#metablogulation

[caledfwlchthat]

still here, but not much jam

Hello new followers!  You are few but welcome!

PSA in case it’s needed:  As you can see, this particular blog now mostly features Rosemary, some Locked Tomb content, and small fuzzy creatures.  I have not done any voice-over work in an increasingly very long time.  If you’re looking for updates on (mostly Homestuck) fic posted to my AO3 account with this handle, check out @caledfych​ instead.

I have at this point cultivated a reputation for highly sporadic output, owing in part to day job stress and/or to various exchanges I’ve been in.  I think it has been four months at this point.  To keep a long story fairly short, even though I have a lot to be thankful for relative to others over the last year, I find myself struggling to find bandwidth for anything outside my immediate daily routine and reblogging the occasional cute thing.  Writing fic or recording voice things has sustained me through some times that by any objective measure would be difficult for people, so I hope I can regain the momentum to return to it at some point.  Perhaps if I can once again carve out an hour or two in the evenings.

I understand I have no real obligation to post anything (after all, we’re all working for free here) and that we should all look after our own mental health first, but it seems like a good time to say thanks for everyone who still clicks on my fics and engaging positively with them.  It actually helps a lot, not even solely as motivation to write the next part, just in general.  Thanks for enjoying them, I hope you’ve found what you needed in these weird times, and I hope to give you more where that came from, sometime soon.

[caledfych]

shiny new sideblog for HS fics

Hello tumblr dot com!  Dang, I’ve been here a while and my main blog, @caledfwlchthat, has gone through a bunch of different uses:  from mostly voice acting up until the Homestuck Gigapause, to Homestuck art reblogs after the Gigapause given the lack of new canon content, to adding fic starting in 2016 and increasingly starting in 2019.  It’s been a very mixed bag and I have often just forgotten to post new things here.

I’m gonna keep the main for general ‘Stucking, but I thought it might help keep things less cluttered to have a sideblog for HS fic content.  So because bytes are cheap, that is what I have done.  Chug on over here to @caledfych if you’d like a bunch of AO3 links and noodling about the writing process on your dash.  As a reminder, I generally write non-Explicit stuff featuring a variety of ships (Rosemary’s a fave) and exploring canon-divergent situations.

The pandemic has not been kind to my creative output and so I’m just now picking the torch back up again.  I am going to do my darndest to keep updating with something Stucky on Mondays Eastern US time.  Right now my meteorstuck longfic serial Rose: Remember (Rashomon Roshambo), or R^4, is getting pride of place; it’s been updating in earnest since December 2018, and I’m going to try to bring it home by the holidays this year.  Huge ongoing thanks to fic friends @laurasauras and @katreal-fic for doing sprints with me and getting me to keep adding to things the entire month of October.  Go follow them right away and love on all their fics, they both rule.

Also!  If you are keen on writing “in-game AU” Homestuck fics -- ones focusing on SBURB, canon-divergent timelines, Alternia in all its dumpsterfire dystopianity, fan sessions, and similar -- give me a shout.  I’ve been as scattershot about community as I have been about promoting anything, but I would like either to find or to corral a community of folks who can encourage more such content and promote the hell out of each other.  I include Earth C, the Epilogues and HS^2 as “in-game” themes for these purposes, although I have friends on both sides of that fraught divide and will respect boundaries; I’ll tag any such posts as “#homestuck epilogues” and #homestuck^2 if anyone does not want to see anything to do with those.

[inboxofcrosseddestinies]

here we go

Okay so!  My other blog is 1000% Homestuck fan stuff, with my own contributions being mostly voice acting, and that’s great but right now I find myself wanting to work on mostly writing projects that don’t necessarily have to do with Homestuck.  Rather than re-invent literally everything about that account it is probably easier to start a new one.

I’m currently facing up to the notion that I may actually be afraid to do this, despite wanting to engage those creative muscles again.  It’ll take effort!  I’ll suck at it, at least at first!  Nobody will read it!  It’s time poured into a black hole that I could be spending, uh, working, or doing literally anything more useful!  Then again, perhaps the best and most important outcome might be to simply give myself permission to spend time and effort making art, that’s sucky at first and then hopefully gets better?  We’ll see.

