
Homestuck in review - networked
https://medium.com/@bbctol/homestuck-in-review-the-internets-first-masterpiece-989a84548767#.pbp2spgx4
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cousin_it
As a longtime Homestuck fan, I approve of this review.

> _So, do I recommend Homestuck? Should you drop everything and start reading
> it?_

> _You can’t. Homestuck is over, and I mean over, not just that it isn’t
> updating. “Homestuck,” the masterpiece, was the event, the community, the
> shifting pace of updates, the constant chatter between fandom and author.
> Homestuck is done. If you missed it, you missed it. It may still be worth
> reading the comic, but it won’t be Homestuck._

Yeah. You'll never watch Cascade on release day along with a million other
people. I did, and it was insane.

(Though that problem is not unique to Homestuck. If you want to become a
Beatles fan today, you're just as out of luck.)

IMO the best Homestuck-inspired works are Undertale (game), The Northern Caves
(prose, finished) and Prequel (webcomic, ongoing). Check them out, you won't
regret it.

~~~
Mithaldu
As a person who liked Homestuck and read it entirely on his own time and
wasn't aware of any of the community stuff:

Saying things like this is narrow-minded as hell and i don't understand why
you would even say something like that. All it seems to do is prop yourself up
to be higher than someone who comes in later.

Will a person who didn't read it in realtime get a different experience? Sure.
Does it mean it's pointless to do so? No. Why would it? In some aspects it may
even be a better experience.

Trying to claim "you can't become a beatles fan anymore" is just nonsensical.
It sounds like something an _ebooks twitter account would generate and less
like a coherent human thought.

It feels like you wear the "be a fan" thing as a badge of honor, instead of
just meaning "i like something".

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jdonaldson
Some folks best enjoy things in a group, and it sounds like this short
story... thing... was completely designed to cater to those folks.

The post does come off as narrow minded, but I got the point after reading
into it a bit more.

~~~
Mithaldu
That's the thing really, it's not a short story at all. It's a web comic with
over 10000 pages, a good amount of which are even flash and youtube animations
and even flash games. It's totally worth delving in. :)

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soneca
Well, I never heard of Homestuck before. I think the author tries a lot (maybe
too hard) to create an aurea around it while defining what it is for so many
words.

Well I guess it is simply _" Something that reads like a heavily illustrated
novel."_. Not much more. It is delivered in small pieces and have a community
interaction with the story.

Well that's not that exciting or even new. I don't know of other countries,
but some of brazilian literature classics from the XIX century were originally
published in small pieces at daily newspapers. With intense debate around the
paths of the story.

"Manipulating" communities is nothing new either. Art is not that vanguard
when it is doing something that companies have even a career path for people
who "manage communities".

It is so obviously a fan review. But that's ok, it was an interesting reading.

Where I think it gets right after reading the review and a few searches. It is
a piece of art that embody what the internet _is_ , not what was predicted to
be. No small feat, as there were a lot of hype about what art in the internet
would be and no one seemed to get right until now.

Apart from Homestuck, I found incredible the insight that in the past we had
to plant, cultivate and harvest knowledge, usually conforming to not get any.
Nowadays we are in abundant forest of knowledge where we can just pick up
anything from the trees anywhere.

Not sure of the consequences of this shift, but an awesome insight about the
internet era that I never saw before. Really worth reading it all if just for
it.

~~~
jtedward
> Well that's not that exciting or even new. I don't know of other countries,
> but some of brazilian literature classics from the XIX century were
> originally published in small pieces at daily newspapers. With intense
> debate around the paths of the story.

Two questions:

1\. What specifically are you referring to?

2\. Why did you feel the neeed to express it in Roman numeral?

~~~
pasquinelli
It was typical for novels I'm the 19th century to be published first in
papers, serialized into many installments over a period of time, giving
readers an opportunity to talk about it, like episodes of a TV show, and
perhaps steer the direction of the story.

~~~
soneca
Yes. As everything big in culture at the time, it started in France:
[http://www.gutenberg.us/articles/roman-
feuilleton](http://www.gutenberg.us/articles/roman-feuilleton)

But it happened in the USA also, as serial novels:
[http://www.gutenberg.us/articles/Serial_novel](http://www.gutenberg.us/articles/Serial_novel)

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bbctol
Oh hey, I wrote this. I mean to update the last section at some point, as it
gets a lot less coherent; I wanted to publish it right at the 6 month mark or
I'd put it off forever.

~~~
soneca
Congrats on the text. As I put on my other comment above, I loved the insight
about the internet era being a forest where you pick up knowledge anywhere,
contrasting with the past where cultivating knowledge was hard and
insufficient.

Another interest take is that this be an original piece of genuine internet
art. I didn't bought all the aurea you put at it, but I do believe that it is
something special and might lead the way to what is art in this century

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vanderZwan
Congratulations, internet, you have reached Stage 4 of Michael Parson's model
of aesthetic appreciation! :D

> _“[An awareness of the social context of a painting reflects] the
> realisation that the interpretation of a painting is a social creation and
> can exist only in a community of viewers, just as words can have meaning
> only in a linguistic community. [...] The meaning of a work, therefore, is
> no longer equivalent to what an individual experiences, but to what can be
> said about it in a discursive way by a number of people. [...] It is a
> public meaning, part of a complex historical web of meanings that
> constitutes an art tradition.”_

Source: Talk about a Painting: A Cognitive Developmental Analysis, Michael J.
Parsons, 1987
[https://www.jstor.org/stable/3332812](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3332812)

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Figs
Is anyone backing up Homestuck? Once webcomics end they tend to vanish from
the internet after a few years...

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Mathnerd314
tl;dr: Homestuck is

1) 800,000 words plus pictures & videos

2) an internet-induced psychosis spanning 2007-2015

~~~
Mithaldu
What do you mean 2015? He's still releasing new stuff and forums are still
exploding over it. :D

Most recently he posted a part of the epilogue on snapchat and archived it
here:
[http://mspfanventures.com/?s=17075&p=1](http://mspfanventures.com/?s=17075&p=1)

~~~
SirBenet
That was the "credits" rather than the epilogue, but you can see it in full on
the official site if you haven't already:

[http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=010029](http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=010029)

"2007-2015" is weird because it started in 2009 and it's looking like the
epilogue will come in 2017. We had [S] Collide and [S] Act 7 in 2016 so the
webcomic itself definitely didn't end in 2015. It may be that they're
referring to the famdom, as Jailbreak started in 2007 and the famdom died down
significantly from all the pausing before the webcomic itself finished.

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k__
Never got it.

I tried to get into it but it completely eluded me.

Also I like with Doctor Who, I didn't like the fan-base. But I found DW on my
own and later the fan-base so it was a bit different. But it took away a bit
of the fun to see what kind of people they were :/

