Cookie Fonster Dissects Homestuck Part 98: The Part I Absolutely Love, as an Act 6 Apologist

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Introduction

< Part 97 | Part 98 | Part 99 >

Act 6 Act 5, Part 6 of 6 (Act 6 Act 5 Act 1 x2 COMBO!!!)

Pages 5778-5926 (MSPA: 7678-7826)

This image cracks me up every time I see it.

My Homestuck posts are in a rather slow spell right now, which may get in the way of my goal of finishing Act 6 Intermission 5 by the end of 2019. Maybe I’ll do a short stream of posts written extremely quickly in December like last year? Or maybe I’ll just speed up my posting schedule again now?

Also, I REALLY need to finish fixing up my posts that got messed up on the move to the new domain. I’ve been insanely slow on that side project lately.

Following the absurdly long Santa nose zoom-in flash, the narration goes back to Act 6 Act 5 Act 1 and proclaims never to speak of Act 6 Act 5 Act 2 again. However, Caliborn interferes and has a very interesting conversation with Hussie’s self-insert about the narrative flaws of trickster mode.

Please don’t type in the narrative prompt.
YOU CAN’T FUCKING DO THAT.
Do what.
GO BACKWARDS.
This isn’t backwards stupid. It’s forwards.
After all the trickster shit happened.
NO. I MEAN.
BACKWARDS BY AN “ACT”.
OR I GUESS. AN “ACT ACT ACT”?
ARGH. I HATE THE THINGS I’M FORCED TO SAY. AND ACKNOWLEDGE AS REAL. BECAUSE OF YOU.

Caliborn’s disgust at act act acts is somewhat prophetic because Act 6 Act 6 is divided into act act acts and act act intermissions galore which fans must acknowledge if they wish to meaningfully discuss late Act 6’s subdivisions. It’s part of why many fans don’t even bother and just refer to whatever portion they’re talking about as “Act 6” which sucks and is bad. As this post’s title would imply, I don’t think most of Act 6 is as bad as people say, but I am rather irked by its lengthy subdivision names near the end.

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A few words about this Homestuck^2 thing

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I have absolutely no idea what to say about this new Homestuck continuation thing that just dropped today in celebration of [S] Cascade’s eighth anniversary, other than the following: whatever it turns out to be, unless it somehow turns out to be ABYSMALLY bad, I will include Homestuck^2 in my Homestuck blog post series right after the epilogues, which will themselves be right after the Snapchat credits which came out exactly three years ago today.

I’ve kind of put this blog on the backburner lately, partly due to schoolwork. Hopefully I’ll finish reformatting my old posts probably in November or so? And make new Homestuck posts too probably.

Cookie Fonster Dissects Homestuck Part 97: The Part Everyone Hates

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Introduction

< Part 96 | Part 97 | Part 98 >

Act 6 Act 5, Part 5 of 6 (Act 6 Act 5 Act 2)

Pages 5713-5777 (MSPA: 7613-7677)

I’m sorry, everyone. I am so fucking sorry.

As of this post’s initial publication, this blog is still under construction, which means a lot of my prior posts are still formatted wrong and need to be fixed. Reformatting old blog posts is such a tall order that I often find myself getting distracted by making new blog posts. I suppose making new posts is a good way to get a feel for my new platform though.

Anyway, here’s my fabled (not even remotely fabled) trickster arc post! Part of me was always in this weird sort of denial that I’d ever get to this point, but there’s no turning back now. Are you ready?

Wait, I mean…

ARE YOU READY???????????
Sucker

You better be ready. Trickster mode, here we come!!!

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How K-ON! Personally Connected to Me (and is also the absolute best thing to ever exist)

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Best girl, I love her so much.

The time has finally come for me to write a full-out blog post about what is arguably the best work of media I have ever consumed: a glorious anime called K-ON! I absolutely love literally everything about that show—the music, the nostalgic atmosphere, the sense of humor, the EXTREMELY PRECIOUS AND CUTE girls, but most of all, the connections and nostalgia it gave me for middle school and early high school.

