From HSG with love - rambunctiousHooligan



HOMESTUCK BOOK 2 COMMENTARY [brackets will be used to indicate specific pages if commentary covers a large scene]
Book 2 covers the start of Act 2 to WV: Rise Up.

[gamefaq walkthrough]
Welcome to the author notes section of Homestuck, book two.  Last time it was Sburb UI-Skinned.  This time it is GameFAQS-skinned, see?  My plan is that each book's notes section will have a different flavor.  I am literally the only person excited about this idea, but whatever.  The users SanctuaryRemix, winnie the poop 2, and Chaos Demon all wrote walkthroughs in problem sleuth as well.  I wonder what their game sessions were like?  I mean, other than miserable failures.  I bet winnie the poop's was particularly catastrophic.

[Gamefaq walkthrough]
If there isn't any "majestic prose blustering into the sails of a galleon as we embark on this voyage together,
 I'm not really sure what IS filling those sails.  Snark from a thirteen year old girl, probably.  She take this walkthrough-journal very seriously for a while, and often uses it to blast the authors of other such guides.  Many of them do tend to get a big carried away with the stuff they write, or at least this was my observation as of 2009.  Rose's guide shockingly became plot critical later for reasons I won't say.  (t has to do with magic, and aliens)

[[S]==>]
Thee previous book ended on a cliffhanger.  Was John really killed by a meteor??? You didn't know what to think, did you?  Here we find out not only he survived, but his clown-riddled house became enshrouded in pure evil.  Try to bear in mind though that sometimes I say things which are not true.
The Mac and Me poster is by far the most graphically offensive visual included in Homestuck, and here I have inflated its dimensions to far beyond what should be thought of as decent.  I'm sure the inclusion of all these little movie posters on walls qualifies as fair use.  But even if the producers of Mac and Me were inclined to sue me, I'm quite sure they are all either in jail, or died in prison years ago.
Slow zoom-outs to convey larger context and sense of scale.  A Homestuck tradition since, uh
What I'm trying to say is it happens a lot in Homestuck.

A new mystery!  What's under the clouds??  find out in about 900 panels.
NON-SPOILER SPOILER: IT'S LOWAS

Once it splits, each one sort of contains "one eyed, one armed clown essence" and carries that essence to the towers which then broadcast the essence of that prototyping in all applicable ways.  The concept of prototyping in this game was always about distilling the prototyped elements into something more symbolic, more essential, and customizing the whole game according to the merged ideals of those components.  Just a bit more of this Platonic nonsense that kind of goes unspoken, that is up until these books, when I had to go and totally de-unspeak it like a friggin' loudmouth.

And then for the next 20 panels or so I stopped taking reader suggestions for commands, and wrote them myself in this CAPSLOCKED VOICE.  There are many reasons for this.  Do I have enough space here to mention them?  No, doesn't look like it.  For one thing, we needed a "player surrogate" to give commands for the little interactive game that followed.  It also indirectly (and unbeknownst to readers) introduced us to a character, and the interface through which he'd engage with the story, and players like John.  That is, a cursory, back door introduction to the concept of exiles.

[[S] YOU THERE. BOY.]
This was a walk around flash page.  You could move John around with the keyboard, click on things and choose commands.  All options are shown in the book sequentially, thus making it a pointedly NON-interactive experience.  but this really just means you don't have to click on stuff to read hidden words.  They're visible already.  When you look at it this way, interactive stuff isn't that amazing.  outcomes are hiding, and you have to go to the bother of unhiding them, which is kind of a chore.  Life is interactive, which is among the reasons it's such a huge pain in the ass.

You would think that by designating an author-created reader/player to submit commands, the game would start moving along more smoothly, but no.

This now somewhat resembles an old Nintendo Power strategy guide, with screenshots of the game and illustrations of the consequences of player actions.  If this Flash game ever stumps you online, like you find yourself getting lost in the house, just take a peek in this book for some HOT TIPS, and you will be well on your way to becoming a Power player B)

Also, who wants to take a piss with that weird clown watching?  I doubt John's cool with that.

John' please.  The plot of little monsters is not foreshadowing the existence of mischievous imps in your house.  It is CLEARLY foreshadowing the existence of an alien race called trolls about 2000 pages later.  Get with the program!

Critical Point #1: WV, the one typing the commands, knows who John Cusack is, which is weird even for homestuck. (SEE:UNIVERSAL CONSTANT) Critical Point #2: Dave is referring to the face that the Ghostbusters are always getting drenched in a particularly mucilaginous brand of spooky slime in that movie, carrying sexual overtones which I think we're in agreement would be a shame and completely unnecessary to bring attention to under basically any circumstance.

Spoiler: John never does use the towel to clean up the oil in his room.  I admit fully, I let that plot point get
away from me.

god Damnit John, That isn't Michael Cera.
Really long term spoiler: in an alternate universe, it literally is Michael Cera.

The way the gameplay worked out, most of the time the sprite would follow John so closely they would just overlap.  That is one clingy clownsprite.

Yes, the cruxtruder is why he is housetrapped, and not the fact that his house is now confined to a small plateau towering over an abyss.  Also, he can STILL go out through the back door!  Homestuck is frequently host to some of the least literally homestuck children in the history of fiction.

John: Exchange shitty figurines for a palm of pennies and a kick in the nuts.  Transaction favors you overwhelmingly.
PS: Hey, whoa, whoa...that last line about elderly wisdom.  Foreshadowing anymore???

That case full of games: same one used by Death in Problem Sleuth.  Wait!  Did I make a note about that in the last book?  Behold the inevitability of my befuddlement on such matters.  I promise, you haven't seen the last of it.  Probably half these notes will be me inadvertently repeating book one trivia.

heh heh, John sure does irrationally hate Betty Crocker, the harmless baked good corporation, doesn't he?  Surely this is just a silly running gag and wont come back to haunt us in any significant way. Right?  I mean...it just can't...could it?  That would be blowing a gag way too far out of propor-oh fuck Crocker's gonna be last boss, isn't she.

In retrospect its pretty remarkable to examine the breadth of WV's basic understanding of things.  He seems to know what a washer and dryer look like and what they're for.  And can give quality advice on when it isn't or isn't practical to launder your garments.

Although he doesn't know what a swing set is.  Or damage power lines.  Or an electric meter.  Or handcuffs.  or a kitchen
Maybe I spoke too soon.

author's note:  RE: Cirque de Soleil.  Best joke in Homestuck.  You man now stop reading, and close the book.
Follow up on the peanut allergy issue: I'm pleased to report it does in fact prove to be relevant later.

I like to picture dad first hanging that dumbass clown photo straight, look at it for a while with a vaguely dissatisfied expression, and then tilting it.

One thing the book doesn't do ( or even the site most of the time) Is convey how quickly all this stuff was made.  This entire walkaround game was made in less than 24 hours, all drawn and written by me and programmed by Gankro.  When you have to write a large amount of text for many different user choices, you start to get very quippy and punchy to just get it all done.  But then, that's sort of a stupid way to qualify these pages, since that is how literally every page in Homestuck was written, ever.  And also all of these notes.

In these early pages, particularly with the lonely and disquieting ambiance of the walkaround page, there was something that felt deeply troubling about all this strange harlequin shit.  Ultimately, the edge was taken off somewhat when it turned out all clownish roads led to a stoned alien juggalo.

[on to page 002156]
There are some really subtle ways the art started to change over the course of the series, and not just through playing with different art styles.  For instance, in later pages no matter which style I used, I would never draw John's glasses that small.  Which is why it jumps out at me as kind of odd here, and is also why I guess I am talking about it now?

It's exchanges like this that got some fans to start regarding John and Rose as "shippable commodity."  But then people would also ship things like Colonel Sassacre and the pogo ride in John's backyard.  Do you know why?  Because I made the mistake of including them both in the same story.

The game parsec, even though it's able to understand virtually any sentence no matter how awkwardly worded or irrational, still quite often demands the "==>" command, and recognizes it as the game's atomic unit of unfolding narrative momentum.  Here there was nothing for John to do but wait for Rose to do something.  When in doubt ==>.  In fact, these commands are so frequent, I decided to omit them from the books to reduce clutter and redundancy.  They're essential on the site though, because you always need a link to click on to move forward.

John isn't just a video game mannequin to control as you please!  He is a sovereign being in a story with all sorts of feelings and stuff.  The commands are never absolute mandates as they usually are in games.  they are more like little suggestions which characters will follow if suitably reasonable, and this dynamic is made a little more apparent when the console is hijacked by this coarse fellow.

good thing the sprite ducked under the expelled figurine, or it would have gotten double-prototyped with yet another fucking clown,  Just what we need.

