HS book 1

Homestuck volume 1

>AH: Write introduction.

Homestuck is a story that was made for the internet. It was designed to exist on the internet, crafted to exploit the versatility of the internet, and posted page by page, as quickly as I made each, on to the world wide web, a thing that is often referred to by cyber-savvy dudes as: the internet. And this thing you are holding-this floppy, rectangular thing in your hands-this is a book.

I feel it's important to share a few facts about Homestuck here up front, before you invest your time in goodness knows how many books this series will ultimately fill. If you are unfamiliar with the series, and this book is your first exposure to it, some contextualization will have it all making perfect sense, wink. This is your "Ah-Ha Moment," since you have quite reasonably read through all or some of the book before bothering to read this dry-looking introduction, and now that you have flipped backwards to give it an idle gander, it will all finally click. You will soon be able to claim with full confidence that you understand Homestuck less than you ever dared possible.

THE FACT ZONE

FACT ONE: For the better part of the first three acts, that is, for well under half the completed series, all of the commands preceding each panel were reader-submitted. Readers on the internet would suggest an action they wanted a character to take, and I would choose one from the pile and illustrate the results. All of book one was created this way, as will a number of books following it. You'll find this method generates quite the garden path through a story, leading to a good deal of meandering, sill diversions, gags, trial and error from the "player," and impromptu story crafting decisions. I am playing the role of a dungeon master, a game engine responding to input, and an improv-comic all in one. Many story points are planned well in advance. Others arise organically through the manifold interactions with readers. The product is the oddity before you.

FACT TWO: Homestuck in its native habitat is an all-out media blitz. The static panels here do not tip off its true nature. Many, if not most panels, are animated. Usually short looping GIF animations. Some pages are longer animations created in Flash, with music. Other pages are interactive, playable minigames, also made in Flash. I don't claim these books to be an equivalent substitute for the series, as originally meant to be navigated. I see the books more as complementary material. Either as a gateway into the story for further reading online, or as an offline supplement to those who've already read it, and wish to pursue it more leisurely, or studiously, by way of the tangible, attractive papery mechanism.

Each page in the upper corner contains the URL page number for those panels, which is where you can find them online if you append it to the address www.mspaintadventures.com. If a set of panels looks like it could involve some animation, it more than likely does. You can look it up online and find out. If you see a depiction of a Flash animation, you may look that up too and behold its motion and sound. Annotations at the bottom (when failing to be utterly frivolous) will provide insight into the story and process, and I'll continue looking for ways to deepen the understanding of the work in subsequent books, particularly as the story's complexity and density snowball. This collection in the ideal universe will serve as a set of handbooks for the Homestuck scholar, both providing illumination into the series, and containing it entirely, if also approximately. And for those of you who choose to possess the work for mere enjoyment, I hear you. I feel you. Let's you and me direct our combined enjoyment at the notion that there is such a thing as a Homestuck scholar. It's true. They are real.

FACT THREE: Fact three is often referred to by fact-savvy sons of bitches as THE TRIVIA ZONE. As of writing this, I have just completed Act 5. That put Homestuck at a little over 4000 pages, finished in two months, 6 months and 12 days exactly. About 250 of those pages are contained in this book. There are 7 total acts planned. Wow, wait. Really? Damn, this into is a waste of paper then. I'm going to need every scrap of paper I can get my hands on.

==>

Homestuck (the stable release) began on April 13th (i.e. 4/13) 2009. My intent was always to make the start date a very significant number in the story, recurring frequently. Consequently, I decided to make him 13 years old, thus making the story about four thirteen-year-old kids. There are more references to this number than can be mentioned casually, some of which are serendipitous. Playing cards, which have a good deal of relevance later, are comprised of four suits of thirteen cards each, for instance.

The name Zoosmell is based on some old comics I used to do, which was called Zoosmells. It was generally about ordinary men who loved the smell of stinky animals. The punch lines tended to involve either a man taking passionate enjoyment from such an odor, or making some desperate move to be near an incredibly filthy creature. This usually involved pushing somebody out of the way, or committing a crime.

All character names were taken from reader suggestions. John Egbert was the very first suggestion for his name, so I used it. For the second character, Rose, I used the second name suggested. For the third, Dave, I used the third suggestion. And for Jade, the fourth.

Retrieve arms from ____ was first a Jailbreak gag, and then a Problem Sleuth gag, and now a Homestuck gag. There will forever be a class of people that struggle to understand the idea that form may be simplified through stylization, which in some cases results in missing appendages, and these people will be mocked in my cartoons for ever and ever.