I have plenty of storytellers I admire, mostly science fiction and fantasy though not necessarily all, so in parallel with writing (or writing about writing) I may include attempts to take those stories apart and see how they work.  I may put thoughts here regarding books I’ve read lately, with the occasional reblog about technique or criticism.  I’ll undoubtedly put works in progress here.

The handle is a reference to a collection of Italo Calvino stories, told by reading plots both specific and archetypical in tableaux of tarot cards — a device that gave the stories that extra whiff of the mythic.  I find the idea fascinating, and even toyed with the notion of doing it myself, but it’s really quite an involved process that Calvino himself became obsessively drawn into as he wrote, rewrote, re-rewrote, trashed and started over, etc.  There’ll be a lot of starting over, but maybe best to start small.

[caledfych]

byyyeee 2020, hiiiii 2021

Okay!  Bit late to the party, have been on such a reading binge and eyes are crossing.  But the year is new, and since I haven’t posted in like ever maybe that’s worth remarking upon?

2020 was a good year for fic!  I wrote several new Homestuck stories that were pretty well received:

January:  Close Encounters of the Slurred Kind, a follow-up to laurasauras’s quick one-shot Observation.  And by “follow-up” I mean 24 kw over 7 chapters, written in a mad rush and posted over the course of a week, involving Drunk Rose pranking her friends with an SBURB-like cursor provided by Kanaya’s exobiology research team.  All the beta kids are involved, Karkat gets owned, Sollux has no investment in anything, and Rosemary features prominently.

January:  Doors, done for the Polyswap Derse Winter Promptfest.  Since Promptfests are Lawless, I turned this fill into a serial but unfortunately a very slowly updating one -- still needs one more chapter, and should come to 25 kw when finished.  Jade helps Rosemary raise Vrissy on an alt-Candy Earth C -- not actually Epilogues compliant, there is domestic hurt/comfort and also smooching.

April:  the ballad of catelyn cowl, 18 kw over 8 chapters.  Meowrails feature prominently here, as Nepeta joins the FLARPers as a Robin Hood inspired character and kicks all the ass.  Won the Lord Equius McBluepants Honorable Mention for Incessant Quirk Flogging which I made up and awarded myself just now.  Also features cool cover art by my giftee as a bonus treat!

June:  Moonshine Under Manhattan (recorded live from paradise), a short-ish fic (9 kw over 3 chapters) written for Ladystuck 2020.  A hard-boiled Prohibition agent (Terezi, obviously) tries to unravel the seedy underworld activities of an unstable crime gang (Vriska, Rose, Kanaya) in Jazz Age NYC.  Terepy the Movie references abound.

I also managed to add at least some material to Rose: Remember (”R^4”), which now clocks in at more than 100 kw over 48 chapters!  This fic IS NOT DONE, and YES I AM STILL WRITING IT.  Please stay tuned!

This feels good to look back on as it reminds me that I did actually write some things this year!  So often this year I felt like I was just trying to survive to the next day, so that’s a plus.  But I really for serious would like to finish my open serials before I start any other nonsense.

Once those are tied up though, perhaps I’ll branch out!  I have ongoing ambitions to perhaps try an SBURB fansession, or to branch out into the Locked Tomb fandom -- Harrow the Ninth was the book I pulled two all-nighters to finish and my mental corkboard is lousy with screenshots and twine.

[caledfwlchthat]

ongoing fic plans

Okay so I haven’t put anything in here for a while.  The past few months haven’t been great for fic, not so much because I haven’t had time but because I’ve barely had any leftover spoons.  I’m still committed to finishing all my as yet unfinished fics, so fans of R^4 and Doors please know these fics are not dead!  I’m not sure which is the next cab off the rank but you’ll find out in due course.

Most of my fic effort of late has been going into my Polyswap Derse fill, which I have fortunately finished, in some form at least.  So I look forward to shilling that here when I get a moment, but it isn’t now.

Apart from that, I have a couple of other fic projects planned, some of which are Homestuck-related, others of which aren’t.  I’ll shill the Homestuck here, at least, when it’s finished.

At some unknown point, maybe I’ll actually start producing HS^2 response fic but that moment also isn’t now.

Yeah.  Kind of anticlimactic.  Mostly just, not quite dead.  Getting better.

