Pastelland Forum

Never a Covert Front Spinoff :C Exept Where is 2014 but that one doesn't count.

Happened to pick up some sort of flu on an Adirondack camping trip with my girlfriend and our moms. If I had spent it with anyone else I would have considered it a total waste of a weekend, but since it was with her it was only a 90% waste

Now I'm back home trying to get comfortable in bed while realizing that. I only have a week until I go to college, and then she goes to her college which isn't in the United States. So not much time left to say goodbye :/

Also, I don't have much energy to record my next video, which is Comrade's Pick #3. I have it all planned out; I'll just to make it once I move in to college (assuming I'm feeling better by then).

This happened last year too; right before I moved into college I fell ill. History repeats itself, I guess.

Though I think y'all will like the next video; it's about one of my favorite recent games.

Maybe if I feel up to it today I'll get cracking on categorizing Subwiki pages...

get better, bro.

hope you get better Jatsko

Get well soon.

I apologize for taking a whole page to rant about something so utterly trivial, in a time when I hardly do anything on these forums but the occasional vent. It does feel inappropriate.

(Also, big-time Homestuck spoilers.)

What a weird fucking week.

Homestuck was, in many ways, the best thing I’ve ever read. There are more clever stories, certainly deeper ones, but between the gorgeously complex timeline, masterful escalation from kids playing games into multi-versal epic, and an ability to strike the cords of “oh my god this is actually happening”-awesome with impeccable precision, it devoured me whole. A simple sort of entertainment, but a ruthlessly effective one nonetheless.

As the story concluded, everything resolved, I could have walked away happy. Like any story that’s filled me up this entirely, I’d suffer from severe withdrawal. But, with all the pages there to easily access, I could just dose myself with the more awesome moments, thinking about various aspects and discovering details I’d missed, as I slowly moved back into the real world and it’s many stories. I would have walked away with a pleasant memory of an awesome ride, untarnished.

Oh, I could have.

Why did I have to accidentally click past the [S]Cascade animation? Why, when I was distraught the scratch had just happened without explanation, and went back to double-check if I missed anything, was I convinced the Act 5 Act 1 intro was really all there was to it? Why did I never follow through on the idea of asking here if we’d ever see the main characters again, surely you would have steered me in the direction of the animation I’d missed? Why, when AH joked about not killing characters fast enough, didn’t I take AR’s crossed head to be a sure sign I had skipped something?

So many coincidences, so my stupid mistakes, and here I am. I was only convinced to double-check the end of Act 5 after Jade, Dave and Rose had been revealed as god tiers, Jade had showcased her catalogued planets, the origin of the Green Sun explained, and I’d pretty much guessed who the new, white “anti-jack” was.

Jade was put on her quest bed, and my only thought was “This is great, but how epic wouldn’t it had been if I hadn’t known for sure it would happen?”. The newly-crowned sprite-first-guardian-god-tier-space-witch collecting planets with a stern face and evacuating… It would have been epic without precedent, and my only thought was “What if this had actually been a surprise to me?” It was only on my second or third rewatch I even realized how huge of a twist the tumor explosion must have been.

To begin with, this was all drowned out by the story that remained. After all, with almost a third of the pages left, I didn’t have much time to be be sorry. I finished the story, and it was epic. For a while. I’m not sure exactly how it happened, maybe I rewatched the [S]Cascade animation at a bad time, but by monday I was hardly holding up under the frustration of just how much better everything would have been if I’d been allowed to watch homestuck in order. The humongous Act 5 neatly tied up, me reading Act 6 Act 1 while freshly fueled on awesome and sure that all the characters I knew would soon be back. Between wallowing over any of the small details that would have allowed this to happen, and frustration over being frustrated, it all eventually spiralled out into a taint of frustration and sadness, covering my otherwise-great memories of Homestuck, mixing it all into a melancholic soup. And more regret over tainting my memories with bad associations.

I haven’t actually lost anything, there’s no damage to adapt to and learn to live with. It’s just… what might have been. The stimuli of watching [S]Cascade for the first time, at the the edge of my seat with excitement, forever made impossible by information I possess. My entire recollection of homestuck, tarnished. What would have been a slow, amicable separation from the best thing I've read, is now a slow process of forcing myself to forget about it all as fast as possible, so I can at least cease all this regretting. Story withdrawal and regret mixes together into a very persistent sort of sadness, it turns out.

I’m somewhat fascinated by how badly I’ve gutted myself over a bloody webcomic. I mean, seriously. How much did I just write about this? This is ridiculous. Here I am, ranting for pages over what must seem so utterly childish to anyone else.

Still, why did it have to be Homestuck?

Why not homestuck?
I mean if a piece of work makes you have such deep feelings then it's propably worth the time spend.
Also,I'm actually thinking about giving it a second chance.

Oh, do. It's beautiful.

(For the record- if you haven't read it, I assume you didn't read my spoilers. Basically, I've been gutting myself over a spoiler incident, not the story itself.)

It has, I will admit, been interesting. I mean, agonizing myself for weeks over a spoiler? I've realized it's gradually become entirely self-referential. I'm not upset over the story, I'm upset over my ability to recall the story as a fond memory. I no longer think "If only X, I'd been allowed to read the story properly", I think "If only X, I wouldn't be agonizing myself right now". Sad about being sad, how ridiculous isn't that?

Another factor, I think, is the sense of inevitability. With the usual forms of loss, such as destruction or death, we're used to telling ourselves there's nothing we can do. Every other fantasy story takes a moment to explain why death is natural and necessary. With memory... well, every other fantasy story casually includes a means of manipulating just that. It's one of those things that are impossible, but it's not ingrained into society that it has to be impossible. With a problem that relates to memory, you don't have any pre-defined "memory is a constant" thoughts to fall back on, unlike how almost everyone has "death is a constant" patterns they can use when needed.

So, well, at least I'm able to gain useful insights about my thinking.

I'll admit about homestruck, it is definitely one of the best story ever conceived online.

The main criticism about it is that the story of the heroes both old and new against the Condesce just kept dragging on and on and on and on. I kept reading because of the characters, but even them got hit boring as well when the story starting to run on the fumes with nothing new left to tell. But then, it managed to end the story and ties up everything nicely and almost perfectly. All characters got their tales to tell and earned their way to end the grand story.

But I'll say this : homestruck surprised many of us by being uniquely captivating while outlasting its own expiration date.

Rant: Feel so demotivated for exams. -__-