For some reason, the image of fedorafreak rescuing all the garments from his burning house reminds me of Peewee's Big Adventure, when he saved all the pets from the burning pet store.  When he finally goes to save the ties, it was like when Peewee saved all the snakes for last, then finally ran out of the store covered in snakes while screaming.

Rose is wondering about his anxiety disorder in a way that is shamelessly hopeful.  I'm sure nothing would delight her more than to play therapist to a group of friends riddled with psychological problems.  Luckily for her, those are exactly the sort of friends she has.

The keyboard is adapted from a diagram of a Mac keyboard.  I like to think that if Steve Jobs lived a little longer, he would have incorporated a giant green ==> button into all Mac keyboards.  And then knowing his penchant for simplicity, would have gradually removed all the other keys.

[Gamefaq again]
SanctuaryRemix was probably killed before his session started, in a gruesome lathe accident.  ChaosDemon crafted a small fort out of perfectly generic objects, and hid inside weeping until the meteor came.

Sorry Rose, it was a nice though, but all the kids on Earth sucked way too much at this game for your guide to save them.  (A bunch of alien kids found it pretty helpful though.)

For the longest time I pronounced "alchemiter" as AL-keh-mighter, since it's roots are in alchemy, and miter, which is the flat, platform-like portion of a miter saw that dictates the angle of the cut.  But lately I've been favoring the pronunciation al-KIM-itter, because it sounds classier.
[end of Gamefaq]

Major stumbling blocks in early Homestuck: the low battery life of a laptop, the depleting fuel gauge of a portable generator, and John's nervous reluctance to lap across a narrow chasm on to the hood of a car.  did I mention their objective later will be to destroy a sun twice the mass of the universe?  No, I guess I didn't.  cause that would spoil everything.

Rose and John have no idea what sort of bullet they just dodged here. (It was a delicious bullet) [the sprite dodging the betty crocker box]

Colonelsprite: also not to be
:(

The very tome responsible for crushing nanna to death is also responsible for her resurrection.  poetic justice?  Or poetic stupidity?  You decide.

No no Rose just throw a refrigerator through the wall of something!  That is seriously a legitimate solution to this problem.
Nobody listens to me.

"Spirited" is an adjective that always makes for great ghost puns.  I recommend you use it a lot next time you invite your friends over to watch ghost dad.  After you finish apologizing to them for your movie selection of course.

I like to believe that over the years Dave has accumulated thousands of pages of sent messages after John has already logged off Pesterchum.

I wonder if John realizes his dad has a perfectly serviceable backup car in his wallet?  Probably not, because I didn't either.

Car: Park illegally beneath clouds.

What is the situation of this "GG" character>  Sounds like she lives in a pretty ordinary house, in an ordinary neighborhood.  And it's definitely a safe assumption that she was awake when she wrote this.

WV loves green things.  This is relevant to the story.  sometimes there are things that are not relevant to the story though.  I'll try to point them out if I notice them.  Like the fact that both of the ellipses Jade uses here contain five periods?  that is not relevant (maybe.....?)

It's cool Dace, Pretty much everyone else only skimmed her walkthrough too.

And now we introduce reader-submitted commands again so seamlessly, you barely even notice.  When WV gets distracted by other stuff, he wanders away from the console and gives the "player" a chance to resume control.  Until he feels like butting in again.

that god damned tree modus.  Okay, I admit,  Even I'm frustrated.

The goofy alt-universe Lovecraft mythos had its roots in problem sleuth, and was picked up again here with very little modification to the premise.  The creatures are known as Horrorterrors, and their presence in the story was always meant to be a silly one.  Although after these pages, in retrospect their involvement was actually played somewhat more straightforward than humorous, as if I was importing a fairly deadpan Lovecraft model into the mix.  But with HS you may reap the spoils of these pilfered concepts without soldiering through an actual Lovecraft novel which I think even Lovecraft's ghost doesn't recommend.

The electric-powered windows you recognize these from both 2000 panels earlier, in problem sleuth, and from 4000 panels later, in Act 6 of homestuck.

For full web experience, imagine the sound of rain as you read barkley's poem.  Or, take the book into the shower.
Boring "real fact": Barkley's poem is actually, The Waste Land by T.S. Elliot.  I bet T.S. was SUPER shitty at b-ball though.

Our third character is introduced with our first true "psycheout."  The previous panel with Rose blinks "PSYCHE" and suddenly here we are.  This is a first and very modest taste of highly unpredictable train of though that gets far more volatile as the story progresses and complicates.  It's exaggerated further by the non-linearity of events.  Later we hop around not only points of view, but different time frames.  this runs the full gamut of standard flashbacks, to just revealing certain story events in anachronic order.

It's probably appropriate this narrative volatility announces itself with the introduction of our Knight of time, a guy whose icon ultimately turns out to be a broken record, which, in the iconic language of HS myth, is a symbol that embodies fragmented timeline and splintered narrative.  But never mind that a second.  RE: above.  Remember how Rose and Dave referred to each other in conversations with John respectively as "insufferable prick" and "flighty broad?"  Well, that's what's going on there.

The Stiller shades, presumably the exact same ones that made the whole trip through Problem Sleuth, were witness to every event that took place in the history of the universe when they went through a black hole.  They still bear this cosmic imprint, much like a kind of photographic film.  this detail remains startlingly insignificant to the story in HS though.

I'll be the first to take the blame for the fact that Dave has never once in the story exercised his habit of raving about BANDS NO ONE'S EVER HEARD OF BUT HIM., which is a shame.  I guess I'm taking the blame for that because I am literally the only person who is conceivably responsible?  If you want to get technical.  Here's what would have been a good idea though.  If the bands he mentioned were some of the many memorable phrases from MSPA, like "A Frightening Beast Appears!" or "Meaty Fist glassward" or "wrist Deep in Puppet Ass" or "Unbelievably Shitty Swords."

And context has placed us in the past, before anything we've read so far has happened.  Now we play catch up from Dave's perspective.  Which will include a variety of redundant reprinting of certain pesterlogs.  which may seem kind of silly, but I feel like the story is preparing you responsibly for events later which will present themselves like pieces of a jigsaw puzzles as viewed through a kaleidoscope.  It's like a primer, for understanding non-linear events to come, just as Act 1 was an extensive tutorial on the game systems fundamental to Homestuck and sburb.

Date on which Dave first contemplates bleating like a goat: 06/30/09
Date on which bleating is actually perpetrated, by someone: 12/07/11

in PS, the Stiller shades were swiped by a thieving prostitute (probably?) from a stone bust of Ben Stiller (which was wearing real shades I guess?)  In HS I apparently go to the bother of explaining these glasses once belonged to Stiller himself, or at least was one of his accessories in a film.  they actually did touch Stiller's weird sort of gaunt face.  The myth surrounding these sunglasses is layered, like an especially ironic helping of lasagna.

"it is like fucking Christmas up in here" if a callback to the line dave used about the juice in his first chat with John which is reprinted work for word on the page after this one (thus called back AGAIN).  I considered something like a CALL BACK ZONE: feature when making these books, but after thinking about it, the reality is there are so many it is actually impossible to catch them all after a certain point.  Even for me.

Dave's wallpaper is from an old comic I did about rappers, and he appears to sport some sort of mock Windows 7 OS deal, And the slick as hell Pesterchum 7.0, choice of coolkids everywhere.  Also this conversation is kind of interesting because as the story moves along, John kind of smooths out slightly into more of a straight man to the ridiculous ravings of others, but in this first conversation there was more of a smartass give-and-take.  John makes some pretty sassy quips here.  I like the "15th day in a row" line, which makes sense since I was the one who actually said it in a real conversation about this.

Hephaestus is a Greek god who is some sort of divine blacksmith.  A god of the forge.  And later, proven to be the denizen of Dave's planet.  All the kids' browsers are named after such gods, who are also the denizens for the kid who uses that browser.  Because I can't really think of a better way to foreshadow near-endgame bosses than through an eclectic variety of fictional web browsers, can you?  No, you can't stop trying to think of one.

[SBaHJ comics]
Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff began as a comic I made hastily and posted on a forum to mock someone's rather poorly executed comic.  It then metastasized into a Thing far surpassing whatever it initially had a right to become, which was basically nothing.  Primarily because I made the decision to include it prominently as a feature of Homestuck canon, as Dave's ongoing magnum opus.  Probably the biggest reason for doing so was to introduce an original work into the story which could serve as a wellspring of humorous references among the kids, which they could recite to each other and joke about frequently.