[caledfwlchthat]

Characters:  John Egbert, Dave Strider, Karkat Vantas Ships:  John/Dave/Karkat, John/Dave, Dave/Karkat, John/Karkat Other Tags:  Post-Retcon Meteor, Dream Bubbles, Internalized Homophobia, Internalized Xenophobia, Closets, Coming Out, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, Ashen Romance | Auspistice, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Troll/Human Sloppy Makeouts, Polyamory Negotiations, Pillow & Blanket Forts, Fat Vriska Jokes, Unreliable Narrator, References to Depression Rating:  Not Rated

Hi followers, now that Polyswap reveals are out (a few days ago now), I can fess up to writing this 20 kw JohnDaveKat thing about making out in literal supply closets, that I wrote for @cassandraooc (check out her art and AO3, she’s tops!).  Shout-out also to @katreal-fic for her help as a sounding board and general pompoms while I was writing this.

R^4 fans:  this was my May/June, I have not forgotten you!  But if you like all the dream bubble romance and the awkward poly negotiations Rose and Kanaya have been having about Dave, you might give this one a look too.

Process discussion (as best as I can recall it) under the cut, as with other swap assignments I’ve done, for anyone who’s interested in the (long, spoilery) story of what the hell I was thinking exactly when I wrote this thing.

So my giftee’s prompts were -- by her own admission -- written in a bit of a sleep-deprived haze (I had to laugh as I read them, haven’t we all been there at some point, I know I lost some sleep over mine).  We were each required to provide between three and six prompts for polyships (3-6 characters each) that we wanted to see depicted in gift fic or art.  Cassandra’s OT3 was JohnDaveKat, which sported a string of elaborate sub-prompts (“medievalstuck!”, “soulmates!”, “haunted house!”, etc.) -- along with an invite to not use any of those and just write whatever I felt like.  Other prompts for Dave/Sollux/Karkat, Jane/Callie/Roxy, and Rose/Kanaya/Jade were basically completely open-ended.

I’m trying to remember exactly how I seized upon the idea I ended up executing.  Although some of my other works feature polyships, such as Kankatrezi (The Cafe Mocha Caper) and Daverosemary (foreshadowed in R^4), the process of how they got together is important for me in ways that I don’t care about as much for canon ships.  I felt some resistance to just picking one of the ships and starting to write it as if it was already established.  Also, people who know my writing know that I like to stick close to in-game or post-game AUs, or at least the broader Homestuck setting, rather than non-game AUs or other settings that remove the characters from the context that made them who we recognize them to be.  So I was going to need some runway and a satisfying premise to run along it with.  But by golly, if Cassandra wanted JohnDaveKat, she was gonna get JohnDaveKat.

The JohnDaveKat prompt I personally found most hilarious and awesome was

John gets turned into a Trickster, and finds Karkat and Dave. In the ensuing candy fueled mess, a lot of pent up emotions and secret crushes get revealed, including Dave realizing and admitting that John was probably his first crush on another boy though he was in denial at the time, and Karkat admitting that his own pitch crush for John never went away. (For his part, John finds out that he might, in fact, be a bit of a homosexual.)

Another JohnDaveKat prompt that turned out to figure in heavily later with the work I ended up producing was

John decides to surprise Dave and Karkat with a visit, only to find them already *quite* busy. Before he can think of what to do or do enough thinking at all to leave, he gets caught, and Dave notices evidence of interest, knows Karkat's still got some pitch feelings, and has some of his own, suggests maybe John stay a bit and they talk over some things and maybe do other stuff later too.

Going with Earth C could also bring the Epilogues material into play, and I briefly toyed with an Epilogues-related scenario that could score multiple polyships at once, before remembering that the Epilogues are hugely polarizing and maybe I want to be double sure about my giftee before giving them such a gift in a fan swap.  A combination of Tumblr-stalking, re-reading the prompts and discreet inquiries showed that my idea wasn’t going to work, largely because Ultimate Dirk is a legendary piece of shit and his presence over against End-Of-Act-7 Dirk would cause real friction with Cassandra’s requests -- which leaned fluffy and offered bonus points for “DirkJake” and “Dirk and Dave being good bros who love each other”.  Maybe I could have just done something similar in a separate Earth C AU without a lot of the Epilogues baggage, but by that point the specific discarded spin on the idea had so thoroughly colonized my brain that I just had to ease the whole thing carefully onto the shelf.  I’d still be keen to write that other fic sometime.  Just not for this particular fill.

