Cookie Fonster’s Vacation Stuff Part 2: Birds Are Very Stupid

(part 1)

I am in Italy now. I went there yesterday for the first time in my life and I will be there until around the 19th. Since writing my last post four days ago, I spent some time thinking about the next thing I want to write about, when earlier today I did something and thought, this would be a good thing to write about.

My family walked around somewhere for a bit, and at one point we sat on a bench and ate sandwiches we brought. There were some birds there, and we all started tearing off bits of bread and feed them to birds, something I had done before in an earlier vacation. When the first crumb was thrown, a whole bunch more birds came out of nowhere to fight for the food; eventually there was quite a flock of them.

It worked pretty much like this. One of us would throw a bit of bread at the group of birds, and whichever one catches it first eats the whole thing. But when I tried it out with a bigger piece, about half an inch in size, something funny happened. One of the birds grabbed the piece and selfishly flew away with it, as if it’s prized delicious food not to share with anyone else. I did that several times, and each time that same thing happened.

I seriously expected birds to be a bit smarter than this, maybe for each to gather around the piece of bread and start nibbling on it because the pieces of bread were really quite big for the birds, the same way multiple cats eat from the same bowl of cat food. The pieces looked too big for a single bird to store in its beak, but the birds would always fly away with the big piece stored that way regardless.

I think the moral of the story is as follows: never underestimate how dumb animals can be.

Part 3

Cookie Fonster‘s Vacation Stuff Part 1: Airplanes Destroyed My Sleeping Schedule

Now I know I said earlier that I would not make blog posts during vacation. Well, it turns out that I actually will make posts; just not any Homestuck posts. It is only the second day of vacation and I already have a pretty interesting story to tell, so I figured it would make a good post topic. I got access to a laptop to write vacation posts, so I guess that’s what I will do whenever I have something interesting to tell.

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Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Commentary Part 55: Scrapbook Examination Station (SBES) Volume I

Introduction

Part 54 | Part 55 | Part 56 >

Act 5 Act 2, Part 28 of 32

Doc Scratch Intermission, Part 3 of 6

Pages 3874-3935 (MSPA: 5774-5835) (not in order)

NOTE: Remember, no new posts until after the 23rd because of vacation.

Here’s how this whole 250-ish-page scrapbook section is going to work. I said a while back that I will always avoid doing the selection screens in the normal order. The scrapbook pages, which are in fact the first selection screens, are an exception, not because I will do them in the normal order, but because there is no normal order; from what I can tell, readers do them in various orders. To spice it up regardless, for each of those selection screens, I will go by a different rule for which order to read the scenes.

There are six such selection screens total, each directly following the previous. This post and the next two will each go through two of those selection screens. I was originally going to do something different so that I’d be sure it’s all split evenly since some selection screens take up more pages total than others, but I figured it’s easiest to just split it like that.

For the first selection of scrapbook scenes, shown above, I will do them in order of smallest to biggest picture. This means I’ll start with the one on the bottom left, the Dersite battleship.

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Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Commentary Part 54: Vriska the Bus Driver

Introduction (now updated!)

Part 53 | Part 54 | Part 55 >

Act 5 Act 2, Part 27 of 32

Doc Scratch Intermission, Part 2 of 6

Pages 3833-3873 (MSPA: 5733-5773)

Just warning you, this post is EXTREMELY long.

NOTE: Sorry about the late post. To make up, this is another really long one. I’ve decided to do only one more post, which will also probably be pretty long. This one took a while partly because I spent the past several days preparing for the SAT and applying for summer jobs, and all that should be mostly out of the way now.

NOTE 2: You probably have no idea what the title of this post is supposed to mean. It’s explained later on.

Where were we? Never mind, I figured it out instantly because the previous post helpfully listed where I was. Accompanied by a shot of various mind visions, we get a paragraph detailing the description of an ideal seer. I’ll analyze it thoroughly, specifically some parts that stick out, because of how much unlike Rose it sounds.

A Seer would support her allies in battle not with her weapons, but her vision. 

Rose fought with weapons very much, and while Terezi assisted largely in vision, she too is noted for skill in weapons. However, this is a pretty spot-on description of the Sufferer—also a seer by way of Kankri’s title—who had visions of a peaceful life on the other side of the Scratch.

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Something I Feel Cluey About

A recent blog post from Wait But Why, a popular blog about pretty much any subject, talked about a weird kind of sadness Tim Urban, the writer of the blog, calls “clueyness”. It’s basically the feeling of guilt you get after declining a friendly offer or request even though the person who gave the offer probably forgot about it entirely. The word was coined from a story his father told him. Tim’s grandfather bought a game of Clue for his children to play. They came over to him and listened to the directions for the game, but when some friends came, the kids immediately left and he put the game away. One can only imagine how his grandfather must have felt back then, waiting for the kids to come back and play with him and then giving up.

Today I came across something that was in my clothing drawer for some reason:

and it’s something I feel pretty cluey about.

I got it for Christmas about five years ago. I dreamt of having music writing software back then, and asked for it for Christmas. I got the disc shown above from my aunt but I never ended up using it for some reason. I think I couldn’t figure out how to install it or something? I did get into music writing software about two years later but I still feel guilty about never using what I got back then.

There’s a lot of other Christmas presents I feel just as cluey about never using, but this one kind of sticks out.

Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Commentary Part 53: Scratch Doctor Narration Adventures

Introduction

Part 52 | Part 53 | Part 54 >

Act 5 Act 2, Part 26 of 32

Doc Scratch Intermission, Part 1 of 6

Pages 3763-3832 (MSPA: 5663-5732)

NOTE: For once I managed to release a post ahead of schedule! God damn am I proud. I will leave for vacation June 9, so you should expect about three more posts before then.