It was a deliberate source of in-house memes, and of course enjoyed memetic proliferation in the real world as well.  The arsenal of catch phrases and symbols is so extensive, it's almost like a secret language understood by those who trade the terms, and it comes close to being employed this way in a number of Homestuck pesterlogs.  It's actually kind of hard to believe how few comics there really are.  In almost three years, there are only about 40 which means I (Dave?) was churning out one of these pieces of shit only about once a month.  I think there were Renaissance painters who worked faster.  (I.e. hacks)

Dave is the author of a comic clearly created by me, because he's basically one of the numerous "self insert characters" lurking in Homestuck.  Similar in classification to what people call a Mary Sue, though it's not really that simple.  The personality profile is not mine, but his jokes and sense of humor are unapologetically my own, with very little filter applied.  Much later, his bro is an even more egregious case of this.  The fact that they are both explicitly made out to be "too cool for words" is just more shameless self congratulation, in the fine tradition of self-insertion.  Which is "part of the joke." ;)

[End of SBaHJ]
I might have mentioned in book 1 that I nearly did a Midnight Crew adventure instead of Homestuck.  But then later I had this idea that I might do a more casual MC adventure in parallel with HS, and update it sporadically.  ultimately even doing that much would have divided my concentration too much, so I didn't.  But while exploring the idea, I made these pages, then later snuck them into the story here.  I literally never waste anything.  ANYTHING.

Even though I bailed on the MC adventure, I still came up with a whole lot of ideas for it.  like reversing the PS inventory, and giving them a lot of weapons but only one item.  And naming all their weapons after figures of speech, like OCCAM'S RAZOR, RAPIER WIT, DOUBLE EDGED SWORD, and such.  And weapon/playing card duality.  I wound up using all those ideas in the intermission.  (See previous note about wasting nothing.)  Then I joked there about burying readers in an absurd volume of updates.  Ironically, I only punished myself though, because now I have to turn all this shit into books.

I think certain elements within the readership looked at the early dynamic between these two, and thought surely romance was in the air.  But then later, it turned out they were ectoslime brother and sister, and they got kind of upset, because it meant they couldn't draw them kissing anymore.  (they kept drawing them kissing anyway.)

And we're back to John wait no we're not Dave is on the next page never mind.

On the beat sequencer page, you could make your own illbeatz!  I was always 100% positive that 100% of the people who visited that page tried activating all 16 buttons at once to behold the cacophony.  Another fact: if you hit the four corner buttons, it reveals secret songs.  But they're all pretty shitty, like the Captain Planet song, and the Armageddon theme.

THE CALLBACK ZONE!  (Still not a thing.)  Dave almost drinking the monster piss there is the same basic 3 panel sequence used when problem sleuth almost tries to play an old tuba, but he can't do it because it's too filthy.  Also another great mystery: he caps up the juice and puts it away, but the cap stays on the floor.  Is sorcery involved?  The answer is yes.  This page was visited by the wise old Fuckup Wizard.

Admit it.  You are excited by Dave's sylladex math boners.  I know you are.

The early acts involve a weird amount of activity centered around picking up towels, wringing them out, and threatening to clean stuff up with them.  I'm going to be crystal clear here about this.  nothing important has ever or will ever result from a character in Homestuck fucking around with a towel.  There, I said it.

Dave's interest in photography and dead things sort of fall by the wayside as forgotten interests.  They only become relevant again much later when he goes on his alchemy binge to make a lot of ridiculous crap.  Frankly, the dead things were only sprinkled on the shelf as a number of red herring candidates for prototyping (with a very vague consideration toward making the eventual selection democratic.)  Though his interest in dead stuff is somewhat indirectly revisited when the hobby is echoed by [SHH] his ectobiological mother as a teenager in an alternate universe.[/SHH].

"Brainless Feathery Assholes" would be another good name for one of those bands you've never heard of which he likes.

Wait don't turn the page yet!  Look at the second panel.  See the tiny "!"?  It's so small in the book you can barely see it.  On the site it was blinking rapidly.  To duplicate the experience, please blink your eyes as quickly as you can.  Keep doing this until you start feeling weird.  Then rate how weird you feel on a scale of 1 t0 10, and whisper that number into the heavens.  I will hear it.

And then the second formal psychout of the story.  We just got psyched out back to a big ugly wizard.  I think we can all agree that wizards are pretty fucking dumb.  This is what I picture when I close my eyes and imagine a wizard.  A big ugly hobo in a stupid hat holding a dumb crystal ball.

Roxy loves Wizards.

The guardians seem to think these weird tall dolls make spectacular birthday gifts.  Every kid has at least one lying around the house, and they're meant to serve as obvious prototyping bait.  As with many things in the story, you are dared to expect this outcome..

That looks like a really short cat poem.  Maybe it was a haiku?

I really think Mom scored checkmate with the velvet pillow move.  I'm not even saying that as the author.  Just another spectator captivated by this heavyweight match.

That wizard down there was deeply unamused by her little mustache stunt.  Wizards don't ever think anything is funny because they're all such pompous douche bags who only care about looking really hard into crystal balls and acting all grave and wizened and shit.  Someone needs to pass the memo along to wizards that nobody seriously gives a fuck.

Rose, don't even bother.  The pillow was the knockout blow.  Gracefully accept your defeat.

Chekhov's Mop Bucket is used later by John in a prank involving Gushers.  Also, Chekhov's Literally Every Single Story Detail plays a key role in the future as well.  Keep an eye out for it.

THE CALLBACK ZONE!!!! (no still not a thing) - “Youth Roll” is a phonetic regurgitation of the “Sleuth Roll” technique from Problem Sleuth.  They are both equally pointless.

Dave's one pixel smile there means that there are literally more than ten thousand drawings on the internet of Dave and Jade kissing.  That pixel literally made that happen.

So, here is some stuff we learn about GG: she knows the future, has a weird pet, and lives with an intense grandfather.  Time to start forming a mental image about her situation that is assiduously proven false over the course of many, many pages.

The SO. OO. Panel was a lot more compelling when we could see the towel launch out of his sylladex and slowly float down to drape over his head.  It's quite amazing how the panels which I regret by far the most that they cannot be animated are always the extremely simple ones.

[002286]
Let's play a game I just made up called “spot the funniest line of dialogue on the page.”  Can you find it?  Turn the book upside-down to see the answer, and then turn it upside down again, and read it.
The answer is “ok I dont really care.”

Can we play the game for this one too?  I don't know.  There are too many good ones.  I'm going to have to declare a mistrial.  God fucking dammit, why does all my shit have to be so great?

Exhaustive list of the types of babies who DON'T believe in that stuff: non-retarded babies who poop in their diapers, both retarded and non-retarded babies who poop in places besides their diapers but never in them, retarded babies who are able to refrain from poop altogether, and non-retarded babies who fit that description as well.  So as you can see, if you are a baby who believes in that stuff, you are in pretty elite company when it comes to such embarrassing displays of naivete.

In the interactive flash animation, Rose does this whole sequence of stabs and ninja moves which mom BLOTT-PARRIES, not shown here due to the gratuitous overabundance of panels what would require.  I like to think of page presentations like this as somewhat akin to the screenshots of a game you might see in a printed strategy guide.  Here, check it out.  PROGAMER TIP!!! – Try not to stab your mother with knitting needles in the living room.  In addition to being violent sociopathic behavior, every one of your attacks is likely to be parried.  Seek a different strategy for resolving domestic conflict.

Colorful and lively buffet of mother-daughter melodrama.  This exact scene plays out in family households all over the world every single day.  I wonder how much facetious housework Mom had to do to gain the XP necessary to score the IRONIC NEGLIGENCE technique in her GUARDIAN RUBRIC menu?  Maybe she had JUST earned it with that bit of faux-mopping she did a few pages ago.  She was probably dying to try it out in battle.

Some people wondered if this was a real pony, or some sort of oversized plush pony or something like that.  Honestly I left this somewhat ambiguous in my own mind for a little while, until later when it was clearly shown to be a living creature that autonomously perambulating about.  Here though, I really didn't think this particular detail would be revisited in any relevant way later at all.  What a fucking idiot I was for thinking that.