So, I took a break for a few days before revisiting the prompt and asking what else I could do.  When I think of John, Dave, and Karkat together, my mind goes immediately back to the “EVERYBODY STFU, I HATE YOU BOTH ETC” memo, in which Karkat tries to dissuade Dave and John from encouraging Terezi’s and Vriska’s flirtations, respectively.  This convo is burned into my head because I’ve VA’ed it -- I draw a lot of inspiration for character dialogue from the time I’ve spent doing goofy voiceovers for them.  And there is a lot of grist for the mill here:  Karkat alluding to his pitch crush on John, Dave making fun of Karkat for being gay (while not realizing or admitting how he might be projecting), John being totally clueless about whether he’s attracted to Vriska.  All of these are compatible with the “pent-up emotions and secret crushes” Cassandra asked for, and favors Dave <3 Karkat <3< John as a baseline.

Now, one of the reasons I love writing dream bubble fic is because I am fundamentally lazy.  I can basically use any canon Homestuck pesterlog as a prompt and run with it.  So that’s what I did here.  In the moment that they realize that it’s a dream, the participants are forced to reckon with the way dream bubbles respond to their innermost thoughts.  Deep desires manifest in weird ways; emotional distances contract, go non-Euclidean.  Despite this, the association with dreams simultaneously offer a layer of abstraction or remove to Dave and Karkat -- allowing them to access and slake those deep desires without having to take responsibility for it, either with themselves or each other, during waking hours.  In that sense, John opening the closet is like walking in on them a second time -- the dream bubble itself is their main outer closet, and they already know the jig is up when John diverts the pesterlog down Memory Lane.  This then raises the question of whether they might have wanted John to discover them, deep down?  Perhaps John’s convenient remembering is a sort of wish-fulfillment dream summoning.

From there I already sort of had the fic’s contours and decided it would be best written from John’s POV.  The other nice thing about the dream bubble setting was that it let John participate even during the meteor journey, when Dave and Karkat must have been messing around trying to reverse-engineer their own sexual preferences.  How gay is Dave, and how troubled is he about it at this point in his history?  How does he feel about John finding out?  Does Karkat somehow have some symmetrical hangups that leave him struggling as much as Dave, or is he just a giant crab?  (The literal vs metaphorical closet thing was accidental at first, but once I discovered that I ran hard with it.)

There were still some problems I struggled with, such as how to get John to fall for Karkat pitch-ways when he’s said in canon that he isn’t gay, and when Karkat has said in canon that he’s not pitch for John anymore.  The second problem is easily dispatched by pointing out that Karkat isn’t a reliable narrator of his own preferences, by construction.  As for the first -- John might be no Casanova, but he loves his friends and is fiercely loyal to them, and he also saves his anger for either really important moments (like his GAME OVER fight with Caliborn) or utterly trivial moments (like Con Air not being as good as he thought).  This seemed like a good place for the former.  Once that was laid out, the trio coalesced nicely -- Dave and Karkat need John to keep them honest, and John needs Dave and Karkat to keep him anchored.  John <> Dave and Dave c3< (John <3< Karkat) were dynamics that just showed up on their own.

The interpretation of the ending is left open, but the other difficulty I left unresolved is the timeline mismatch between pre-retcon and post-retcon, and the question of which John it was exactly that showed up in Dave and Karkat’s shared dream.  Pre-retcon Davekat didn’t happen because Dave and Karkat were fighting over Terezi, but post-retcon John died in the explosion of LOWAS and couldn’t live happily ever after having so gloriously enabled post-retcon Davekat.  And I wanted them to live happily ever after.  The two most obvious interpretations I could think of were (a) the three are all on Earth C and dreaming together of each other -- or, more poignantly, (b) pre-retcon John is starting to integrate some of post-retcon dead!John’s memories.  The second possibility leads in the direction of Ultimate John (what would that even be?) so I made sure to place the ending in a time frame that gives the Epilogues a miss -- although the background DirkJake also signals that this is probably an AU that diverges after the ACT 7 victory.