The hand cursor up there was a gaming abstraction that was phased out of the comic pretty quickly. It made an appearance much later, when Jade was introduced, and in a few interactive pages for obvious reasons, but that's it. Here, it was mainly a holdover from the Homestuck Beta. Yes, there was a beta version of the story, which was done entirely in Flash. The fact that this proved to be a bad idea is the reason it was only the beta.

The characters are often as new to the game constructs in the world around them as the reader/player is. This is common logic in game tutorials, where characters straddle postmodern awareness of the game mechanics on which they directly or indirectly seek to educate you, as well as themselves, strangely.

I had recently put up the Problem Sleuth print for sale, and this page linked to the item, undoubtedly resulting in some pretty choice bux for me. (NOT REALLY...) Problem Sleuth, as well as MSPA.com, are real things in the Homestuck universe that the kids know about and enjoy. Come to think of it, it would have been cool if I made them banter about the site more often. Or at the very least, it would have been self-indulgent. I call this a win-win scenario.

Speaking of self-indulgent, the idea of a card-based, data structure-themed inventory system was very exciting to me, and I probably occupied some sort of minority in this respect. Though others who know about compsci I'm sure found it similarly titillating. It wasn't quite the ass pull it seems, as the cards are actually punch cards, the root "captcha" has relevance, and really everything revolves around esoteric computer concepts. The logic unfolds and deepens the further you get into the story, kind of like everything. Even the dumb things. Especially the dumb things.

On the MSPA forums, people began making fan adventures, eventually by the thousands. But in one of the very first adventures, one about some sort of bird wizard, I personally suggested the command "Squawk like an imbecile and shit on your desk." Then later the guy who made that adventure resubmitted the same command to Homestuck, and I used it. Then its template became a running gag with the other characters as they were introduced. This is because readers kept making suggestions in that structure: _____ like a ____ and _____on your ______.

Carefully educating you on needlessly complex inventory systems that eventually get retired from a game you never get to play that doesn't actually exist.

HOMESTUCK.

Aside from "Mac and Me" which is unspeakably horrific, "Little Monsters" is probably the worst movie on John's wall. Howie Mandel parades around as this disgusting thing with horns dressed as a 1980's punk and pees in juice bottles and stuff. His appearance foreshadows the existence of trolls in Homestuck, though to be honest at this point I hadn't conceived of them yet. "Foreshadows" is often interchangeable with "inspires."

If you recall, before Obama came along, movies and TV used to treat black presidents as a monumental novelty, kind of implicitly. Strider rants about this later and does a silly rap. Oh, also the movie posters foreshadow practically everything in the story, in equal parts intentional and conveniently retroactive.

The Sburb beta arrived three days after it was released. Just like Homestuck officially began three days after my "beta" attempt. This is pure coincidence. In the beta, the calendar marked John's birthday as the 10th (the day I started the HS beta), and the Sburb beta three days before that. The fact that there was a three day delay for both Sburb and Homestuck is just another one of those weird miracles with no explanation.

There is generally a lot of meaningful detail to observe on each of the kids' computer desktops. One thing I'll point out here: the time. Translates to 4:13 PM.
About Pesterchum: my simplistic parody of chat clients, which always struck me as not much more than perpetual botherment engines. Little gateways for your friends to hassle you all the time, dear to you though they may be.

This was a lightly edited real-life conversation I had online with a guy named Michael Firman who does a comic called Moe. My original idea was to mix in a bunch of excerpts from the fairly substantial chatlogs I'd accumulated with some people over the years, to help keep the dialogue very casual and true to life. But in practice it was difficult to advance through the story with this idea. There was only one other conversation in the story borrowed from reality, wherein Dave conversed with Rose about being sexually assaulted by a bunch of puppets.

When the red flappy thing (otherwise known as a flag) is up, it's actually a signal to the mailman there is outgoing mail in need of collection. By the narration, it sounds like either John didn't know this, or the mailman didn't, or both.

It's Dave bugging John again, and reference is made to clockwork about 2000 pages before we know he's the Knight of Time. In fact, we don't know his name is Dave yet, because his name literally is not Dave at this point. The name would not be suggested until his intro. It's more fun not knowing anything about the main characters, e.g. names, except for what's exposed through their chat, until you finally get to meet them. It echoes the feel of having real internet friends, who remain lively abstractions of text until you meet them in person, and you have your impressions dramatically altered.

Notice how he has now trouble picking it up, or putting it down. But READING IT, well, that's a whole song and dance involving these bullshit cards.
Also, why the hell is Ghostbusters II MMORPG not a reality yet?

