audience. Like maybe Square was finally recognizing that their spin-offs don’t measure up to the greatness of the original. For a minute, watching a playthrough (I don’t have a PS4) I thought oh wow, I really missed FF7 and loving FF7.

and then NOPE lol

Again, if you like hot spicy meta takes, fine, eat your heart out. I envy you. But I stand by the fact that Square’s advertising and titling of this game was scummy and deceptive on purpose. It’s okay that I will never have any new FF7 material that recaptures the feeling of the original ever again, I got other things, but it is disappointing to be misled into thinking, even for a second, that I might get something like that. And then WHOOPS it’s more Advent Children Kingdom Hearts nonsense

I’ll always like his art probably, and I know Tetsuya Nomura didn’t technically write FF7R, but I’ll just end this rant with

[theinsanecrayonbox]

so...when the story that i remade Vita for was scrapped, we were all given the option to either de-level the characters we made or make a new one (funfact; i’m the only player that changed characters completely, haha whoops). i wrestled for a while about what to do, since i was really looking forward to being a Woodland Sniper, and just as i was giving up and settling to stay the course, i was hit with a brilliant concept, and i ran with it, a very classic yet cliched concept i’ve seen people online do a bunch but i had never done myself; a sugar-sweet, candy pink, unicorn themed tiefling, complete with the horns and hooves i rarely give to my tiefs

so may i introduce to you Candoren Caina, Candi to her friends. i first tried to build her as a Unicorn Bloodlined Sorcerer, but...i couldn’t get it to make sense, so i scrapped that and went with Warlock (we play Pathfinder, so it’s the New Paths Compendium version) because i had been wanting to try that out, and it would still make me a primary range attacker (like Vita was) but give the party a tiny extra bit of magic in the long run. seeing as the Warlock’s main stat is Intelligence, i decided that she’s the fantasy Elle Woods; you’d never look at this bubbly candy pink tiefling and expect her not to be a bobble headed blonde. so she likes to twist that expectation and use it to her advantage. it also helps that she’s 1 of like 8 kids (#4 or 5 i think), raised in a popular adventurer tavern by her single mother who just so happened to be the hot barmaid that all bards go to seduce (yes, all her siblings are different races lol); this leads her to being a bit iffy around bards, but greatly shaped her social skills. she lived there until a teenager, when a magic man came through the tavern, saw the magic potential in her (and maybe 1 or 2 of her siblings) and offered her mother a full ride scholarship to his magic school. so Candi went off to magic school. which leads us to the story now; she comes to town to study the ancient magical ruins in the area for her thesis paper.

she doesn’t get a random dice pallet because (1) she’s played on roll20, and (2) she suits the new candy pink set i bought and the handful of pink/white/blue d6s and matching d20 from random pounds i’ve accumulated, because they are totally her colors and warlocks need multiple d6s. (i have ALOT of pink dice)

so onto the other fun extras; name meaning game:

Candoren Caina kandər -en kay-nah

Candoren: from the word “candor”, meaning  the quality of being open and honest in expression; frankness

Caina: from the name “Cain”, meaning “acquired” in Hebrew

pun count: her name is a very blatant “candy cane” pun (because her color pallet is based on my peppermint lotion’s packaging); combining “candor” and the fact that “cain’ is often associated with demons, pointing to infernal contracts

while her playlist...yeah i’m having issues getting my iTunes to cooperate, so this is very subject to change, but i mostly like this...

Bubblegum Bitch, by Mariana and the Diamonds

I Want Candy, by Aaron Carter

Watch Me Shine, by Joanna Pacitti

You’re Gonna Go Far, cover by Johnathan Young

Under Our Spell, from Equestria Girls

Queen of Broken Hearts, by Blackbear

Die Young, by Kesha

Belle, from Beauty of the Beast

[simblrjane]

Soooo I remade all of my sims. Every last one. Which is why I still haven't actually posted anything on here lol. Whoops. Good news is that now I'm so hecking in love with all of them and I can't wait to actually get to story stuff!