All in all this was really fun to write!  There were lots of other great prompts in the collection, but the ones that grabbed me looked like they would spawn more 20-30 kw novellas and I need to get back to my poor neglected serial!  I’m looking forward to making my way through the treats that others posted, eventually adding some of my own, and of course going through Cassandra’s other stuff.  (Maybe that awesome fantroll Friendsim project will be the next thing to eat my life after this.)

[caledfwlchthat]

epilogue reactions forthcoming

I’ve finally finished both halves now.  For the record, I read Candy first.

Also for the record, like many others, this epilogue stomped on all my feelings and ran them over with a steamroller before chucking their tattered remains into a burning pit filled with starving robotic badgers.  I have a separate word doc that is just the phrase “FUCK YOU DIRK” cut and pasted 1,377,459 times in coruscating rainbow shades.  @bladekindeyewear, whom I’ve followed for yonks, has some fantastic live blogs of both routes where he also varies the number of U’s in each separate utterance of FUCK YOU DIRK just to keep things interesting.  (See also his notes in the last post about his interpretation of the Meat postscript re: insulating fandom works from future canon threats.)

(Seriously, my condolences to anyone who loves Dirk ca. end of ACT 6 because now there are so many theories about What Went Wrong as regards Ultimate Selves and maybe we just want the Striders to get over their issues together.)

And the thing is I doubt I would have been nearly so invested in the outcome if both routes had not been impeccably executed.  I was drawn into the world immediately, not just textually but metatextually in classic Homestuck sense -- my attention was often sent going up and down the levels of meaning but never jarred out of the fictional dream.  Dirk in Meat, and Gamzee in Candy, each compelled me to take multiple showers through the course of my reading, because EW.  And to yell at the screen almost continually for about the middle third of each route.  And most of the loose ends that I wanted to see tied up, were.  Hats off to @cephiedvariable and the other writers for being awesome.  I dunno.  Maybe I just like having my feelings stomped on and my brain put in a blender on "frappe”?

I have multiple rounds of thoughts on different themes which I may or may not dump:  Dirk and transhumanist tech-bro hubris; Gamzee and OOCness; this Ultimate Self business; the Epilogues as parodies or critiques of various fanfic tropes.  Might take a while to collect, especially if I actually want to keep updating R^4, which I may now have to tag as Epilogue Non-Compliant unless I can figure out a new ending.  But it wouldn’t be the worst thing.  I now have all kinds of great ideas for Epilogue-Compliant things.

[caledfwlchthat]

R^4 is not on hiatus so much as, um, stuck

Okay, apart from the fact that life is happening and my crazy extended holiday is well over, I find myself having some difficulty writing the next few chapters of R^4.  I have a solid idea of where I want to get to, but I’ve been writing what feel to me like some big checks in both the Davekat and Rosemary parallel subplots and am struggling to cash them, so to speak.  In Davekat’s case, to figure out a believable set of actions and reactions that could just about torch all the meteor kids’ relationships in the ways Karkat relates; and in Rosemary’s case, to talk through the weird body-image-distorting projection effects implied in the most recent chapter in ways that are vulnerable and authentic without being excessively mannered (or, tbh, creepy).

I’ve also felt oddly numbed lately for no real reason I can put my finger on as well.  It isn’t as though I haven’t had time for writing, but energy seems harder to come by right now.  I’ve been phoning it in a bit in the offline world -- what do I need?  time with friends, more exercise, better sleep, better diet, Twitter/Facebook/news abstinence, some meaningful reconnection with loved ones or classic fiction?  these things all kind of bleed together and so of course the answer is “yes”.  Over the years I’d like to think dealing with vague anxious/depressive symptoms would get easier, but it never seems to.  Fortunately it doesn’t seem to get harder either.  So there’s that.

Anyway, I’ve been working on the next R^4 installments whenever I can scrape some effort together.  I think I’ll be more aggressive about posting links to updates here, b/c honestly, why not?  Thanks to all the crazy Homestucks who have read and liked and commented and supported so far, you are the best.

[caledfych]

Friend, I don’t know who you are but you have made my week :D

[caledfwlchthat]

years in the future, but not many

Haven’t been here in a long time.  Largely because I care about privacy and Oath’s surveillance and censorship regime creeps me the fuck out.  I’ve now got my Tumblr browsing cordoned off in a little sandbox away from the main cookie jar, but it’s probably not enough.  Working on that.  Not anonymity, really, just the right to compartmentalize my fan life away from stupid ad networks.