I had this idea way back when that setting Pesterchum to rancorous would have DIRE CONSEQUENCES. That... never really materialized.

One of the unwritten rules of Homestuck: character will always refer to each other by their chumhandle initials, up until we are introduced to that character and they receive a name. Thereafter, they will always be referred to by name, and never by chumhandle. This is for practical purposes, since they truly aren't named yet, as well as a feature of their reality. Many things in their universe don't QUITE exist until we the readers learn about them, and once they come into being, it's as if they always were. Like the cosmology of Sburb, its planets, moons, and battlefield.

Earthbound played a major role of inspiration for Homestuck (take a moment to analyze the two titles, as well as John's chumhandle initials), and its influence is pervasive throughout the story. Weapon classes based on simple household items, which become increasingly fantastical as the story progresses, would be an obvious example.
P.S. - It's a pity nobody ever snapped up fncysntakind (fancy santa kind), a.k.a. the deadliest kind of all.

John: Deallocate hammer kind specibus, reallocate as ghostbusters2mmorpgkind.

That's a really boring cover of GameBro. There isn't even some sort of awesome dude grinding a skateboard on the edge of the green house. You get the feeling that all the bros who write this magazine just gritted their teeth through this issue.

Spoiler: Dennis turns out to be last boss. His broken thumb is his weak spot.

It is cute how John keeps a portrait of Harry Anderson in his chest to greet him when he opens it. He is like a second father figure to him. Actually, it later turns out that John's dad has a big Harry Anderson poster in his room too. I guess he is like a mutual father figure for both of them.

The "Micheal Cera" photo is really just one of the first images that appears in Google image search for beagle puss. It really looks like Cera. Alas, it is not. The implication that John and his dad have had debates about this is indisputably enjoyable.

"The moon's an arrant thief" is actually a Shakespeare quote, not a Twain quote. This is the first instance of the misattributed quote running gag. There isn't one quote in HS which is attributed correctly.

DENNIS WILL HAVE HIS REVENGE.

If you see an urn full of ash anywhere in a work of entertainment, you can guarantee the ash will come out eventually. The only factor left negotiable is what degree of slapstick is involved.
That was like a brief tvtropes.com article, but without the 5000 links to obscure anime underneath.

MSPA prior HS grew on a tradition of mute characters. but I experimented with ways of giving certain characters voices in HS. obviously the kids were voiced through their pesterlogs, and only through pesterlogs. Later, sometimes spritelogs were an exception to this rule. Dad, as a rule, would only communicate through notes left behind to his son. The rules for dialog were adhered to pretty religiously, and sometimes expanded upon with new rules.

"Fourth wall eventually takes on a very specific meaning in this story, one with which you were probably already familiar. Here it's just used to see the rest of John's room, which is really important, because we were just DYING to know what other movie posters he had pinned up. Notice How Liv Tyler from Armageddon is position just beyond his mouse. While goofing around on the computer, he probably clocks in ours of teen pining for his Hollywood crush.

The chumhandle "tentacleTherapist" involves a bit of snarky, off-color wordplay, invoking certain fetishistic imagery common in hentai. But then, 13 year-olds often have pretty snarky, off-color senses of humor. The chumhandles for the kids (and eventually, trolls too) tend to have major ramifications for the development of characters, their interests, and very long timer ramifications for the entire story.

When Rose correctly guessed John was wearing a disguise, I remember a lot of people concluded this meant she was either psychic, or could see him somehow, rather than attributing it to knowledge of a good friend's mannerisms. Reactions of serial readers to various panels are innumerable, an if there was way at all to make an off base interpretation, then such interpretations were made. All part of the fun.

Look for this product at the airport. Airport vendors are always loaded down with ridiculous amounts of Toblerone. As far as I can tell, the product is actually manufactured in airports, possibly as a result of FAA regulation.

A lot of times I would have character move objects around and "cleanup" because I personally wanted to clear up the stage. The command was essentially "Andrew: Tidy up your Photoshop file."

The Sassacre graphic was actually a modified illustration of Mark Twain by Joseph Keppler, a 19th century cartoonist. Colonel Sassacre is of course a fictional Twain figure.

I think a lot of readers have been disappointed that John's peanut allergy never had significant consequences in the story later. Still, as of writing this note, the story isn't finished so...

At times the sweeping gravitas of this story can be overwhelming.

I declare the sylladex as an exercise in unending frustration as an exercise in uproarious comedy to be an overwhelming success.

On the bottom right, the TV looped an old commercial for HI-C's Ecto Cooler. I recommend that you go Google "youtube hi-c ecto cooler" right now, and watch it. You will find it rewarding.