Just imagine all the text in the book is capitalized, and that it was written by Karkat.  You have my permission.  He liked to program anyway, so it KIND of makes sense??  He also talks about wriggling in viscous secretions(!)  I'd like to see the section on the encryption modus, which was the one he used, and by far more stupidly inconvenient than any we've seen so far.  And by “I'd like to see” I guess I mean, “I'd like to write, and then read?”  When I put it that way, I guess I don't actually want to do that.

In this scene, a moment in Con Air is reenacted, when John Malkovich threatens the bunny and delivers that line, while Nic Cage assaults him with a sledgehammer, discovers it's a bit too heavy to wield, topples backwards and breaks it, while Malkovich proceeds to taunt him with the bunny forever thereafter via infinitely looping animation.  (Some of that isn't true????????)

The broken transformer is another rare object that got no attention whatsoever later on, when in fact I had originally envisioned the opposite.  I thought that maybe it would be involved in alchemy, like Dave's huge damaged air conditioner block on top of his roof.  Or failing that, I thought we might at least see it again when Rose entered the game, so we could see that electricity was magically restored to her house, like it was for John, when we saw his mystically sparking electric meter in his back yard.  TRANSFORMER TRIVIA.  This is exactly why you bought this book.  I just know it.

She removes the umbrella from the root card, severing and dropping all those below it.  But we don't really get a sense of the falling objects playfully bouncing off her umbrella, or the little magnetic W fly through the air and cling to the transformer!  AUUUUUUUUUUGH.  (Just joking around, shit like this is not actually a BFD.  Let's cool our jets.)

In this flash, I think some people didn't quite understand the “health vial” gauge system.  Some thought it was a glitch or something.  It was really just a style of gauge that defied typical game convention in a way that was...I guess we'll just call it satirical.  Instead of a gauge remaining stationary, with the contents depleting, with each hit, the entire gauge itself would move, withdrawing from the stationary blob of “gel” signifying the player's vitality.  Hence “gel viscosity” was a health upgrade, making the gauge more difficult to withdraw from the thick gel when taking damage.

Rose:  Think to self, “God this soggy trek mausoleum-ward fucking sucks.”

Rose thinks that successfully, and it proves to be an apt observation.

Sylladex-driven battle sequences: now more inscrutable than you ever thought possible!

Ok, let me just do the play-by-play if you didn't follow.  Jon picks up the blue totem, launching his PDA at the imp.  The imp blocks it with the bunny, deflecting it into the air.  John runs up the wall and flips action movie-style and SWEET CATCHes it.  This forces the head of the sledgehammer out, launching it at the imp.  It's too heavy to block so the imp takes enough damaged to be defeated.  He drops a bunch of spoils like grist, gel, and a specibus.  You can't believe you didn't get all that.  (Unless you did because you are a veteran INTERNET READER.)

It's not a Chaos Dunk, it's just a regular dunk.  The Chaos Dunk happens later.  (Don't worry it's just as pointless.)  Also, I like how WV is now helping out with the Con Air references through his terminal commands.  He shows a striking ability to adapt to and participate in running gags.  He is the type of guy who just “gets it” you know?

The echeladder is the best level-up system ever conceived in any game, real or fictional.  Compelling evidence for this claim: no other system makes use of the phrase “ceramic porkhollow”  As an excuse to come up with a variety of rung titles every now and then, this system alone made Homestuck a worthwhile endeavor.

The humorous suggestion here is that a bunny could be used as a deadly weapon foreshadows a bunny's later use as a deadly weapon.  Layers upon layers...

I'm suddenly wondering how much expository text in the entire story is dedicated to explaining precisely what the fuck just happened with a sylladex or a specibus or something like that.  I'm guessing if you isolated it and printed it all out, in totality it would be longer than many novels.

Rose, you are being disingenuous.  He was fitted with a tiny, custom tailored suit well before he died.  It was standard day to day ensemble.  You are just grasping at straws for ways to criticize your poor mother.

John:  Who gives a shit about that, get a closer look at that oil smudged certificate of authenticity.
We never did get an up-close look at that.  What an unforgivable boner on my part.

GOD DAMNIT JANE.  I mean Nannasprite.
There's Chekhov's bucket again.  Thought not the same bucket.  It's more like Chekhov's graphic bucket resource.

Meaningless spoiler:  He dreams about Cal, because Cal actually originated from his dreams.  Rose herself chucked him out the window, which got the whole ball rolling in the first place.  And by “ball” I mean literally everything in Homestuck ever.  This is a meaningless spoiler, because if it really is something you didn't know how much sense could any of this REALLY make right now?  It practically doesn't even make sense with full context in hand.

Elderly Jane is a sweet old lady.

“Medium” has a fairly obvious double meaning.  It is literally a middle ground, the wide band of spherical space in between skaia and the furthest ring, an infinite unfathomable void.  It is also a medium in the sense that a canvas is for paint.  An ether for an emergent reality.  In the sense that it is an ether, it has mystical unexplained properties for sustaining life, specifically the players.  It is not quite a vacuum, since people can breathe in it, though it is not necessarily a literal field of breathable atmosphere.  In the same sense, it magically powers houses severed from the electrical grid.

Sprites are guides for the player.  Like in an RPG, you may be thrown into some action at the start, but soon you are likely to encounter an entity like this.  That character or magical creature that starts saying “Hey here's whats up!”  Ultimately there are a lot of guides in HS, not just game-supplied ones.  Characters who know more than others, and fill in details such as this, either specifically to be helpful, or just passing conversation, or outright begrudgingly.  That is, it continues to be like an RPG.  The player keeps gathering information about the quest from many different sources.

Much of HS's lore, game objectives and such, are revealed through the accounts of such guides.  Just as much, if not more, is revealed to us through direct discovery as revealed through the eyes of the players engaged in exploration, trial, and error.  Those revelations of the latter type obviously require considerably more panels to depict.  Often the exposition of guides helps economize sensibly, and gets concepts out in the open quickly for further examination.  HS is, among much else, a hard working engine of new ideas, characters, systems, storytelling and universe building methods, going full steam all the time.

Judging by the commands, WV is just as caught up in the story as John is.  Let's agree this is adorable.

The hates aren't all that hard to reach if you happen to have a rocket pack on hand.  Ideally one that doesn't have a flower pot, a violin, and a cinderblock partially embedded in it.  Oh well, guess there's no solution to THAT problem.

Cage just got so grannyslimed it's not even funny.

I feel like “Drubbing” is used a lot in Homestuck.  It's just such a hilarious word.  I just counted five instances of it in the full text of the story, not including any mentions buried inside Flash pages.  Suddenly I'm kind of regretting not using it more.

Jaspers has a secret.
It is MEOW

Notice how the game engine is flexible enough to switch between speaking in first person and second person voice.  It will refer to the character as “you” most of the time, but will refer to him as John when the guy who is typing (WV) insists on addressing John directly.  At that point, the “you” becomes the one who is typing, and John is just John.  This metalogic is perforating one of the walls, but it's hard to say which one.  It is perhaps a wall that is shaped like a fractal, existing somewhere between the 3rd and 4th.

The keyboard panel was animated, showing him typing frantically.  As he was hitting the 'A' key, his finger slipped and unlocked the CAPS LOCK key, thus not only freeing his text from obnoxious capitalization, but freeing an etiquette book from that storage bin behind him.  That is, a text suitably appropriate for one who insists on typing in caps.  The designers of this underground compound clearly thought of everything.  (CALLBACK ZONE??? – cover of the book features the etiquette monstrance from Problem sleuth.  You had to fill it with mannercite shards to accomplish... things.)

BEANS OR MUSTARD BEANS OR MUSTARD BEANS OR MUSTARD BEANS OR MUSTARD OH LOOK AT BOOK

[Another Gamefaq section]
Reader of book:  Finger-click on winnie the poop 2's walkthrough so hard that all your wishes come true and you are able to read it.

Homestuck has a very high word count.  Close to that of a fairly thick novel trilogy.  But the frightening thing is, there are a lot of words embedded in things like flash files, or GIF image files, as the FAQ notes like his were, and thus don't even count toward the word total.  Microsoft word cant count words that are stuck inside image files.  Yeah, way to solve THAT problem BILL GATES.

Rose is easily flustered when she can't type in purple.

Rose's birthday is December 4th, 1995.  She is the second youngest kid, behind John.  That is, she has spent the second least amount of time being on Earth.

Jade/Rose conversations turn out to be exceedingly rare throughout the story. So unusual in fact, this color combination strikes me as very strange.