I miss Homestuck and its fans.  I worry that any remnant Homestuck community on Tumblr is vulnerable and about to be washed entirely away, particularly given the story’s prominent status as a “gay singularity”.  Heard about George Buzinkai’s passing and became incredibly sad.  Still listening to Clark Powell’s music all the time and hoping they’re well.  Amazed at how much voice material I put out over the years, and how much less it sucked by the end than it did when I first started out.

Thankful that AO3 has a .org extension, and donating to them like anything to help defend space online for lovely people to be weird in peace.  Looking to rally around any remaining community there.  At this juncture given the lack of good studio space it’s easier for me to write than to VA, so that’s what I’ll be concentrating on for now.  Will occasionally cross-post fiction-writing thoughts and updates here.  Any Homestucks still following, I love you all.

[caledfwlchthat]

Caliborn, Calliope, and empathy vs. self-absorption in art

Well howdy new European followers. Welcome. You catch me in a somewhat maudlin mood here, but I'm glad you seem to like my recordings.  You too, US followers.  Not sure if I have any Australian followers.  The world is small.

After cutting that last audio post of John wandering around a broken session, I must have replayed it about twenty zillion times, shadowing John as he tried to navigate the wreckage.  What the fuck happened here, exactly?  Yeah.

Indulge me for a bit while I type, eh?  I'm reflecting on my creative process as mirrored by Caliborn and Calliope's stories, and what I hope to get out of it.  Anyone who wants to know more about what's on my mind here around midnight on a school night, just click under the cut.  Thanks to all of you for keeping me metaphorical company even this far.

More audio later, and less text.

It's been a kind of tough time for me in my little-mentioned offline life -- and a propitious time for Hussie to start updating again. It's a good thing to whet my obsessive compulsions on, when work is getting me down -- jobs are scarce in my line of work, to the point where I honestly can't say what country I'm going to be in next year.  In some ways I'm actually more afraid of getting an offer than of not getting one, as it means buying a one-way ticket out of my comfort zone.  My matesprit is obliging and patient, and I can expect her to come with me, for which I'm supremely grateful. Especially having a matesprit who is at least tolerant, and at times even indulgent, of my Homestuckery.  But figuring out where the rest of my life is going right now is a struggle.

Being part of the Homestuck fandom makes an interesting counterpoint.  When I was John's age I communicated with my friends by typing, as the Homestuck kids do, but the Internet was still the exclusive province of mega-nerds at the time and this new world of memes and densely connected social graphs is something I am struggling to understand and appreciate.  None of my offline friends are Homestucks, but Homestuck speaks to me, and sometimes even teaches me things.

I'm pouring my nervous energy out into my craft, and I think I've come quite a long way since I started -- but without a whole lot of time or energy to devote to raising the bar on that craft, and judging it to be a pretty risky investment, it's hard going.  Very few things I make which aren't tagged #upd8 in response to something Andrew just made actually get played, and I doubt my creative efforts here will outlive MSPA.  Am I eventually going to use these superpowers to make something that can stand on its own, and doesn't have to ride the coattails of each successive MSPA upd8?

I have no illusions about how hard Andrew Hussie works -- doing truly awesome stuff is incredibly hard, and I broadly agree with the oft-repeated attribution of success to the compound interest accrued by the expenditure of sheer stamina.  In that respect, Caliborn's ridiculous story has a grain of truth to it.  But the god of misplaced effort doesn't owe you anything, and I know from my day job that what nobody likes to think about much is also true:  you also need to get extremely lucky.  You need an insight which is critically timed and placed, and which you are uniquely well-suited to offer -- a point of leverage with which you can move the world.  Effort and hard work give you the cross section, the opportunity to realize such an insight, which then will presumably go nonlinear.

The degree to which it goes nonlinear is still kind of astounding to me.  Without channeling my inner hipster too much, a lot of the art I like hovers in the few thousands of notes around here.  I'll look at something that gets 100,000+ notes and it'll be an animated GIF or a cat meme that touches some deep-seated stimulus button of half the Internet.  Often it isn't even remotely the same thing it started as -- there are mind viruses that are meant to propagate, and nothing else.  Popularity is perhaps one measure of value, but it isn't the only one, and enslaving oneself to it is a recipe for a kind of dark existence.

