In honour of 4/13x15 I'm posting (a very slightly edited version of) the paper I wrote on the Unofficial Homestuck Collection for one of my classes last term. The language/tone is a bit more academic than what I would usually put up on here, but it's exam season so... 

Don’t Turn Your Back on the Body:

The Resurrection of Homestuck After the Death of Flash

Digital media is, broadly speaking, very difficult to preserve. The rapid pace of technological development means that obsolescence and decay present a consistent threat to the availability of natively digital works. Most computers produced in 2023 no longer have built in CD drives, and I feel fairly confident in asserting that none are being produced with floppy disk readers outside of hobbyist spaces. Issues with the accessibility of physically stored digital media can be mitigated (at least for now) by the use of external readers, but the preservation of fully digital media, born and hosted in its entirety on the Internet, is a different beast entirely.

This is, in part, an issue of pure volume; no one organization could ever hope to archive the vast amounts of stuff that the Internet is constantly producing, let alone organize it into a resource that could be used effectively. Like Borges’ cartographers who created “a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire,” to fully archive the Internet would be to replicate it in its entirety. Thus scope becomes a central question of fully digital archiving. 

The Internet Archive, which also operates the Wayback Machine, answers that question with a resounding and all-encompassing ‘yes’ — their stated goal is to “provide Universal Access to All Knowledge,” but even this comes with caveats. The organization freely permits members of the public to upload files to the archive and save pages on the Wayback Machine, but the work carried out by its official volunteers is more curated, and prioritizes webpages which have been identified as particularly important.

The Internet Archive is very effective within its own space, yes, but it has its limits. When the piece of work you are trying to archive is composed of not just static text and images, but longform animations and complex browser-based games, where do you put it? What do you do when the software necessary to access these elements of the work has been taken offline? And what happens if the people who were supposed to safeguard it fail to do so?

These were the issues that the fans of Homestuck faced in 2020 as the impending deactivation of Flash loomed on the horizon.

cats don't even unstick their claws out of things anymore they will just sit there with their claw stuck in a blanket and look at you like this until you unstick it for them

Nobody wants to work anymore

[ID: a coloured digital half-body drawing of priya and malini from the burning kingdoms trilogy. they’re standing next to each other. malini is tenderly holding one of priya’s hands, as if placing something in it or tracing the palm with her fingers. they’re both looking down at their touching hands, their expressions peaceful. white flowers grow in front of them, and the background is a light green that turns to warm yellow at the upper edges, with a pattern reminiscent of leaves in the lower half of the drawing and climbing up the sides. beams of sunlight come from the upper right corner.

malini is wearing a blue and teal sari with a floral pattern, the edges of the fabric a golden yellow. she’s wearing elaborate golden jewellery and a bindi, and is crowned with red and white flowers. her hair is in a braid. priya is dressed in a simpler, unpatterned red and orange sari with similar yellow edges. she’s wearing less and smaller jewellery than malini. her hair is down. /end ID]

a perfect screenshot. the golden moment. look at this is like a fucking draw the squad

->

the accent really makes this

The Godmother

[ID: Blonde woman in a “mobster” accent saying “As a gentle reminder, I am choosing kindness. Which means I’m more than happy to explore other options if I feel the kindness is not working out. You see, I am not committed to the kindness. There is no ring on my finger in regards to the kindness. I will jump the kindness ship with such ease, you will wonder if I was ever on board.”]

baldurs gate misc text post meme

Riz Gukgak

Kristen "the greatest cleric of our age" Chilis Applebees

look at me look at me just cause im kewpie

that's it... mleh!

"wyll's too nice i'd like him more if he were a little meaner and angrier" you guys couldn't handle vivienne de fer having a complicated relationship with the oppressive system she was raised in. you couldn't handle liam costa making a minor but well-intentioned mistake. you couldn't handle preston garvey having a recurring fetch quest.

you couldn't even handle early access wyll who was angrier and grappled with moral quandaries more. and you can't handle wyll as he is now when he playfully teases astarion.

the thing about supernatural is that, if it were real, hunting as a subculture would have a lot in common with biker and cowboy culture. it already does, aesthetically and as a lifestyle. and that means that it would be full of gay men, or at least gay sex. if supernatural were accurate men would’ve been cruising day and night at Ellen’s roadhouse and Bobby/Rufus would’ve been real. unfortunately no one involved in this goddamn show except maybe late-stage Misha Collins understood that they were making a show about queer masculinity’s place within the American gothic. tragic. many such cases.