Dave:  Activate ambient Flash zoom-out animation sequence complete with misattributed poem.  It's your turn for one of them.

Snoop has some instructions for you regarding exactly what the protocol is should you discover the pimp to be in the crib, and he is not hesitant to reiterate them for you.

“A familiar face.  A friendly face.” is a callback to a line in Problem Sleuth.  The Mr. T plush is a callback to a bad comic I made like 15 years ago, about Mr. T fighting some robotic drug dealers or something insanely terrible like that, which was included in this incredibly shitty zine I helped make.  We then distributed about 50 Kinko'd photocopies throughout a variety of establishments in Iowa City.  Okay I think the definition of “callback” may be starting to get a little blurry here.

It was funny to joke about how lame/awesome Mr. T was “like 8 years ago” relative to when that panel was made, which approximately corresponded to when I made that shitty zine.  But my crappy T comic was even before the rise of how haha/awesome/lame/lol all that stupid retro shit was, so I was kind of ahead of the curve there with my independent street literature.  (But it wasn't even funny back then either.)  Also I like the implication here that bro has “gigs” out in the world with Cal.  Somewhat like Dad's erroneously implied career as a street performer.

Gonzo's nose is blurred out because it constitutes indecent pornographic material.

Up there is pretty much every skating game I've ever even caught a whiff of.  They always seem to be so humorously glitchy.  All these hungry bros getting stuck inside shitty 3D modeled terrain, or just insane ragdoll physics and ensuing slapstick rearing its head out of nowhere.  You know what I'm talking about.  I KNOW you do.

Want to know what the deal with “HUSTLIN' FUZZ” is?
The answer is I have no fucking clue what the deal with it is.

“COMPLETEBULLSHIT” is basically The Internet, by Andrew Hussie.  This is my take on just about anything that aggregates content or otherwise connects people who awful, overbearing garbage competing for your attention.  Like Facebookreddittwitter4chantumblr, “organized” into uselessly narrow, gaudy rows, all kind of jittering, and daring you to not get a headache.  People probably don't realize that I don't actually like the internet that much at all.  Though I pioneer it's woods I consider them cruel and unforgiving, and advise others to steer clear altogether.  Probably like real explorers used to do.

It's not unfair to suspect the regulars who frequent the little chat box on plushrump.com are just chatbots that pro programmed to talk to each other about puppet smut, to help lure curious visitors into the squishy fold of expensive platinum memberships and such.

[this comment is just the lil cal face]

In retrospect, this would have been a good moment for one of those “nervous breakdown” flash pages, scored wit ha short bit of tense psycho-thriller music.  But I hadn't even done the first one of those yet, so it was not meant to be.

Notice the bucket propped up on top of the door.  John hadn't triggered Nannasprite's trap yet!
Nonlinear storytelling folks, this is where it's at.

Rose likes bro's puppet porn sites.  It's almost like they would have similar styles and would get along pretty well if bro was her age.  Oh well, that's the end of that fruitless hypothetical reverie.

The punch designix required some purple grist, which meant you couldn't deploy it until you killed an imp, meaning it is only usable AFTER entering the game!  Games employ roundabout limitations like this for various reasons.  In this case, Sburb probably doesn't want you horsing around with a lot of alchemy before entering the game.  A savvy player would then just never enter, alchemize a bunch of cool shit, and sell it to make a fortune.

John look out that one has a beagle aegis!!!  Be very careful, he is nigh invincible now.

Certain points in Homestuck can show almost excessive fidelity to what it's like to banter with friends online, in that quite often, your friends just AREN'T AROUND TO READ WHAT YOU SAY.  I'm only just reflecting on this now, but it leads to this dialogue dynamic sort of unusual in fiction where the characters rather frequently find themselves speaking at length to nobody at all.  But then after a long pseudo-monologue the other character rejoins the chat, usually apologizes, and then they're completely caught up.  In HS, characters speak to one another by literally reading each others speech bubbles.

Thank God that joker statue didn't fall off the ledger.

Another great animation you can't see.  Rose plucks the pogo ride kind of like uprooting a vegetable, and the little spring stretches and then kind of bounces once it's free.  I get excited about some kind of stupid things when it comes to animation.

John:  Mount pogo and bounce around in the tub.

No Rose, you misunderstood.  When Nanna said to build she wasn't telling you to build the house upward.  She was telling me to build Homestuck outward, way too far in every conceivable direction.
I did such a great job of that.

Here come the fictional memes, taking this conversation by storm.  Let's play “find the funniest pesterlog line” again.  Can you spot it?
A: It's the last one. [002385]

Rose is all pretending @ John she doesn't think it's that funny, but check her out.  She's totally loling there.

Dad's love shaving.

Oh, wait RE: circle of stupidity.  I was already busting my own pointless towel antics back then, from within the narrative.  I was way ahead of the curve there.  Past me gets some points.  Also; wherein Nanna makes up for years of being dead and not being able to bake.

THE PRECIOUS CLOWN PAINTINGS, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck

I guess we never did get to see how they like the old double barrel latherblaster.  Goddamn loose ends.

I sincerely wonder if the Human Etiquette book actually instructed him to use phrases like “ sir boy” when you think about it, the writers of that book were likely just some other carapacians, who understood human etiquette about as well as WV did.

John can do stuff like Sonic the Hedgehog.
He doesn't do it very often though.  Like that was the only time.

Sometimes inanimate objects gain levels in HS.  Though usually it mentions the names of the rungs they progressed from and to, and here I only mentioned the refrigerators new rung.  I will not decide that it's previous level was MAYTAG MAN'S TOMB.

Looks like that book occupied about ¾ of the safe's interior volume.  Dad probably bought one specifically big enough to hold it.

It's too bad WV never really got to put his tea lesson into practice.  Then again, as I write this, the story's not over...(saying something like that usually guarantees it will happen.)

[Gamefaq]
Creating links to extra content through tinyurl.com or bit.ly was another good way to use the internet to my advantage.  I could have characters link stuff to each other, and in doing so, the reader as well, and host that content on my site without using a url beginning with mspaintadventures.com.  This helps keep things feeling a little more plausible and avoids popping the metabubble of self reference in the wrong way.  There were clearly much better ways to puncture it, such as depicting my orange-skinned author avatar capering around like a jackass.

FUTURENOTES:  It's worth noting that when Rose magically sealed this FAQ in a server somewhere, she must not have included the entire tinyurl redirect registry or the hosted images.  Otherwise Kanaya would have known what humans looked like.  Wait...IS that worth noting?  Fuck it.  I have a lot of pages to write notes for.  I'm gonna say you just found that way interesting.

Rose is so sarcastic.  She knows damn well she butterfingerd that car right the hell down that spooky pit.

Don't worry about sniping John's battle XP, Rose.  He's gonna turn out just fine.

Rose is quoting Nikolai Gogol with the steeds poem.  What a fantastic poem.  I could never in a million years write an ironic poem glorifying horses as good as that one.
[End of Gamefaq]

Ladders are also a lot easier to make in photoshop than isometric stairs, so in a way they truly were cheaper.  When I was making this part of the story, it was kind of funny how this little house building game for Rose very closely resembled the same kind of house building game for me.  I had to think through the same logical issues, how to make it keep growing upward with a little navigational path for John.  Ultimately she concluded the same thing I did, which was that it was easier to build upward with a lot of solid structures instead of platforms.

The story definitely hits a pretty unusual stride when we have to sit around listening to an overly courteous argument between the narrator and WV typing into a command console.

Rose put the crumpled hat on his head out of frustration.

Another one of these rare logs lifted from real life almost word for word.  At some point, I actually had cause to type all of Dave's lines almost exactly as they are, realtime and rapidly ab libbed, in some conversational context I don't fully remember.  I only vaguely recall it had something to do with that Saw/Muppet babies comic battle, and I may have been chewing out the guy who that battle was intended for.  It seems his dereliction was prompting me to pick up the puppet ass gauntlet myself, and I was being faux-enraged about it. [002422]

This is why they are called captchalogue cards.  (Those wobbly codes you have to enter for security purposes are called “CAPTCHAs”)  Although this idea was planned since the beginning, it took all the way until now to discover this, by simply having someone take a look at the other side of the card.

The hole patterns punched into the cards are not random.  There is an actual cipher for translating an 8 character code into a particular hole pattern, and back.  John goes into this later when he makes a contribution to Rose's FAQ.  It's the most scintillating body of text in the entire story.

If his dad knew he was destroying two perfectly good cans of shaving cream, he would be SO grounded.