Caliborn doesn't seem to get this either, and although he doesn't measure his own worth by the opinions of others, he still insists that they recognize his reality.  I've commented before on this:  Caliborn's ongoing story, which mirrors the Biblical (or Tolkienesque) story of the Adversary, is one who needs desperately to be worshiped, to have the acclaim of a Creator God.  These characters are also marked by a serious lack of imagination:  unable to create anything of their own, lacking the divine spark or breath of life, they spend their efforts corrupting the works of others into shambling, monstrous parodies.

Calliope, on the other hand, isn't thinking about herself at all:  she's genuinely completely absorbed in her rich inner world, but interacts generously with others and with concern for their interest and welfare.  She has no thought that any of her fan works might be of interest to anyone but herself, but is still entranced with them.  She has the capacity to learn new things, and to remain positive despite overwhelming odds against her.  This isn't the same kind of creator spark I imagine from the enigmatic Yahweh or Eru Iluvatar, but someone we can relate to more readily and imagine being.  Not an avatar sharing substance with some antecedent divine (like Jesus), whom we couldn't realistically expect to be, but a creature bounded as we are, from whom infinite things flow nevertheless, directly from attributes we all possess.

It seems, then, that empathy and curiosity are key values for people who would make worlds.  And it is probably no wonder.  Apart from their ethical loading, empathy makes it possible to learn from others and distinguish what we all share and what makes us each unique, and curiosity enables one to draw on outside stimuli which one can then recombine in one's own work -- adding to one's genome, as it were.  Being consumed by jealousy for the achievements of other artists is only going to take valuable energy away from one's own art.  On the flip side, being contemptuous and unempathetic keeps us from seeing the universal in the particular and thus dooms us to shallowness, and lack of curiosity means we never get to see enough instances of the particular to recognize the universal.

Probably time to go to bed -- but I'll dream on those things.  They may be more widely applicable than I thought.

[caledfwlchthat]

creating is fucking hard

Burning the midnight oil lately, and futzing around with Homestuck-related things while I do it, I've gotten some new appreciation for things I harangue about constantly here.  I've been in touch with some members of the music team about using Homestuck tracks as background in my voice acting, and while they've been really nice to me, it's clear that use of their stuff without permission is a persistent problem.  Which sucks, because I love these people and think their stuff is awesome and my use of it comes partly from a desire to be part of it.

It is always tempting to just use the tracks, and I have all kinds of rationalizations for it:  among them, "it goes perfectly with what I'm reading", "other people do similar things all the time" (though I'm not sure they really do), "my blog is a non-commercial fan blog", "my non-commercial fan blog only has 10 followers so it's not like I'm costing the originators anything" (but quantifying this kind of impact is difficult), "the originators don't have time to respond to use requests from every 10-follower fan blog out there" (if true, isn't that their problem, not mine?), and "I make sure I link to the originators and their sites" (which is a step in the right direction, but not the same as having their permission).

But apart from reflected glory, the other thing I need to note here is that it is fucking hard to make really awesome stuff.  I know this already from my day job, where I create/discover new scientific knowledge -- the encyclopedic familiarity with existing literature, and the insight necessary to do something truly original and influential, require that it be a vocation, not just a job.  These readings are just shitty things I do in my copious spare time to relax from doing really hard work at the office (and often also at home).  And while I enjoy them and think I've added something, it took me a long time and a lot of effort to improve, even to the extent that I have done.  My readings are still not nearly as good as a lot of the material I'm watching and listening to, which is made to look so easy by its creators, many of whom are on track to be professional artists themselves.

And that's just the fan material.  When I think about how much effort it must be to make something as big as Homestuck -- and how much effort goes, after creating it, into promoting it, and possibly seeing it go viral by some stroke of luck -- my mind boggles.  Even if you devoted your life to it you would not have any guarantee of it getting anywhere, and the universe wouldn't owe you any fame for your pains.  And though the extent to which anything is truly original is limited (Ecclesiastes 1:9), let's face it, a huge proportion of the value of artistic work is the extent to which it does really new stuff in a distinctive way that hasn't been done to death.