People aggressively recommended K-ON! to me after I watched Love Live! School idol project due to extreme summer boredom, claiming it to be—and I may be paraphrasing here—”love live but actually good”. When I finally watched the first episode of K-ON! on my 20th birthday (which also by EXTREME luck was the 10th anniversary of the show’s premiere, like holy shit how can I be so lucky), I immediately saw what they meant. The season 1 OP blew me away when I first heard it and made me know I was in for a wild ride. A wild ride of humor, endearing girls, and being far more enjoyable than that other anime which I won’t talk much about from here on out, because while I’d be glad to do a full comparison between those two shows, I’d like this post to be just about K-ON! by itself. I’ll just say Nico Yazawa is kind of an amazing character and leave it at that.

Season 1 (13 episodes) was pretty fun, but the show started to go way above and beyond for me in season 2 (26 episodes) as I took more time to think about its implications and realized that watching K-ON! is a lot like re-experiencing middle school, a time I am extremely nostalgic for. Middle school was three years for me, the last of which felt the longest by far; season 2 of K-ON! is similarly two thirds of the show and takes place entirely during the girls’ third year, with a lengthy and extremely emotional lead-up to the graduation. I also started to heavily identify with the lead girl, an impossibly adorable dorky bundle of joy named Yui Hirasawa, and some other characters started to sort of remind me of specific friends from middle school which is pretty crazy.

I kind of get dazzly whenever I think about this absolutely wonderful anime and I don’t think I’ve been doing a very good job putting all my thoughts into words. Maybe I’ll be able to write out these thoughts better if I go on a character-by-character basis. I’ll start with the five band members ranked from favorite to least favorite, then do the other major characters. Do note that I love every character in the show, just that there’s some that did something special for me more than others. To add some visual spice, my sections on each character will be accompanied by my own personal Artist’s Interpretation of them.

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Small blog update (Homestuck posts and otherwise)

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Reformatting old blog posts is harder than it sounds. So much stuff got totally messed up and it’s led to quite a bit of busywork and a bunch of clumsy going through everything and fixing dead links, image size, post date/time listed, pesterlog text formatting, fancy fonts… a whole bunch of bullshit that I’ve started to sort of fall off the wagon of. And it’s caused my third case this year of, let’s call it “blog burnout”. A burnout that causes me to just sort of keep forgetting my Homestuck post series exists. I estimate this burnout will end in November or December and I’ll resume my Homestuck posts with my fabled (by me) trickster arc post.

I’ve also been working on a non-Homestuck blog post I need to finish: a post reviewing K-ON! which is arguably the best work of media I’ve ever consumed, like seriously it’s so fucking good you need to watch it to believe it. I’ve been hyping up that post on Twitter a lot and I really need to get around to finishing it instead of being affected by blog burnout.

(yui is best girl)

Pesterquest Vol. 4 (The Loneliest Girl in the World): Review and Analysis

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hell. fucking. YES!!!!!!

If you’ve been following Homestuck/Hiveswap news in the past month, you’re probably aware of Pesterquest, a visual novel series following up the Hiveswap Friendsim with the MSPA Reader meeting the cast of Homestuck itself. I didn’t write any blog posts about the first few installments (John, Rose, and Dave) because there wasn’t much to say about them: they were decently written but unremarkable aside from a few moments. The most recent installment, however, focuses on Jade Harley and totally blew away my expectations!!! I was excited for Jade’s route the moment I heard someone say it was written by a major fan of her character, especially considering that Jade’s screen time in the epilogues was extremely disappointing, and it was well worth getting hyped for. I’ll go through the route in order of the bad endings, followed by the good ending, in roughly the same style as my numbered Homestuck blog posts. The dialogue has been transcribed by yours truly.

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Web domain migration update

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(text copied directly from Blogger)

I won’t be posting to this blog for much longer, because last week I purchased the web domain cookiefonster.com! I’d wanted to do so for years and I’m glad I finally did it. The domain is hosted via WordPress, which is much more customizable and viable as a real website than Blogger.