And now his Cirque du Soleil poster got creamed by a bathtub?  That's it, he's grounded for life.

John, we are counting down to the point in the story when grist quantities become ridiculously irrelevant.  Please bear with us.

Rose is right to have a bad feeling about it.  For you see, what is in that room is a box of Gushers, and the fruit snack's dirty little secret...

See, when you make a story that is also a game, at some point you have to start outright telling the player/reader stuff like, “We aren't going to watch this dude do every stupid thing like you literally would in a video game, so maybe let's not all sit around wondering why he didn't go pick up all that grist, and stuff like that?”

I think it was pretty shrewd of Dad to keep the Shaving Almanac in the safe.  What if a bunch of scruffy, unshaven burglars broke in?  Yeah, best to keep it locked up.

Dad has a note hidden for literally every contingency in his son's upbringing.
Dad of the fuckin year right there.

As good as this idea by Rose is, I'm not sure it's ever utilized once over the course of the story.  [002451]

Rose just used a game cursor to catch a tiny PDA fired out of his house at high velocity, using nothing bu a laptop track pad.  Those are some serious reflexes.

What I like most about the run, ONE MAN JULEP VACUUM, is that it implies that ordinarily a julep vacuum is going to be spread across the dedicated efforts of several men.  A julep vacuum is something that's just not that easy to be if you're one guy, but the colonel pulls it off with his wily veteran sousery.

Vaulthalla is not a concept that is ever revisited, but I will say that setting sure does look like an Alternian vista.  And now that I think about it, it's actually kind of strange we never hear about vaulthalla again, because this is far from the last vault that is destroyed over the course of the story.

The deeper I get into annotating the books, the more absurd it seems to me that the Flash animations are often considered the striking point for translating this story into books.  Losing the subtle animations in individual panels actually seems to have a lot more consequence.  With simple 3 or 4 framed animations, we could very easily tell bro was quickly swiping the sword and dropping Cal there in a shadowy blur.  But with just stills, even if all those frames were shown explicitly, the action still isn't telegraphed nearly as well as when it was animated.

I made these shitty Saw/Muppet Babies comics well before Homestuck began, and lifted them from their respective context and adapted them to function as evidence of another one of bro's strange and unsettling hobbies.  They were from a forum game where I sort of “dueled” via comics with another artist who pretended to be Jigsaw on a quest for Muppet Babies porn.  The result was every bit as stupid as it was vaguely disturbing.

DUMB SPOILER:  With respect to the ironic goat bleating that he's saving for later: Bro eventually one-upped him yet again by stealing Dave's ironic goat bleating thunder.  In an alternate universe.  As his robot self.  While slaying a huge, purple blooded sea goat monster.

The destruction of a little frog puppet in a blender.  This foreshadows...
I can't think of what it foreshadows.

It must take a lot of patience to overload a microwave with a lot of spongy soft puppet ass, and then close it flush.  Like, really, you're picturing doing that, right?  Isn't it frustrating in your imagination??  I know it is in mine.

I had Dave load up all the stray weapons and dangerous shit into his sylladex so that later he could use them to battle his bro on the roof by way of “hash rap” but this never actually happened.
Hey Hussie, what value does the hash function yield for “laaaaame”????

BOY AGAINST SYLLADEX THE ETERNAL STRUGGLE

The Scrabble hash function is important because it opens us up to an entirely new horizon of pointless fucking around.

That soft, bulbous bottom was sufficiently being like
kind of jutting out and impudent or whatever.  It left him no choice.

Fact:  His bro totally is around to see how he just used “Y” as a consonant to trick his sylladex like a weak ass jump.  Hahahahaha, what a tool.

Fact:  Ill-mannered hunger is known to be one of the leading causes of snooty dowager suicide every year in this nation.  You can help assuage this cruel epidemic by keeping that rude hunger under control, or by shooting any dowager on sight preemptively.

Any time I catch myself thinking this whole sequence might have been kind of a useless waste of time (BUT FOR THE LAFFS) I have to remind myself that it directly lead to the creation of the legendary SORD..... later on.

Frankly I have to wonder what kind of asshole refers to them as anything other than RED SPHERICAL SALUTES anyway.

This whole “ridiculous names for ordinary things” thing was indirectly revisited and/or brazenly regurgitated during Hivebent, wherein I would come up with innumerable such terms for Alternian parlance.

How many Saw movies were there again?  Like ten?  The first one in the theater,the next on DVD.  Wait, that's probably not true.  But it should be.  Saw is like the Air Bud of horror movies.  While Air Bud is the Saw of dogs-improbably-succeeding-in-sports movies.  And even that's not quite true either, it should be too.  (“HELLO, BUD.  I WANT TO PLAY A GAME.”  Cue “who let the dogs out”)

THE CALLBACK ZONE!  Obviously to those who read PS this is in reference to when Problem Sleuth crafted a fort out of his desk.  By my recollection, people have made forts out of things in Homestuck exactly three times.  Which is one less than it happened in problem sleuth.  So...stay tuned for #4???

And here is Dave's side of the conversation we already read.  Behold how his consternation is fully contextualized.  We may verify that he has indeed burrowed fuck deep into lively, fluffy muppet buttock.

While Dave's lines were once my words verbatim, Rose's side of the conversation is heavily edited.  You may be surprised to learn her poem was not part of the original conversation.  Or you may not be that surprised at all, because in real life, chatlogs don't actually go like this all that often.  Unless the two conversational partners both happen to be me.

I wonder how bro hung that there unassisted>  Wait that's a dumb thing to wonder.  He just held the paper in position, then let go of it and flashstepped at warp speed backwards, and threw the batarang at it before the note could fall even a single nanometer.

Here's the second fort that gets made.  Although technically it's not a fort, it's a tent.  But I'm going to count it anyway.  The third time it happens is so far in the future it's a JOKE.  However, it is the one instance which most closely resembles the original PS fort by far, and is therefore dear to our hearts.

There  is sort of an implied cipher between the captcha codes and totem shapes.  The code for a card here is very simple 11111111.  So the result is carving the whole thing down by a little bit, without introducing any curves.  Similarly, the code for nothing 00000000 (an unpunched card) won't even deploy spikes from the lathe, so the totem is left uncarved altogether.  But complicated codes will modify the spikes and the path it carves in interesting ways, like a key-making machine.  HOW IS THIS NOT FASCINATING??????

Rose, while you're at it, do you think you could write these book annotations for me?   Sweet, thanks.

Look at that imp with a hammer.  What is he up to?  Imps are so mischievous.  In fact, they're so mischievous, they had a whole adjective named after them which is synonymous with mischievous.

The secret of the stack modus was that it was the queue modus in disguise all along, and vice versa.  Most shocking twist, or must stunning development?  You decide.  No wait, I will decide.  The answer is yes, both of those, times a billion.

I'm guilty of being absolutely convinced this book would make a great read if it were real.  Which it is.  But the real one presumably has content that doesn't involve this strange man following Harry Anderson around like some kind of infatuated private detective, documenting his street performance bumbling in the voice of a hard boiled booze hound.  I guess the real book is mostly flattering of Anderson, and maybe talks about some magic tricks he doesn't totally fuck up?  Pass. [002531]

When you think about it, John is actually very clever for solving this little puzzle I invented, which I also made him solve, because he is a fictional character whose actions I am 100% responsible for.  Way to go, John! :D

Rose doesn't know anything about Night Court because it was before her time.  It's kind of like how I don't really know shit about M*A*S*H.  Not because I'm unfamiliar with the series, but because I always thought it was boring as hell.  Wait, what point was I making?  The point is, Night Court wasn't actually a very good show either.  I guess they asked this guy who was a magician if he wanted to do a show, and he said sure.  They said, want to be a judge for some reason?  He said yeah, put on some robes, and they started filming.  The result was as underwhelming then as it is dated now.

One time I was summoned to court for some sort of absurd traffic violation that was total BS.  But the summons said to come at 10 P.M. So I got kind of excited, believing I was going to a night court.  I kept imagining all the nocturnal antics I might get swept up in while arguing my case.  But then when I got there, the whole building was closed.  The summons was misprinted, and the real time was actually 10 A.M. When I told them I thought it was a night court summons, everybody just laughed at me.  It turns out that in reality, night court isn't even a thing?

Oh man, some huge ogres are climbing the house.  Shit is getting real, right?
Ha ha ha.  Yeah, get back to me when the first universe blows up.