Reading bladekindeyewear's Homestuck theory posts have just driven this home to me again in a different way.  The dude has the most amazing discourses on what Hussie's doing from a literary standpoint (I never much cared about Homestuck making sense before, I'm mostly here for the feels), and while only Hussie will know what he did or didn't intend, the fact is that it took a lot of careful thought to discern those patterns, and even more careful thought to have constructed something that fit them.

So while some people seem to be cool with me deriving new (limited distribution, non-commercial) artworks from their stuff, I'm beginning to think that it really is laziness in my case.  It's relatively easy to pull someone else's shit from off the web and derive things from it -- which includes Hussie's original pesterlog scripts for almost everything I'm reading -- but incredibly hard to make something that, while inspired by other people's stuff, stands on its own as good artwork.  And I'm starting to think that except in a few slam-dunk cases where everything lines up right, my use of the music team's material is a cop-out, even with permission, because it distracts attention from what I'm doing.  Genuine collaborations are different, where efforts are combined to add value, but that's obviously not what I mean here.

As such, I think I'm going to reduce my use of gratuitous background music here in my readings.  To be fair, everything I'm doing here is an homage to Homestuck and how fabulous it is -- which is fine as far as it goes.  But continuing to reduce my sense of Internet-based entitlement to other people's incredibly hard work is probably for the best.  And if I ever want to make something really worthwhile, a lot of the effort I'm pouring into this might be gainfully spent on writing my own story with my own characters someday.  Imitation is a good way to learn -- but to what end?

[caledfwlchthat]

1 year later: almost to 50

At 49 followers.  tumblr also sent me an anniversary card.  So if you were thinking of following me, doing it today would have a certain, I dunno, je ne sais quoi.

Yes, I see the update.  No, I can't do anything about it because I'm at work.  I'll get to it.  I love to hate Aranea as much as the rest of y'all.  Seriously, who'd have thought Hussie could get so much mileage out of Aranea "Little Miss Recap" Serket?!  And that's pretty much exactly the point.

Interestingly, instead of little bursts I'm now getting a steady influx of notes on things I did a few days ago.  So I guess some people are making their way here through channels, or deciding to stay and browse.  I've got SCM Player installed at the top of my main page, and though it doesn't play automatically (because BOY HOWDY I find that incredibly annoying on other people's pages) it's a good way to quickly preview a few audio posts which turned out to be popular or of which I'm exceptionally proud personally.

(edit:  sweet, made it to 50!  celebration tonight.)

[caledfwlchthat]

on rereading past me’s stuff

So on a bit of a whim, I clicked back on a Homestuck fanfic I wrote nearly a year and a half ago (but only a few posts down in my feed).  It was for what seems to have been the last @ladystuck exchange, which I remember really enjoying being a part of.

I kind of expected to cringe reading my old material, especially since I was really self-conscious about them at the time.  But with the distance from those feelings, I found they held up remarkably well, with Past Me getting many honest laughs from Present Me.  I definitely stretched to get all kinds of canon joke references in there, but if I’m usually my own worst critic and I’m like “hey that was pretty good”...  at least for the circumstances, maybe it actually was.

Although I’ve legitimately got a lot going on right now, I think the biggest obstacle to writing fiction is not actually lack of time or energy but, surprise, a fear of writing bad fiction.  Given how much experimentation I was doing for my Ladystuck submissions (my first fan works ever and my first fiction in years), perhaps Present Me can take some inspiration from Past Me.  If all I need are prompts, I’ve got plenty of promises of chapters left to fill.

[caledfwlchthat]

what there’s more

Got my Ladystuck assignment in!  It’s probably good that I only now figured out where the Treats prompts were, otherwise I’d have yet another WIP with no conclusion.

Somewhere in there I’m actually gonna do some more episodes of things.  My hope is that the remixes of my own stuff may tell me something about how it’s received and how to do better.  

[caledfwlchthat]

holy shit why am i not in bed

Welp.  Got all the editing done.  I have...  a bit of a buffer now.

When was the last time I had a buffer with VA shit?!

It’s like I need to start working on my fanfic again.

Or for that matter, actual work that still isn’t really getting done.