[skeletonate]

extremely late #quarantinethings

i was tagged by @business-pug about 58 days ago whoops

instructions: tag 10 followers or people who you follow who you want to get to know better

name: nathan/greyson (having name crisis rn)

gender: trans guy

star sign: cancer

height: 5'7"

sexuality: panrom ace c:

hogwarts house: gryffindor

favorite animal: turtles!!!!

blankets i sleep with: 1 comforter, 5 fluffy blankets, and an old blankey i've had since kindergarten (6.5 total blankets)

dream job: author, but i'm going to school for theatre and entertainment tech

when i made this blog: i remade it i think fall of 2019? first one was in 8th grade tho, about 6 years ago

followers: 55, used to have a few hundred before i remade

why i made my tumblr: i was bored, on crutches, and needed something to do lol

reason for my url: skeleton war + nate = skeletonate

i feel like at this point it's a little late to tag people, so if y'all see this and wanna do it fee free to tag me!

[dahniwitchoflight]

a-well-toasted-brain mentioned you in a post “did you hear Hussie's massive explanation on the epilogues?”

send me a link dahniwitchoflight

https://www.reddit.com/r/homestuck/comments/cuywff/the_homestuck_epilogues_bridges_and_offramps_new/

Alright something about Hussie calling his own work a cursed tome is hilarious to me

that’s really amazing he first intended the epilogues to be written as books because like, I’m so sure that if a third one does come out, it will be on an actual hardcover book, even just for the book eating jokes in homestuck and the fact that a book was in calliope’s offerred picnic basket of food choices to John

“I feel like the work does a lot to suggest it's not merely following up on the lives of all the characters after a few years, but also reorganizing all narrative circumstances in a way that points forward, to a new continuity with a totally different set of stakes.“

Yeah like, Homestuck in it’s current state is certainly finished and done and over with, but he’s right that the things presented in the epilogue do at times feel like cliffhangers leading to something new

but not something entirely new, new in the sense of a remake new

I wouldn’t be surprised if the old proclamation of homestuck 2.0 was just homestuck remade/retcanoned into a new different format and re-telling the story over again but different this time

“ In this sense, I think it's heavily implied to be a piece of bridge-media, which is clearly detached from the previous narrative, and conceptually "optional" by its presentation, which allows it to also function as an off-ramp for those inclined to believe the first seven acts of Homestuck were perfectly sufficient. But for those who continue to feel investment in these characters and this world, ironically the very elements which could be regarded as disturbing or depressing are also the main reasons to have hope that there is still more to see. “

Yeah!! Exactly! The Epilogues are leading into more things, but it’s not just gonna be a continuation of the story so far, even using in character retcon mechanics

it’s not like it would be out of place for Homestuck, Homestuck already did that once upon a time with Homestuck Beta, the idea of reimagining what the story of Homestuck is overall, isn’t something new to the media

“It turns out the gaze we cast from the sky of Earth C to revisit everyone isn't exactly friendly, like warm sunlight. It's more like a ravaging beam, destructive and unsettling to all that could have been safely imagined.”

“Our continued attention is the very property which incites new problems, and the troublemakers appear to be keenly aware of this. “

That’s really ominous though, it’s sort of implying that that everything fucked up that happened in Candy was through our gaze of wanting to read more being that eternal endgame Sun is what caused all the character skewing, not necessarily that John had leftover bits of canon power in him when everyone else didn’t

We wanted to see the drama and problems that would arise therefore it did

Kind of implies that the longer this continues on the more an original neat happy end is out of reach, what could have been a simple story of 4 kids playing game turned into something much more complicated and dramatic

But I don’t think that’s true, if the story is hinging on what hussie imagines we as an audience want to see, if we all want to see that original neat happy simple end, that hardly feels impossible

Yeah like something else is definitely coming, Hussie gave up the epligues as a way to zap our attention, make us talk, get feedback, get passionate about things he didn’t know we would, get ideas of what it is we wanted to see, and now it’s gonna simmer for a while while he uses some time to cook up something new

“Once you have a multitude of intermissions, don't you have two dueling threads of content, one supposedly "irrelevant", and the other important? And if that's true, then is it possible for the "irrelevant" thread to accrue more importance, throwing its entire identity as "optional content" into question retroactively?”

yes!