Protip for Rose:  You may not be able to carry him up on the bed, but what you CAN do is shake it back and forth while demanding that he apologize for being a cripple :::;)

Rose: Screw that, send him Jaspers.  Sit back, wait patiently for prankster's gambit to skyrocket.

Yeah, I heard you thinking earlier, this CAPTCHA code thing is just more useless jokey bullshit that serves no actual purpose.  Oh really?  Useless jokey bullshit, or a system that prevents clever kids from cheating???  guess you were busted.  Hey, you know what I think is useless jokey bullshit?  Your face.  THE BUR NWARD HAS A NEW PATIENT TODAY.

John was probably way more excited by the fluffy Anderson cloud than by Jade's silhouette.

Jade, you filthy stinking liar.  You better turn out to be REALLY adorable when we finally meet you, or else we are all going to be so pissed.

This is right about when the massive significance of sleeping and dreaming in Homestuck begins to take shape.  Strangely, those things actually prove to have much more long term significance to the story than what it started as its central premise, a game about kids building houses to reach skaia.  Sleeping mechanics turn out to be quite elaborate and varied, and drive the plot in a hundred different ways.  Dersite/Prospitian dream selves as extra lives and mythical moon royalty, the whole god tier system, the dream bubble afterlife... all these fall under this category.

John, just sneak under the bed and escape through the hole!  Oh wait, your head is too big to fit under there, nevermind.

John:  Steal ogre's huge silly elf shoe and ride around inside of it like Kuribo's shoe in Super Mario 3.

Is he REALLY being ambushed here?  Seems more like some massive goons have been lumbering up the side of his house in a very straightforward kind of way.  They are almost being civil about it.

PREEMPTIVE CALLBACK ZONE!!!!!!  The trick handcuffs were taken by the imps and used on Dad.  He presumably went along with it because he couldn't resist the pranking opportunity that was being presented to him on a silver platter.  Of course the really ridiculous thing is that even if they were a real pair of handcuffs, he could have broken them easily with his mangrit.  But that wouldn't have been as “hilarious.”

Being the other guy is a long and proud Homestuck tradition.  It never stops being a thing that doesn't mean anything.  Please note his literal acrobatic pirouette, which is not taking place off a handle.  However there is a later instance where one of his pirouettes is literally off a handle.  However it is not particularly acrobatic.

The “red eye of the sun” is another bit of recurring imagery.  It shows up in other places too, like in volcanoes, and in the lava underneath the Beat Mesa.  What does it mean, you ask?  Look into your heart to find the answer.  (Protip: that answer will be wrong.  Your heart is kind of a moron.)

Bro doesn't give the slightest shit about the meteor storm raining down on the city.  He swiped the puppet and wants to rumble.  What a cold blooded motherfucker.  We are surely about to witness the culmination of this mounting preparation for battle and shall not be interrupted by any sort of...

I think more books should include full page psycheouts, don't you?  “IT was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of believe, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was...” PSYCHE.  “It was the epoch of bitchin' beach parties.”  And then the rest of the book is about some beach parties.  Dickens is awarded the Pulitzer posthumously.

Jade:  Do not even bother with the pretense of locating your arms, or messing around with that pumpkin.  Just wait patiently for the second psycheout on the following page, and resume your part of the story in the next book.

….................

If one psycheout dropped in a dickens classic is worth one Pulitzer reverently deposited into his tomb, then I wonder what TWO PSYCHEOUTS IN A ROW are worth???  I'm just thinking out loud here, but try to imagine all the Pulitzer in the world melted down, and their prestigious alloys then smithed to form a kind of battle armor, specifically tailored to my proportions.  Now imagine that I become the last boss in the literary world.  Are you imagining it?  The dream we are sharing is what unites us as human beings.

For approximately the next hundred panels, I switched up the approach again.  I wanted the action in this segment to closely resemble Problem Sleuth “gameplay” which not felt significantly different from the style that had evolved after two acts of Homestuck.  Of course I was still accepting reader commands at this point regardless.  But here, I made a concerted effort to avoid much planning or thinking ahead.  I knew some big picture stuff, like who VW was and what his role in the bigger story would be.  And what event he was ultimately working toward in this stations but...

Other than hat, I just dropped some initial objects and conditions into the room, and began to let things take shape organically through whimsical selection of reader commands.  Even though the most immediate result of this was a lot of silly antics, there were a few major and long lasting consequences that followed from some of it.  Off the top of my head:  Can Town was something I wouldn't have done otherwise.  Its long term consequence was more subtle.  For one thing, it began pushing the exiles into compartments of civil service.  A mayor, postal working, police officer...

I think the previous two acts have prepared you adequately, you are now primed to receive the notion of simply picking up objects with your hands as a point of comedy.

Learning about exile anatomy.  Nothing about this is ever explicit, but there are some points to speculate on.  He's got the dull livestock teeth, whereas higher ranking agents of a more predatorial nature like Jack have very sharp teeth.  Would it make sense for the more populous classes, soldiers, farmers, to be herbivorous, while the higher-ups are carnivorous?  Let your imagination guide you in your quest for answers.

Wait a minute.  This is the shittiest inventory system yet

The etiquette lesson on that page is, if you're going to eat a horse, for the love of Christ, use some utensils. [002577-80]

WV  Check under the cloth wrapping of your trusty knife, see what it might be hiding.  Or , you know wait a really long time to do that.  It's up to you.
(callback zone trusty knife problem sleuth yadda yadda)

The response by the top panel is mostly addressing this bad theory that people had at the time that WV might be an imp, even though he has totally different proportions and anatomical traits.  There are always a lot of weak theories circulating around, and occasionally the story will pick out a certain theory and remind people how terrible it is.  I think this is very courteous of the story, specifically debunking certain theories so that fans can stop obsessing over them, and get back to focusing on what's really important.  Shipping. [002586]

Why does WV hate kings??  He has a troubled and mysterious past, as tragic as it is heroic as it is mostly ridiculous.  Also, don't blink, or you'll miss another critical plot point, almost as subtle and mundane as it is relevant thousands of pages from now.  He eats the uranium, and then we forget about it forever.  Got it?  Good.

What's with the items on the floor you ask?  Oh, you didn't.  Well you should have.  Look at the upper right panel on the previous page.  See the four items?  Oil, chalk, amber, and uranium.  Each represents the first four known types of grist (where oil = shade).  They similarly represent the kids' four planets.  LOWAS (John, oil), LOLAR (Rose, Chalk), LOHAC (Dave, amber), LOFAF (Jade, uranium), which is where those grist types were found, and dictated the types of enemies indigenous to the planets.  CONTINUED->

CONTINUED:  I also had the idea that these 4 substances would serve as various contaminants on their planets, in ways relevant to their personal quests.  John's planet and all its pipes were clogged with oil, Rose's ocean planet poisoned in some way by excessive chalk, which the islands were made of.  Dave's planet was covered in gears, which would be gummed up by sticky amber sap.  And Jade's was going to be in some way affected by fallout (nuclear winter?).  But this was a very loose idea, and never quite came to fruition beyond John's planet.  Another case of the ever broadening plot steamrolling such details.

Chess people tend to play very boring games of sim city.

How do you prefer to ingest your lore?  Through friendly,. Grandmotherly exposition?  Or indirectly, through a symbolic mural of a simple fellow revisiting memories of his home world?  I'll be cool about it and say you don't even need to pick just one.  You can select as many different varieties of sliced lore loaf.  You can make a sandwich.  It will be delicious.

File this under “obvious to me but not to most people”  The drawing of LOHAC, the red planet, is drawn on the gear label from the motor oil bottle, which was stuck on the way presumably with some of it's adhesive residue.  Take a look at the previous page.  The label is ripped off in the last panel.  Also note : “impenetrable veil of darkness” is where the term “the Veil” came from, which is the belt of meteors beyond which dense lies.

I wonder which key opens the door to the bathroom?  Probably some infuriating combination, like ctrl + option + shift, then tap “p” twice.

There is also this whole line of humor that a lot of people didn't get which was centered around how sweet and sugary Tab was, and how a man is liable to go into sugar shock for drinking too much of it, and stuff like that.  The joke is that Tab is of course a sugar free beverage, so these statements make no sense.  I mean what kind of idiot doesn't know that????

I think of those early commands in green as some things that were entered as test cases while this station was being built.  I like to imagine a mild mannered carapacian in a lab coat just running through the drill, making sure the terminal checks out.  Then he gives it a thumbs up, and the thing just sits inside a meteor for a while, crashes into Earth, and waits centuries for this bozo to show up and fuck around with the keyboard.