John: what do you think you're doing, you put that beagle puss back on this instant.

One of those clouds looks a bit like a jester's hat. I honestly can't remember if that was intentional. Probably?? And the sun there of course become and important recurring symbol, notably one Vriska commandeers, as she does with much of the plot later on. The sun has meany meanings in this story. In retrospect, we might view it here as a sigil representing a mischievous god, who happens to be a female troll, always watching over him and meddling with his life in subtle ways. He didn't know it at the time though, and neither did I.

You have a feeling it's going to be a long book series.

In this early going, I made a habit of capitalizing a lot of words, like DAD, and the generic generic three letter names of of all the other guardians (MOM, BRO, DOG/BEQ). Many other key terms and items were capitalized, but over time, the text based adventure-style capitalization petered out. I think a lot of times video games do this too, by gradually "dropping the act" in whatever way, as the player gets more familiar with the systems and concepts.

The arm unceremoniously slipping into the cake, going unmentioned: this has RAMIFICATIONS.

You imagine these close-ups to be slowly panning and fading to black while the tension mounts to the sound effect of a heartbeat. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Your sense of trepidation soars at the imminent reveal of John's nefarious cake baking father. Your hands being to sweat s you envision the true form of this pipe smoking, pastry slinging menace. See, who needs Flash? Case closed.

"ARTIFACT" was another word that drifted out of common usage later on. It was just a way of saying "item" in Homestuck's quirky gaming parlance. Homestuck always leaned heavily on silly ways of expressing mundane things, like sylladex instead of inventory, especially while all these systems, and the universe itself, were finding their legs.

If you aren't familiar with the series, this would be a page to check out online to fully understand. (mspaintadventures.com?s=6&p+001990 as the upper corner indicates.) It is an interactive Flash battle, with music. Jon's dad battles his beloved son valiantly with an enormous cake, while John attempts to bludgeon his pesky father to death with a hammer.

Note John's drawing on the fridge. This drawing was canonically done by John one week ago, and was hung there by his dad who was beaming with pride.

"AUTO-PASTRY!" is a callback variant to "AUTO-PARRY!" from Problem Sleuth. It is the first of many in Homestuck, including, off the top of my head, blotto-parry, oglo-parry, and auto-Harley.

Dad had to grind for hours to get enough responsibility points to nab the Coddlebrand sub-index for his Guardian Rubric battletech menu. probably involved doing a lot of dad stuff, like putting in hours at the office, taking out he garbage, and shaving.

Really the best thing about this Flash in my view was dad's nimble fancy footwork. Imagine Fred Astaire with superhuman strength, holding a birthday cake. You're welcome, I just caused you to have the most amazing thought you ever had.

I think we are all at ease with the implication that something like this happens in the Egbert household just about every day.

Why introduce one esoteric gaming system in a single panel when you can introduce two? The BEAGLE AEGIS, or any sort of aegis for that matter, was never mentioned again. On the other hand, we actually got some pretty decent mileage out of the prankster's gambit dual-gauges. It even turned out this was the name of Nanna's old joke shop.

Gracious acknowledgment: some of these panels, without animation now require careful study in order to follow the subtle chain of events. Those smoke pellets sure are small.

The cake is quite huge when you think about it. I wonder how many boxes of cake mix he needed to make it? No wonder he makes so many trips to the store.

John never did switch the background image of the PDA. Possibly my greatest oversight in the entire story.

At this point we've just come to naturally expect shit to go flying everywhere whenever you pick something up. What fun would a game revolving around largely aimless domestic activities be without such infuriating artificial challenges imposed on the player? Kind of how the major challenge of The Sims was to somehow find time in the day to go to work, make a meal, AND go to the bathroom.

Merging items across cards is yet another concept that faded from the story. Or more accurately, it got sort of replaced with a different and much more fun item-merger system involving alchemy. Oh man that was fun.

It's reasonable to argue watching a kid wander around the various rooms of his house, engaging in inventory-based slapstick isn't exactly a roller coaster ride as far as entertainment goes. But it all feels pretty necessary to me, for lots of reasons. Getting to know the layout of the house which is relevant for more outlandish shenanigans later, getting to know the rules of he game, and so on. Besides, much of what characterized MSPA stories is this gradual sense of liftoff from truly mundane initial circumstances. It's hard to achieve that without first establishing the mundane!

John's interest in the 2006 romcom "Failure to Launch" is probably the only area of overlap between his and Karkat's taste in movies.

