If you are sitting there, an active fannish participant in 2017, then I know that feeling. Homestuck is huge and ubiquitous and sometimes its fandom is irritating. It’s deeply memetic and weird in a way that has a high barrier of entry, and you just are not interested in People Telling You About Homestuck.
I’m not gonna do that. I’m just gonna tell you, as someone who was in your shoes: you should read Homestuck.
A year ago today, the main story of Homestuck finally ended with the release of the Act 7 animation. Knowing literally nothing about it, but unable to avoid the explosion of reactions on my dash, I watched it.
I had no idea what the fuck was going on. But the music was stunning. So on a whim and with the knowledge I might fail out, I started Homestuck from the beginning.
The next two months, I got to experience why people cannot shut the fuck up about this goddamn ‘webcomic.’
There is literally nothing like it. Even people who look at the structure of Homestuck and draw out the major influences are missing that there is no other story like it. When I try to shorthand it, I call it “the homeric creation myth for the internet age.” And that still barely scratches the surface.
Homestuck is a funny story. The writing is some of the snappiest, most fast-paced wit I’ve ever seen. It’s loaded with visual jokes and running gags and the kind of back and forth repartee that the greatest comedy writers can only dream of, and everything in between.
Homestuck is a well-crafted story. It is long, and it is complicated, but it is never inscrutable, and all the jokes about how hard it is to understand Homestuck are simply untrue. It’s a story that takes you by the hand and teaches you a language of symbology and mechanics, and then uses that language to show you something so remarkable I can’t explain it to you because you have to know that language. And it’s all done perfectly organically and with careful pacing. By the time you read [S] Cascade, you feel like you were tricked into earning a PhD in this shit, and were rewarded for your time and attention.
Homestuck is a beautiful story. It’s visual style is at first glance simplistic, but is harnessed into pure art. It is filled to the brim with slick animations and with a soundtrack that goes hard as fucking hell and never stops.
Homestuck is a heartfelt story. It’s a story that has stakes that span entire universes and the fate of whole civilizations, but it never once forgets that it’s a story also about characters. And these characters are genuinely the most nuanced and carefully constructed and executed you have ever seen. There will be someone who hits you right in the heart. There will be someone who makes you grit your teeth in pure actual anger. There will be more than one who will make you proud by the end of their journey. And you will learn things about yourself through the cipher of these characters.
Homestuck is worth your time. I do not regret waiting so long to read it, because I genuinely feel like the archive read is a stronger story than the live update read. Now is absolutely the best time to read Homestuck, at your own pace, knowing there is a completed story ahead of you. You’ll learn something from the experience, either about the other media you consume, or about yourself, or about your own craft.
You’ll finally know understand what the fuck people are talking about, and get to feel that level of enthusiasm for yourself. And, my dudes, it is a very cool feeling.
fwiw, I officially started reading Homestuck in early 2016 and I deeply agree with everything said above. The archival read is amazing. My once-best friend then-fiancee now-wife spent LITERAL YEARS trying to get me to read it and I finally gave in 4 months before it ended after resisting based on a nebulously bad impression of it because of the obnoxious 2012 fandom and ubiquity of it, and I guess it is a mark as to how good I found it that I am sitting here more than a year later still talking about it pretty much fucking daily.
Homestuck is Good y’all, please read it
Me in 2006: I’m still bitter about that
Me in 2016: I’m still salty about that
Me in 2026, probably: I’m still umami about that
The only thing that’d be more potentially embarrassing than my internet history would be my calculator history, a chronicle of all the painfully simple math I couldn’t manage to do in my head.
A transgender World War II veteran proves it’s never too late to live life truthfully.
Patricia Davies, from Leicestershire, England, didn’t decide to transition into a female until she turned 90 years old.
Davies — born Peter — has known she was a woman since she was just a toddler.
“I’ve known I was transgender since I was 3 years old. I knew a girl called Patricia, and I decided I wanted to be known by that name but it didn’t stick,” Davies told Caters News Agency.
Davies kept her identity a secret for most of her life for fear she would be shunned by her peers or forced to undergo electric shock treatment.
“The atmosphere [around being transgender] was not safe. People did not understand what transgender was,” Davies said.
Davies — who served in the army between April 1945 and 1948 — said coming out as transgender would have categorized her as a homosexual, which wouldn’t have been accepted in the army.
Despite losing friends and cheating death while serving in the armed forces, she says she’s glad she got to have the experience.
“I feel quite proud having served during the war and having done military service, in particular during the trouble in Palestine,” said Davies.
Davies, who married when she was 21, eventually came out to her supportive wife in 1987. Her wife, to whom she was married for 63 years, bought Davies jewelry and dresses that she could wear in private. Sadly, her wife passed away six years ago.
“I was 60 when it all came pouring out to my wife, she was very sympathetic and helped me all the way, but we agreed to keep it quiet,” said Davies, who first learned about transgender identity from a TV show sometime in the 1970s.
When Davies first came out to her wife, she decided to wear high heels but was deterred when teenagers saw her and threw eggs at her window.
Now a nonagenarian, Davies has begun taking estrogen to move her transition forward and has come out to her community.
“It feels like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I was living a lie,” she told Caters.
“I have been keeping quiet. I have slowly started to tell some of my neighbors. Everybody said, ‘Don’t worry, as long as you’re happy,‘” she added.
Patricia was inspired to make the big change from male to female after seeing the romantic comedy film “Boy Meets Girl,” which features transgender characters.
Now that transgender people are portrayed often in film and on TV, Davies feels more comfortable being herself.
“It’s not 100 percent safe now but it’s much better than it was. People that I have told seem to be very accommodating and haven’t thrown abuse at me,” she said.
“I joined the Women’s Institute. I socialize with them and have a natter [long chat]. I’m having a great time. I have a new lease on life,” she added.
I decided to train the neural network to randomly generate Pokemon names and abilities based on this list as a training set – and found that it was good at generating Pokemon. Annoyingly good at it – by the time it had gone through the training set 50 times, it was already fluently plagiarizing Pokemon word for word. I had to go back to my very first snapshot of the neural network (16 times through the training set), at which point it hadn’t yet learned the entire set of names and abilities, and was still coming up with hilarious new ones.
callanswall 