We get some excruciatingly tantalizing sneak peeks at Rose and Dave's monitor after they enter the medium.  Let's barrel through the checklist of WTF: broken Zazzerpan statue in white sand(?), ripped up Cal, Crowsprite, broken sword, broken record on shirt...yep, that sure is some stuff we're waiting for the story to clarify.  Also of note: WV was probably wise not to switch to screen 4.  unless he likes it when stuff explodes.

BAMBOO SHOOTS PICKLES RADISHES SEA WEED ARTICHOKES shooo
HAT[002620]

In this flash, WV played a really goofy match of chess with himself to a whimsical score.  All of the chest moves were copied exactly from a famous game played by bobby Fischer.  I forget which one exactly, but it was super famous among dudes who bone tight up on their chess.

WV:  Now speculate on why you bothered to speculate on the physics of an exploding can...?

A new kind of fakeout in the already overstuffed bag of fakeouts for you to be leery of: things in the sky which one assumes to be looming meteors, which actually aren't.  In this case it is actually /spoil WV riding a /spoil huge tin can.

Another Jailbreak thing, the bars at the top trapping him in.  there's actually a bunch of jailbreak stuff in the WV segment.  The pumpkin and appearifier: directly imported from Jailbreak.  (Though in JB, it was SPECIFICALLY a “pumpkin appearifier.” It could appearify nothing else.  Really,why would you want to?)  There's so much imported from JB and PS, or sometimes from JB to PS to HS, that I'm not sure a “callback” is even the right concept.  More like parts of an expansive, perpetually accumulating mythology in utter nonsense.

WV:  While sitting down adorably like that, just keep hitting buttons to make the room spin and spin and spin.

WV: no no go back in there and keep spinning.

Re: GPS coordinates.  There are several instances where such coordinates come up, and they all correspond to real places.  These point to Jade's island in the middle of the pacific.  If you look up those coordinates on google maps, the satellite view shows a small, mysterious geometric shape in the ocean.  Which is why I picked that spot when cruising around the ocean.  Because of the mystery.

Mr. Vagabond, do you see that shape carved in the pumpkin?  It should be familiar to you.  We will wait patiently while you scour your tormented past for grim recollection.

At this point in the story you'd have no way to knowing Jade lives on an island.  But a savvy reader could not follow those coordinates on google maps, and infer her location, since we know that's where the pumpkin came from.  We just saw it on the previous page next to a sleeping Jade.  The particularly perceptive can also infer this by reading this note I just wrote, in which I explicitly said so.

The home coordinates of the station were covered up by WV's head to keep his actual location a “secret” from readers until it was revealed a few pages later in the end of act animation.  Those coordinates point to a place called rainbow falls in the Adirondacks in NY state, which is the waterfall over which Rose's house is situated.  His station is the exact same location, 413 years in the future.  Why, you ask?  I'm sure there'll be more trivia about the stations and server/client players they correspond with in the next book.  Or maaaaaybe even..later in this one.

This capsule is just so well equipped to prepare a carapacian for understanding humanity.  He has been given a thorough book on their etiquette, a unit of their measurement system, some samples of their most delicious food, and no less than 16 cans of the tastiest, sugariest beverage Earth has ever produced.  He was MORE than prepared to try to boss around a goofy kid through a command prompt in capital letters.

WV: Who cars that you don't know what a spook schema is, just do it and become a fruit rollup mummy or something.

Remember how the pumpkin disappeared in one of the first panels of this segment, and then we did the “what pumpkin” gag?  Well, this explains how it disappeared.  Wait, no it doesn't.  WV ate the pumpkin.  That explains it.  The fact that he ate the pumpkin explains why he can't appearify it into the future.  The lack of time travel actually somehow makes this sequence MORE difficult to understand.

If you are ever confused about how exactly all the kids were “born” well this is the introduction to the entire basis for it.  You care being shown the first step in the process of creating a “paradox clone” further trivia: serenity is saying “Let's go!!!” in Morse code.  She blinks such codes with her flashing bottom to communicate friendly messages sometimes.  They are rarely translated for the reader and exist as a “FUN!” extra credit puzzle for you t solve by googling “more code translator” into google and then typing a bunch of damn dots and dashes.

Serenity's message was translated here because this was a flash animation, and that was a quick shot.  Also notice how the white hot ends of the severed bars gradually cool off.  There are things to notice a lot of the time in this story.  Did you know that?

I had WV accidentally chuck the tab can onto the button that tracks the station's location, weighing it down persistently, so that during his journey the terminal would track his exact location via GPS coordinates.  That way we got to see the coordinates for John's house as he flew over it's post-apocalypse location.  Also he was having a bitch of a time cramming that pumpkin lid back on his overstuffed gourd bindle, so he just ate it.  Just thought I'd mention.

Wait...yet ANOTHER psycheout?? How many can I cram into one book?  I doubt that all the mantelpieces in the world could hold the amount of Pulitzers I deserve.  I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to need to borrow your mantel to hold some of them.  I'll drop by in a little while to clear it off with a baseball bat.

Oh, I unpsyched the psycheout on the next page.  Never mind, cancel the Pulitzers.  Well, cancel SOME of them.  I'm still gonna fuck up your mantel though, because a promise is a promise.  Anyway, this kicks off the End of Act 2 animation.  This flash is often cited as a critical point of demarcation, which upon crossing Homestuck ceases being merely an odd little story, and starts being a thing that ruins your life and that of everyone you ever meet.  It probably doesn't work the same way in a book thou, because rad music can't come out of paper:L so if you're a noob, just pretend these pages blow your mind.

[[S] WV: RISE UP]
And there's the GPS coordinates of John's house, in the “YEARS IN THE PAST” panel.  Go to google maps and look it up.  The neighborhood depicted in the panel to the right will look very familiar, lakes and all, if you zoom in sufficiently. John's house even has a specific address, though if you look at photos of the real house, it doesn't look much like his house at all.  Also, we find out WV's station was a huge can all along, and laugh.  Except that later, we find out that it was actually ANOTHER THING ALL ALONG, that is appropriate for different reasons, and re-laugh about it.  <spoil>cork<spoil>

PM's station is the apple shaped pod that grew and fell from this giant tree.  The tree grew from the meteor “seed” that destroyed John's house 413 years ago.  The design of the station is always related to the player's entry object.  The station's terminal is meant to “control” the client player of the kid whose house once existed where that station is.  So WV's station, which was in Rose's location, gives commands to John ,because John is rose's client player, and she commands his game similarly.  And the apple station commands Jade, because she'll be John's client player, etc.  Did you realize all this?

Now that I think about it, I wonder if the fact that the first station is almost literally and apple that fell from a tree is the reason all of the stations have apple keyboards?  SHIT, GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY TO PRETEND THAT WAS INTENTIONAL: TOTALLY BLOWN.

By crossing out “NOT MANY,” it means that this happened about 413 million years ago.  Which I think you'll agree is VERY many.  Long enough ago that a bunch of ocean used to not be there.  Oh, and dinosaurs?  They hadn't even been BORN yet.

Check out the pterodactyls in the last panel.  I swiped those rudely from the background of Dinosaur Comics, @qwantz.com.  This is what we call a “shoutout” to a “homie”.  Ryan North clipped his shit when he saw it.  He flipped his shit like it was a burger sizzling out of control.  No wait, he flipped his shit like he was a black belt in judo, and his shit was a lumbering, oafish ruffian.  I'm exaggerating, this didn't happen.

ROCK-Z 2 THE RES-Q !!!  She has many secrets.  Want to hear another secret?  Look at the locations of the buttons she pushed.  The code was 4-1-3.

And the trick handcuffs come back to haunt the fuck out of those imps.  Man are they screwed.  They are about the get cake and shaving cream ALL OVER themselves.  Dad owns the gambit.  He OWNS IT.  All he needed to do to perpetuate this beauty of a prank was simply abandon his son in a magical realm for an indefinite period of time.  Which of course was a good character building experience.  Dad of the yet?  Dad of the year.

There you have it.  Another book, another act, another pair of swooping red curtain punctuating an animated series of bombshell revelations which were too copious and too subtle to understand in a single viewing.  But books?  They don't move too fast for you to follow.  They don't hypnotize you into a barely cognitive stupid with a booming cinematic score.  No, books are your friends.  Books are patient with you.  They respect you, and don't try to pull any cheap stunts to impress you.  You gave me some money, and in return I gave you a new friend, and I think that's great.  See you next time.