I’ve imported all posts from this blog to my new domain, which I haven’t launched yet. I had planned to launch the domain on October 1, but the date may be delayed as late as October 4. The reason for the delay is because when I imported the posts to WordPress, a lot of the formatting came out wrong and there’s a HUGE amount that needs to be manually fixed. As I’ve been going through the posts in chronological order to fix them up, I’ve also taken the opportunity to make some revisions to my old Homestuck posts—specifically from post 36 onwards, because everything before that is unsalvageable without being completely rewritten.

I will launch my new domain when I’m done fixing up my old posts! I’ve had a lot of fun going back through my old blog posts and I’m very excited for the launch.

Cookie Fonster Re-Critiques Homestuck Part 12.1: Scrawlings in Puddles of Sloppy Discharge

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Introduction

< Part 11 | Part 12.1 | Part 12.2 >

Pages 1052-1099 (MSPA: 2952-2999)

Act 3, Part 4 of 5

Link to old version

This post (which I wrote on and off over the past few weeks) was originally going to cover the last ~100 pages of Act 3, but yesterday I decided to split the post in half because it was getting long. I also renamed my rewritten post series from “Cookie Fonster Critiques Homestuck Rewritten” to “Cookie Fonster Re-Critiques Homestuck”; the last ~50 pages of Act 3 will be covered in Cookie Fonster Re-Critiques Homestuck Part 12.2.

Picking up from where we left off, John Egbert is commanded to alchemize in a 1980’s time-lapse montage. The narration declines the “1980’s time-lapse montage” part of the command because Hussie didn’t feel it was worth making John’s per-character alchemy binge into a flash, which I think was a good decision. All four beta kids get their own alchemy binge during the first five acts, and each one brings about a delightful mix of extremely plot-relevant items and inconsequential nonsense and everything in between.

First off, John tries alchemizing “pogo || hammer” instead of “pogo && hammer” and makes a hammer-shaped pogo ride. This is a clever integration of computer science technicalities to make alchemy work in Homestuck without inevitably running into captcha cards with too many or too few holes. Here’s the book commentary on this page:

You people don’t even know what the && and || operators mean, do you? Why don’t you learn computers you dorks! Although to be fair, technically the single & and | bitwise operators are what perform the described functions. So now who’s the dork. Me. I went with the logical operators (&&,||) instead because they are more recognizable and frequently used from a pure coding perspective. So it’s this weird case where I dumbed it down for the sake of people who ACTUALLY KNOW HOW TO PROGRAM. Good grief.

I like this commentary because it shows how much care Hussie put into balancing technical accuracy and general accessibility when writing Homestuck’s early acts. The mix of accuracy and accessibility sets Homestuck apart from Problem Sleuth, a story based fully upon technical accuracy (to its own set of rules, that is).

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Happy fourth birthday to my Homestuck post series

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Four years ago today, on September 18, 2015, I launched an ambitious project that slow grew to an absolutely unprecedented scale. This project is my Homestuck blog post series, which is still going on to this day (mostly because it was on hiatus for almost two years straight).

Today, I take a moment during a short schoolwork-related hiatus to commemorate the fourth anniversary of this monstrosity of a project! It feels more like the second anniversary though, because of the aforementioned hiatus. Writing all these blog posts taught me an insane amount about writing, gaining appreciation of literature, and understanding the complex indescribable nature of Homestuck. I owe a lot to this comic—it’s what taught me to READ instead of read, just as the epilogues are what taught me to WRITE instead of write.

Next post, covering the trickster arc, is coming in October after I move this site to a new web domain. It’ll be this post series’ effective fourth anniversary special, why not.

Homestuck posts are on mini-hiatus

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I’ll make it brief this time.

Schoolwork has been piling up lately will likely continue to do so as my fall semester progresses. Because of this, I’ve decided to pause my Homestuck blog post series for probably about a month or two (starting from 9/10, the day I released the last post). Amusingly enough, I put these posts on hiatus right before the trickster arc, which should be a fun and/or terrifying place to get back to. October 1 is still the day I plan to move this blog to a custom web domain and my posts definitely won’t resume until after that date.

As usual, these plans are subject to change.