Honestly, the notion that a 13 tear old kid in 2009 would be infatuated with Matthew McConaughey, is just about as absurd as anything else in Homestuck. It's not even that he's a terrible actor or anything. He's...ALRIGHT. Many of the movies on John's wall aren't even that atrocious. They're mainly just odd selections for idolization, most pretty cheesy, and sort of skirting the edge between blockbuster and B-grade. Anyone could have picked a bunch of films that were utter trash, like MST3K caliber. But I felt like there were slightly more subtle criteria for picking just the right "John movies."

McConaughey does sound like a noise a horse would make. I believe Sarah Jessica Parker made this noise on several occasions in "Failure to Launch". Whenever this happened, Matthew was torn between saying "Yes?" and rushing over to feed her some apples.

John and Dave are alluding to Ben Stiller's shades from Starsky and Hutch. If you read Problem Sleuth, at this point you're supposed to be going, "Ha ha, oh man, this turntechGodhead guy is wearing the Stiller shades? That's so ridiculous." The Stiller shades in PS had major cosmic significance, having been witness to every event in the history of the universe when passing through a black hole, and ended up on the face of Godhead Pickle Inspector while He fondly regarded His creation.

The remark about "the new adventure" was pretty transparently in reference to Homestuck, which at the time could still be considered as the new adventure following Problem Sleuth. This was not an uncommon sentiment, because HS was a pretty different thing, and lots of people were hankering for something that felt exactly like PS2, if not in content then in style. But HS turned out to be indisputably better than PS, because it was several thousand pages longer, and had music and stuff. Factual information.

The first instance of the vaguely ominous corporation name, Skaianet, which is only ominous if you've seen Terminator and recall its stable time loop-based doomsday scenario. Not that that's relevant in any way to HS. Also note that names of the programming languages, which read phonetically as carrot cake (^CAKE), til death (~ATH), and disaterisk (DIS*). There is really too much trivia in Homestuck. It is overwhelming sometimes.

Some people have speculated that Buckminster Funnyuncle was actually Karkat. Which, aside from the fact that it makes no sense whatsoever, is not that bad a theory, since their cantankerous voices are practically identical.

But it's orange instead of hot pink
Upgrade: SUBSTANTIAL

RE: Put it...Down?
The narrative is officially being disingenuous.

It takes a few moments of silent reflection to realize that anything actually happened on this page at all, the author conceded with chagrin.

I wonder how things would have gone if John prototyped the McConaughey poster with the embedded razor instead? We all wonder this. We wonder lots of things.

Guys, come on. How are sylladex mishaps not hilarious and deeply fulfilling? Now quit waiting for the plot to happen.

John: Get dad to bake you more cakes pronto, you're running out fast.

There are quite a lot of miscellaneous items floating around, resulting from a well-stocked environment ripe for messing with. The appearance is that all of this crap is trivial fodder for these hi-jinks. However , if you examine each one, you'd be hard pressed to find any that don't have some significance later in the story. Often that significance is profound, as is the case with the broken glass, and to a greater extent, the red box.

The Con Air bunny was one of the only items I included with the specific intent to make it massively significant to the story later, in proportion to the item's absurdity. I just didn't know exactly in what way it would be significant. Determining this organically over the course of the story's construction was part of the challenge.

Slimer: Ogle reader longingly.

RE: [The rabbit is] practically ensconced in the fold of [her] personal mythology by now.
Trivia question: how literal does this statement prove to be later?

IT took me all day and all night to make this Flash animation, the first of such efforts which would become pretty routine later, if not insubstantial by comparison. but what actually took the most time was coming up with the 100+ silly loading phrases that appear under the the progress bar at a pace to rapid to read.

The first half of act one, that is, all pages before this, was like a tutorial for the reader-player on how Homestuck works. The second half serves as a tutorial for the reader-player on how Sburb works (and by extension, a little more on how Homestuck works too.)

Real interactive menus like this done in Flash helped exaggerate the tension between a static story you have no control over, and an actual game at your command to explore. I believe the false menus like this actually felt quite convincing, and sort of activated the game-playing center of the reader's brain, making the want to use these tools, and on some level, causing them to actually believe they can.

Yup, those sure are the Grist Cache, Explore Atheneum, and Alchemy Excursus menus! More goddamn words to remember. Oh well, it's not until a lot later that most of this gets relevant. And then it's all trivial since the "game" does all the work for you in navigating this stuff. Again, it's like a real game where all the fancy menus and silly names for stuff seems overwhelming at first, the later it all feels rudimentary after you've been grinding away for hours with your level 97 bard cleric or whatever.

THERE'S that stack modus! We've just been DYING to know where it went. Kids in Homestuck with messy rooms are bound to misplace their fetch modi It is to be expected.