“And if that can happen, is it possible the two threads can flip roles, with the intermissions becoming more important than the main acts? Then once the story goes through the motions of answering "yes" to all of this, isn't it also fair to ask, why bother with this examination at all? Was it pure horseplay and trickery? Actually, yes, sort of. There is a trick involved. The gradual realization that intermission content is nontrivial forces the reader to reevaluate their perception of the material, which was originally influenced by a label presiding over that material, and what they believed that label meant.”

“It relies on the reader's presumption about the label's meaning to disguise certain properties of the content (like relevance), and therefore disarms the reader initially, leading to the potential for subverting expectations about the content later in surprising ways. In other words, you can use whatever it is the reader already presumes they know about stories in order to control the perception of what they are reading, just by gradually shifting the boundaries of whatever it is they've been well trained to expect from certain elements.” 

Ah, so them being called “Epilogues” doesn’t really matter, in fact, it’s clearly being used specifically to mislead us, even their current state of canonical-ness doesn’t matter. It’s not a status handed down from on high that they have no choice but to simply accept.

Everything is both within their power and within the audience and author’s power to change, which he has already admitted as such when he designed the “epilogues” stories labelled as such to in fact feel like “intermissions” in application, so the author has already now changed what an epilogue means in Homestuck, so what will the audience and then the characters change about that?

“So now the label "epilogue" has been toyed with in a similar way, and also in a manner which exposes an apparent flaw with the label. Or actually, just by using the label "epilogue" at all, it seems the story is admitting to an apparent flaw. If another way of saying intermission is "whoops, story's too long, here's a break", then an alternate way of saying epilogue is "whoops, I forgot some shit, here's some more".”

whoops indeed lol so yeah, “Epilogue” absolutely doesn’t mean the story is over, it means quite the opposite, it’s a guarantee the story is going to continue

“it's probably time to get nervous about whether it satisfies your expectations about what the content existing under such a label should provide.”

See, this is the sort of thing why I still have a sliver of faith in the author, he’s admitting he knew the expectation of his audience so clearly that he specifically wrote something to come across as unsatisfying as possible to stoke the flames as much as possible to get people to want more so that he could make more

so he didn’t write the epilogue with any sense of thinking that anyone in the audience was really going to fully accept this is how homestuck ends, it wasn’t presently simply as “well, here’s the end here you go, this is canonically how it ends”

he’s fully aware of the dissatisfaction, in fact it was dissastisfaction he was hoping to cultivate on purpose

I think PesterQuest clearly ties into and jokes about with MC straight up reacting the way a lot of fandom did when they first popped out, right on Hussie’s que

“Stories end where they do for certain reasons, answering the questions which were thematically important to answer, and leaving some questions unanswered for similar reasons, and the reader is left with the task of deciphering the meaning of these decisions. Under the "whoops, I forgot some shit, here's more" interpretation of an epilogue as a flawed construct, by reopening an already closed-circuit narrative, what you're really doing is introducing destabilizing forces into something which had already reached a certain equilibrium, due to all the considerations that went into which questions to answer, and which to leave ambiguous. And these destabilizing forces became the entire basis for the construction of an entirely new post-canon narrative, for better or worse.“

By Homestuck’s been doing that this whole entire time, so it’s really not unexpected here as well

Whatever happened to that original flash of Bark Tier Jade doing things with the planets that ended in candydust? The interruption of that dust made it so we might never know (yet)

“By deploying it as mock-fanfiction, and including other authors, I'm making an overt gesture that is beginning to diminish my relevance as the sole authority on the direction this story takes, what should be regarded as canon, and even introducing some ambiguity into your understanding of what canon means as the torch is being passed into a realm governed by fan desires.“

So Hussie is even aware that of the original problem of having a sole author for the kind of story he is making, perfectly represented in story by his self insert being and acting the way it does, trying to diminish it’s presence as much as possible, but still inescapably being there and affecting things

and even showing how a character like John rising to a similar position due to circumstances, can’t help but come to the same conclusion of self isolation as the only way

“ The fanfiction format is effectively a call to action, for another generation of creators to imagine different outcomes, to submit their own work within the universe, to extend what happens beyond the epilogues, or to pave over them with their own ideas. And I believe the direness in tone and some of the subject matter suitably contributes to the urgency of this call to action. “

