formerly greyhoundnomad | still a mess

listen this isn’t rat related but I’m going off the walls right now this is literally so fucking funny

orange bear puppet: i think tutter’s looking a little tired, don’t you?

tutter (mouse puppet): [panting and screaming]

I think it's a bit rich to get all uppity about the possibility that if a character turns out to be a trans woman, that means the author has misgendered her throughout the work, on this website where even the trans rights crowd cannot stop misgendering very clearly transitioned, non-fictional trans women.

It's also very transparent that this becomes a concern in the situation where the "solution" is less representation for trans women

I’ve been listening to the people in the apartment below me have arguments for two years now and I still can’t figure out what language they’re speaking. The best I can narrow it down is like if Portuguese and Hebrew had a baby. Is that a common pidgin combination

I just listened to a clip of this and jesus christ you fucking got it. there are like 3500 people in the whole united states who speak this and two of them are in a very fraught marriage four feet below me

i drew this in 2020, i think as commission examples and i don't think i ever did anything with it lol (not useful now, not doing commissions now)

to be clear, this is how i'd give a casual synopsis, which is usually what people who act like explaining homestuck is really difficult are ostensibly trying to do. if i was, like, describing homestuck's themes in a more analytic register, i would be more inclined to focus on how it's a multimedia hypertext fiction bildungsroman deconstruction with several layers of metanarrative that's ultimately focused on the experience of growing up queer and online in the 2000s through the frame of gnostic allusion, pop culture bricolage, and the author-audience relationship as seen through the lens of said author's idiosyncratic quasiplatonist theory of fiction

Can that be explained for someone who doesn’t know all the jargon? Not trying to be insulting, I just don’t know what a lot of that means.

main difficulty phrases/parts:

bildungsroman

gnostic allusion

pop culture bricolage

idiosyncratic quasiplatonist theory of fiction

so first of all i want to be super clear that, like, this 'jargon' is not simply obtuse for its own sake, but just like any specialized topic with centuries of theory behind it, literary analysis has developed its own vocabulary with which very specific and complex concepts can be communicated succintly

that said: a bildungsroman is a type of coming-of-age story that puts a lot of focus onto a certain notion of 'growing up', a somewhat romanticized vision of the transition from 'childhood' to 'adulthood' with a strong focus on the emotional maturation of the protagonist. when i say homestuck is a 'bildungsroman deconstruction', i mean that homestuck is, in some ways, an entry into this genre, but takes pains to highlight, interrogate, and sometimes outright reject a lot of the underlying philosophical assumptions that go into defining it.

gnosticism is a dubiously historical (as in, it is an exogenous post-facto grouping made of faiths and interpretatins of christian doctrine that is often described as though it is a coherent and continuous religious tradition) constellation of beliefs mostly bound togeher by a focus on personal enlightenment in the face of an illusionary or deceptive world and by a quasidualist cosmology separating an invisible, omnipotent divinity and a lesser, malevolent or flawed creator divinity ('demiurge'). homestuck is full of gnostic allusion, from the surface-level aesthetic incorporation of gnostic vocabulary and concepts (the monster yaldabaoth, a character's username being gardengnostic) to a more thorough thematic engagement with the ideas of materiality being a deceptive shroud over an immaterial 'true world', or malevolent/absent creator divinites emanating forth from higher-ranking ones.

bricolage is an artistic technique focused on repurposing and melding existing objects -- 'pop culture bricolage' here is me saying that huge parts of homestuck rest on the recontextualization and incorporation of both "low" and "high" cultural objects, aesthetic, visual, and narrative elements from stuff like saw, starsky & hutch, the sims, dungeons & dragons -- allowing plot beats and images (sometimes, literal, jpeg images) from all these pop culture works of art to form loadbearing parts of everything from indivdiual panel composition to story arcs.

the 'quasiplatonist theory of fiction' here is a reference to the beliefs about art and fiction that hussie expresses, with varying degrees of facetiousness, through homestuck and outside of it. i call it 'quasiplatonist' as an analogy to platonic idealism, because a central element of it is the notion of the 'pure', immaterial, 'essence' of a character being separable from their depiction in the work and the circumstances of that work's creation, and i call it idiosyncratic because hussie's take on it is very singular and leads to some very strange conclusions.

nothing funnier to me than when AI does math wrong. like I get why it happens, it's a language model that's treating the numbers you feed it as words rather than integers and then giving you an answer based on how those words typically appear in a block of text instead of actually performing a calculation. but the one thing computers are genuinely incredible at. you fucked up a perfectly good calculator is what you did, look at it it's got hallucinations

PHRASE ADDED!

BONUS!!! BIOSPHERE PERMANENTLY ALTERED!

hiiii just revisiting my teenage hyperfixation, i’ll get it out of my system soon i bet

sometimes a theme recurs in your work without your permission. and sometimes it reaches a threshold where you're like. well now i think this is saying something about me against my will. don't know what though