That cake on the wall sure has some staying power. I wonder when it actually falls off? Hang on while I scan through the rest of the book to find out...
It turns out we never see John's room from that vantage again in this book. Dammit!

She will do no such thing.

Check it out. The ghost on his shirt turns blue in the bottom three panels. This was of course related to GIF compression. But people still got really excited about this for some reason.

I think we are all delighted with the implication that dad does so much compulsive baking, he routinely runs out of supplies, and has to take many trips out to the store on any given day.

John has abjured, acceded, aggrieved, and absconded. Homestuck does it's fair share to improve the vocabulary of youngsters, albeit with heavy emphasis on the first letter of the alphabet. You have to start somewhere.

If you examined the full span of the bunny's long and storied existence, it has probably been taken out of, put back into boxes more times than Con Air has been watched by people. And not infrequently, it actually gets SLAM DUNKED into boxes.

For real, picturing a scene like this was one of the first things I visualized led to the idea of Homestuck. Maybe even the very first.
Then I thought of all this other shit, like dads, and cakes, and everybody being inside of a frog.

Look at this lovely and mysterious phernaila. you quickly forget that the formal term for these things is phernalia, and the kids never call it that, because its' a pretty silly word. They call these things just about anything else, like doodads or gadgets or devices or gizmos or thingamabobs.

Each one is in some way based on tools you'd ind in a shop, like a miter saw or a lathe. Hence all those lighting quick loading phrases having to do with ratchets and grommets and bevellers and such. I think this is probably where HS takes a turn from something very simplistic and driven by silly antics, to something that begins introducing many concepts very quickly and starts demonstrating its potential to overwhelm the uninitiated. Of course, at this point in the story, its' barely even scratching the surface yet.

But the fact that it obscures the view of your Deep Impact poster is completely fucking unacceptable.

Rose is obviously right about everything, because that helps John the player, and you, who is also the player, understand the game. Omniscient NPC acquaintances are common in RPGs to help us understand stuff, often via their own speculation. But soon Rose, whoops I mean TT, will not be an NPC (non-player characters) but APC (actual player character). That's right, in about 30 pages, you will get to be tentacleTherapist! Isn't that exciting? This should totally excite you.

The kids never seem to have anything but derision for each others modus choices. Much like they all have fake browser preferences, and bicker about those sometimes too. It's also a little odd that just earlier today, John didn't even seem to know what a fetch modus was. But now he has an opinion on a tree modus? Busted, John, Busted.

It was very efficient of her to neatly place the PDA on top of the book before carrying them both up.

Now that the cruxtruder blocks the front door, you could almost say that John is officially............
HOMESTUoh wait he can still leave through the back door never mind.

It's almost like that whole balcony was specifically designed to accommodate that huge thing. Busted, Hussie. Busted.

Serious Business of course is the mock-Twitter application for serious businessmen everywhere. They are all very professional and friendly and love sharing laundering tips. The conversations between ta a few of them are seen occasionally as a running gag throughout the story, and in particular focus on the tribulations of the member named fedorafreak. Fedorareak quickly became a fan favorite, and I responded to this by shamelessly elevating his role in the story much later.

Let's pause again to reflect on how odd it is that these characters talk at all, if you were used to Problem Sleuth before embarking on this adventure. As casual and not particularly essential as some of the conversations might have seemed at firsts, this dramatically impacted the nature of the story and the way it unfolded. Characters now expressed personalities and nuanced relationships through extensive logs. This made much more dimension to all aspects of the story inevitable, which PS simply didn't, and couldn't have. It opened up Pandora's plot.

I think this is a quality snippet of dialogue, personally. A note worthy bit of trivia: for a good while, there was sizable class of readers which viewed the pesterlogs as optional reading. The only reason I can imagine this was the case is because it was a thing on the internet. When something is on the internet, it authorizes people to engage with it in the most half-assed way possible. You don't skip whole chapters in books, because they're made of real, actual paper, an that is some serous shit. You don't fuck around with books.

In the first acts when gaming abstractions mattered more(as much as fake game stuff can actually "matter"), I was always pretty rigorous with quantities, gauge levels and such. Like if ripping a toilet out of the floor brought the grist gauge down from 16 to 14, you better BELIEVE that gauge would still be at 14 the next time you saw it. Also, you better BELIEVE the standard cost of ripping up a toilet would then be wired to 2.  I marked that shit DOWN.

That clown rug might actually be the shittiest graphic asset I eve pasted into Homestuck.
A portrait of Jeff Foxworthy might be a close second.