So at this point, Hussie I think is actually admitting he might be out of ideas, so in his role as sole author, that means the story is over it’s dead, wherever it managed to end up dying, but at the same time he doesn’t want to let Homestuck die, so he’s opening up canon to be influenced by other people not just himself, fandom has to start creating new content or rearrange the pieces in ways that feel satisfying to them

That’s not to say though that if we like Homestuck we should all write our endings however we please and that that’s the real true ending of homestuck

but rather he’s probably going to be expanding his team of Homestuck creators to include more people than just him, bigger the bigger sample size of people who want homestuck to live and be satisfying, the more accurate it will be to the overall fandom vision of what it means to be satisfying

So dang then, really cool

Right now, If I were to put myself in this role, I can definitely think of things left unaddressed that I want to be handled in a satisfying way, and I can definitely think of things that have been handled unsatisfactorily, and can think of more satisfying ways to meet their ends

it makes sense though that this can’t be handled by one person alone though, that it has to be a communal effort

because there are also things that I personally have no opinion about, or even worse, a negative opinion about, which means if I were in charge, those parts of the story would be handled in an unsatisfying way to those who were hoping to get satisfaction out of

For instance, it’s not impossible for a character even like Gamzee to have a satisfying conclusion or character arc, if a significant part of fandom so desires

It wouldn’t even have to be that hard, Candy already lampshaded the most obvious/most likely ways in which it could be done seriously

a) play up what happened in his childhood having an affect or non affect on him

b) play up the substance abuse angle or how the drugs might have irreversibly altered his personality

c) play up how his Ultimate Self may have been tainted by the part that became LE similar to Dirk through that “Combat, Philosophy, Life, Love” line

heck even the gross unmentionable part at the end half of Candy has a super dark joke that you could even twist Gamzee’s story as him being the one being abused in a relationship having an affect on him, not the other way around

but THAT would be one hell of a contortion of his character as it is now in the story

and since it’s mostly Gamzee being the one to make these jokes about his own character, it even comes across as darkly self aware on his part, especially with his whole redemptions handed out like Candy thing he’s got going on

that if enough people forgive him and start liking him it’s essentially the same as him not having been a villain in the first place, in “canon”, which it would be if audience had control over canon

but whether that’s due to him wanting to simply, get away with the shit he’s done scot free and not have to feel any repercussions for his actions, or some core of genuine remorse that he doesn’t know how to express properly but has access to the power to change if he wants

I think it’s the first most likely because I dislike him, but people who do like him would obviously feel differently

So, I end this all with

“I want to see what happens in Hiveswap and Friendsim, and PesterQuest, and I want to see if the effects of that has repercussions on Homestuck, and changes it further in ways that satisfy me” with my eyes gleaming, staring like sunlight, changing the way it’s perceived by burning holes into parts I don’t like and welding together the parts that I do like

I ended that pretty ominously, but for real I think the better way is a more light-handed touch

use what’s there as much as you can, tweak small details by your own hands and let the rest change naturally like a butterfly effect, leaving as little a footprint as possible

it’s like how sometimes in order to heal your meat-sack you need surgery, which might involve making new cuts to it, which sounds bad, but if the way those cuts heal and scar over overall causes the health of the body to increase and remove things like rot and poison, it’s done an overall good, especially if it’s good surgery and you manage to do so in the smallest amount of cuts possible

Like those surgery robots who simply go in through holes in the skin and do everything unseen under the surface

Hussie’s left a pretty big important plot hole already, probably better to start from there if anywhere

My immediate thought is what’s the best way of explaining the story of the cursor juju? How it’s created and how it’s meant to be used and etc it’s role in the narrative as a weapon against the final villain

Dang, good read though overall thanks for linking it to me!

I definitely would say though that my gaze isn’t filled with wanting to see more drama and problems pop up, it’s wanting to see the resolutions of past drama, wanting to ease tensions rather than create more, wanting to patch things up rather than create more holes, just simply wanting a satisfying resolution to things I care about

If Homestuck is a piece of art, I’m a small blowtorch welding the delicate bits back onto their proper places so that I can look at the finally finished metal statue with satsifaction