Where we left off, Homestuck Disc 2 was taken to Doc Scratch for repair. Now, Doc Scratch takes over the narration for the second time, and helpfully changes the color scheme of the website so that his white text is easier to read. I think the color scheme change does a really nice job at changing the atmosphere of the site to a very different mood for Scratch’s section of the act.

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Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Commentary Part 52: Metafictional Disc Glitch Madness

Introduction

Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53 >

Act 5 Act 2, Part 25 of 32

Pages 3717-3762 (MSPA: 5617-5662)

NOTE: This post took longer than I hoped because it goes through a lot of flash pages and those always take longer to cover than usual. For some reason it didn’t occur to me until yesterday that I could take screenshots from flashes far more easily by taking them from these fan-made storyboards. See the image above for how I feel about that.

Terezi is starting to surpass Karkat as my favorite troll.

Proceeding from where we left off, we have what appears to be yet another walkaround game, except it doesn’t work because the disc is missing. A weird big “Objection!” referencing Ace Attorney appears out of nowhere, our first hint that something isn’t right with the disc missing.

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Modification to my Homestuck posting schedule

(Note: I’m dropping the “Cookie Fonster Says Stuff About His Homestuck Commentary” thing.)

As you may have noticed, I did not end up releasing a Homestuck post this morning. Turns out that my twice-a-week schedule was indeed too much for me.

Instead, my summer post schedule will be new posts every 3 to 5 days. This will depend on how long it takes me to write a post. If a post takes five days to make, then I guess that’s how long it takes. If two posts in a row only take three days to make, then that would be faster than my intended post schedule. I hope to release my next post in a few hours. EDIT: Either that, or tomorrow morning. We’ll see. I’m almost done with this post but I only have a few hours left for today.

Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Commentary Part 51: A Tale of Two Vengeful Seers

Introduction

Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 >

Act 5 Act 2, Part 24 of 32

Pages 3695-3716 (MSPA: 5595-5616)

Before we begin, here’s a fact that probably no one who isn’t me cares about: when moving these blog posts to WordPress in 2019, I edited this post far more heavily than I did prior posts, some edits regarding the painfully basic John/Rose ship, and others just smoothing out faltering wording (which there’s plenty of up until about post 70-some). I’m not sure why I went so much heavier editing this post than any before, but looking back, most of the edits are just clearer wording, so I’m leaving them as is while I go through these posts in order in 2021 after having finished writing (but not yet publishing) the final post.


It’s time for [S] Seer: Descend, a walkaround game that tops all others in chilling mood and rivals Alterniabound in scale while completely dominating it in plot relevance. Like some others, it opens with a flash sequence with, as the title suggests, Rose descending into the castle. I can’t help but notice the giant black squidmonster aura surrounding her, which just utterly dwarfs anything she did before going dark, and that includes glowing three different colors to my recollection.

Another part of the flash opening sequence that is pretty much impossible to screenshot: we very briefly glimpse both the green sun and a color-inverted pink sun. I’ve heard of theories that there’s a pink sun to complement the green sun, just like Alternia’s green and pink moons, though those are dismissed by many as a ridiculous crack theory that makes no sense. Only through catching the glimpse after rewatching that sequence did I notice that glimpsed pink sun. It’s really probably just a color-inverted green sun though.

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Cookie Fonster Says Stuff About His Homestuck Commentary 7: Summer Posting Schedule

NOTE: This post was edited two days after release because me getting a laptop during the summer is more likely than I thought.

Months ago, I said that during summer I may speed up my posting schedule from the rate of every five days. Yesterday was the last day of school, so now I can do a faster posting schedule as I promised.

During the three months of summer break, I will return to (a slight variant of) my original post schedule: new posts every Thursday morning and Sunday evening. Or at least, I’ll see if that schedule works out. If that’s too fast of a rate for me, which I feel that it probably won’t be, then I’ll slightly slow down to maybe every four days. This new post schedule will be in effect starting tomorrow, which is when I’ll release my next post.

Now, I won’t be posting during all of summer. Among the approximately thirteen weeks I have off school, four of them will be on vacation: two weeks away in June, one in July, and one in August. I will soon turn in my school-provided laptop, so currently the best computer I’ll have on me for vacation is my incredibly outdated iPod touch, which is really hard to write posts on. However, if I’m lucky I might get my hands on a laptop of my own during the summer. I’ll tell you when I’m on vacation when it happens, and if I do get a laptop then the vacations might still have posts after all.

All this means that I’ll have anywhere between eight and thirteen weeks total of the summer posting schedule, until I get back to school and see what happens then.

For now I’ll say this. My Homestuck blog post series has become a considerably bigger project than I envisioned at first, just like my large number site. At first it was just telling what’s going on in the story and sometimes making remarks about it. But now, I’m analyzing the story in a level of depth I originally didn’t want to go into, but that I now wish I did the whole time. With my large number site, I would regularly edit my old articles to match them up with the current style, though I feel that I can’t really do the same to my blog post series given that it’s specifically meant as commenting as I go. Well, I did edit some of my earlier posts but it was mostly relatively small edits. I’ve thought about doing remastered versions of my earlier posts, and while I still am considering doing that eventually, it won’t be editing the early posts in their entirety. Maybe when this post series is finished I’ll do the remastering stuff and release it as some kind of grand online document? I don’t know. This project has still been a lot of fun for me.