Yes, a more powerful weapon! Always and exciting moment in a game, when you find the first upgrade to your weapon. Now if only head something to attack besides his adoring father.

What is this "gardenGnostic" girl up to while she pesters John about his present right now? Judging by John's pedestrian household antics, it can't be anything all that exciting............*

In the Sims, you'd always be dropping a fridge or something into a spot that looked fine. Then your Sim would be standing around shrugging like an asshole for a while, and you'd wonder why. It was because the fridge was somehow blocking the path to the toilet.

Girls ripping tubs and toilets out of boys' bathrooms and then swearing is kind of this running gag.

Michael Cera is absolutely tickled about this turn of events. That coy son of a bitch.

By younger time zones, she means somewhere in Texas, where the sun's lurid glare is trained directly on Dave's apartment. It's huge and kind of wobbling on the horizon, fora a really long time, while he and his brother duel with swords and a puppet.

That big clown doll is absolutely tickled about this turn of events. That coy son of a bitch.

To accurately picture what the kernelsprite looked like when it animated, close the book, get down on the floor, and flop around a bit. You are now having a seizure.

This among the first of many countdowns in the story, most of which involve some permutation of these same digits. This is a story about, if nothing else, clocks counting down to things, and the various things to which they count down. /profound.

The characters' keen awareness of each other's abstract inventory systems is definitely the most postmodern thing about Homestuck. That is, until I show up in the story and completely ruin everything.

Following the motions of tiny shards of glass, and parsing their subtle consequences, is one of the chief challenges this book presents to the reader.

Dad basically gave him last boss for his birthday. Sort of.

Rose's idea to write her own GameFAQs walkthrough is percolating here. We get to read it int he next book. The walkthroughs on gamefaqs.com are generally very poorly written, an I thought it would be funny to look at one written by a hyper-precocious, erudite teen with a chip on her shoulder. As well as an entertaining way to comb through the details of the early game, through her journalistic observations.

John can't speak Fleur de Lis??? Man, what a noob.

With things like Athenums and Perfectly Generic Objects locked and loaded, Sburb architecture seems to be circling widely around a game abstraction-based systematization of Platonic idealism. Homestuck deals with what I am going to roughly characterized as THEMES.

I think I animated this big robot laser-arm reaching out and doing the full scan exactly once. Thereafter I just said fuck it, and drew it as one frame in the process of doing h scan. Or, much later, just cut out showing the whole rigmarole altogether, and next panel it was like: hey, look what you made! You wouldn't guess it to glance at a several thousand page story, but there were ways I actually began to economize.

Out of the corner of your eye, you notice the plot beginning to happen.

John: Panic and eject clown statues from your sylladex all over the yard.

Notice the Betty Crocker log on the gushers box. I sincerely did not know that Better Crocker was responsible for Gushers at the time. Needless to say, I turned it this into a major plot point.

ROSE, GOD DAMMIT WHO CARE ABOUT THAT, THERE IS A METEOR COMING... ehhh forget it she can't hear me.

In truth, Dad has never been more proud of his son. A toilet full of cake in the back yard is a top notch shenanigan for an aspiring prankster. A single tear beads at the corner of his nonexistent eye.

You have to solve the dilemma on the game's terms, in the same way you had to just keep rolling dice or whatever in Jumanji to banish Robin Williams back into the jungle. (The children failed, Robing Williams is still among us)

I'm going to declare "dirty wifebearterly" as a quality descriptor everyone needs in their vocabulary.
Also I feel a little weird making humorous remarks in the vicinity of lengthy Dave rants. It's kind of like too many cooks in the kitchen, you know?

I like how John is still trying to stealth-maneuver around his dad while there's a meteor coming . He is really dedicate to this ongoing father-son game of cat and mouse.

RE: the precious pages' note, and the topic of dedication, the same goes for Rose's stalwart commitment to tidying up John's bathroom.

This is not the first time John's dad has encountered a bath tub in the hallway.
Not even close.

John has the right idea calling them blue shapey things and the alchemixer respectively. Because really who even gives a shit what any of this stuff is actually called? I know whey I play games, I seriously don't care about all this meticulously designed stuff and assiduous nomenclature they put a ton of thought into. Most of the time I'm like where's my sword, ok here it is,fuck yes.

The bath tub is blocking his door and he can't get out, you know what that means, John is HOMESTRUCK* ALL OVER AGAIN
*Homestruck is a common typo of Homestuck. Only idiots make that mistake though.

Andrew: Image search Sigmund Freud, paste it on her wall, and draw a Lovecraftian monster on top of his head. Their chumhandles were extremely literal anchor points for characterization.

Bonus Trivia: it appears that the "user" is attempting to name the kids these unflattering names, or so we are led to believe. But there are in fact charters that appear much later in the story who are show to be responsible for this. Do you know who they are?
Bonus trivia premium bonus hint deluxe: they have horns.

She is happy. The two pixels at the corners or her mouth mean that she is happy.

Call me crazy, but I think that shit on the floor is way too big for her. Maybe it's for mom?

It's funny the times I find myself regretting these panels can't be animated. For instance, big awesome Flash animations? No, Who cares about those. They can languish statically on paper for all I care. But the one in the upper left... bot do i wish we could all see her scooting and kicking that box into the cabinet with her little foot. It was adorable.

All the kids had instruments they were skilled with, and I figured more would blossom thematically form their talents as musicians and their instruments of choice than what was proven to be the case. In retrospect, giving them instruments and having each take a moment to play early in the story was more important in calibrating expectations for the story and the medium. Like modest little announcements to the effect, "This story will have pages with music in it, just like this!"

Look at dear, sweet Liv's luscious, pouting lips. They are every teen boy's dream, and nearly as beautiful as my own.

How many are really understanding how the tree modus works, raise our hand. Or caring for that matter??
Humor can be a lot of things. I contend that my nerdish, ridiculously stubborn commitment to demonstrating how certain data structures work through a cumbersome card based inventory is, in and of itself, and act of supremely high comedy.

I went rooting around the internet looking for unbelievably shitty desktop wallpapers of wizards, and I downloaded this really sketchy looking zip file full of poorly rescaled wizard art, and it immediately gave my computer a virus.

As all previous page have implied the hijinks we have sampled were commonplace in the Egbert household, so too is this to be received as just another ordinary evening for the Lalondes. Covert ops, chilly passive-aggressive near-encounters, and a bottomless martini.

Rose: Swat that pompous piece of shit off its pedestal.

Walking approximately ten feet through the rain to save John from a meteor apparently qualifies as being put upon.

It was also going to be this Ting where all the kids were going to have telescopes in one way or another, due to the heavily astronomical nature of thing planned to come. I presumed they would have a lot of relevance, with kids using them to look at each other's planets, Skaia, Derse, Prospit, the Veil, and soon. It didn't naturally unfold like that tough, as other things took more importance.

The fact that "UNSECURED" is capitalized: among the greatest mysteries Homestuck has to offer.

It probably would have been fun to follow the adventure of the bumbling kids who had to make the "eggy loking thign" [sic]. Right up until they got totally creamed by meteors.

Rose: Deposit Fred Savage's punchable face into toilet.

OH. Here is yet another thing I set up, expecting to get serious use out of it later, bu then didn't. The sever player can pick just about anything up and store it in the phernalia registry, including huge things. I anticipated later this would be a way to get around the size limits of things you could captchalogue. And then use codes of things in the registry to combine them via alchemy. But I guess I either forgot this feature, or it turned out the sever player was usually too preoccupied to make much used of it, or come up with the other ways to captchalogue/create large items.

THE HOLY BIBLE, starring Adam Egbert and Eve Lalonde.

I was still learning the ropes in Flash when I made this page, and I'm sure I blundered through it as inefficiently as possible. That comet streaking effect in the bottom panes I remember thinking it came out pretty cool, with the trail slowly expanding behind it. But I think I labored over it for hours. These days, it would take less than a minute to do that And as usual, my increased efficiency would not translate into saved time, but into an excuse to take on Flash projects that were much, much more complicated than this one.

Bruce Willis is concerned.

John: Drop apple, run inside, being playing Ghostbusters 2 MMORPG immediately.

Cut out this page, and ripple it gently to emulate the distortion effect of the animation.
Congratulations. Your book is now ruined!

"Not many" unsurprisingly turns out to be 413 years. Which I guess is a lot. But it isn't much at all compared to the lifespan of the Earth, or the universe. That's why we hear it frequently in reference to the post-apocalyptic timeframe. We're being prepared for the real magnitudes this story deals with later.

His name is the Wayward Vagabond, but approximately half of all readers refer to him as Wandering Vagrant. This is perfectly fine, since they're dead on synonyms, have the same initials, and later on the accumulates about five or six other names by those initials anyway.

WV: Cover it back up with sand and walk away. Only grand misfortunes wait for you inside.

That's the end of Homestuck, Book One. There will be many, many more. May your bookshelf inevitably sage beneath the cumulative weight of the series, and may most of your dollars flutter into my pocketbook, unless you wind up buying them used on amazon.com, or something dumb like that. Thank you.