72 lines
No EOL
4.9 KiB
Markdown
72 lines
No EOL
4.9 KiB
Markdown
---
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layout: base.njk
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title: Better Than Homestuck
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subtitle: or, things to read next
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permalink: /bth/
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---
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{% css %}
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strong {
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font-size: 1.2em;
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}
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{% endcss %}
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**Homestuck** is a story of many things.
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It's a story about chatting to your friends on the internet back in the days before Telegram and Discord, when chat rooms were ephemeral and lawless.
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It's about trying to get an online game working, back before the "live service" era where online games are mostly at the mercy of a server admin you'll never meet.
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It's about music, and art, and make-believe. It's about programming, and puzzles, and time paradoxes. It's about good and evil, light and dark, and a game they play together where evil always wins but good always comes back again.
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It's flawed in many obvious and interesting ways. It's sexist, ableist, and very white. It sets up dramatic reveals and then completely whiffs them, or sometimes it subverts a perfectly good trope for no good reason other than "to fuck with the fans." It's, for lack of a better word, *trolly.*
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And it was unlike anything else on the internet, in the years 2009 thru 2016 at least. Its ambitions were unmatched, even if it completely failed to meet many of them. So:
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**if you like the ideas of Homestuck, here's some other stuff you might like instead.**
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---
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## [Kid Radd](https://www.bgreco.net/kidradd/)
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Dan Miller, 2004.
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some video game characters escape their game and find out that they were never in an arcade at all. they've been in an emulator, on someone's computer! what will happen now that they're free of their ROMs?
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makes clever use of web features like sound, animation, and custom CSS. also excellent storytelling that puts Wreck it Ralph to shame.
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---
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## [17776 (What Football Will Look Like in the Future)](https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football)
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Jon Bois, 2017.
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it is the far, far future. humans have stopped dying and stopped being born. the people alive in the early 21st century just kept being alive, for eternity. they're kinda bored of it, really. wanna watch some football? this game's been going for a few hundred years, they're trying to run the ball from mexico to canada. and there's some other games on, too.
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this is a mixed media sci-fi short story about immortality and football. it makes excellent use of scrolling web pages with chatlogs in a style that will be very familiar to Homestuck viewers, but without the gratuitous verbal abuse. it also makes excellent use of video and music, as the author periodically takes a break from the dialogue to fly a drone camera around a slightly modified Google Earth to give a sense of scale to the various "football games" on display.
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also you don't need to know anything about football, don't worry about it too much
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---
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## [Deltarune](https://deltarune.com/)
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Toby Fox, 2018-ongoing.
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shut yourself in the closet, close your eyes, and then ask "what if it could get even darker than darkness?" what if the shapes we see in shadows could be illuminated, not the absense of light but the *opposite* of light? also what if there were lesbians and furries and stuff.
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did you know Toby Fox worked on Homestuck? did you know that he wrote Undertale at the same time, while living out of Andrew Hussie's basement? it's true, more or less. and now he's making a new game with the stuff he learned from both of those projects. in particular, it makes incredible use of music to develop its characters. if you listen closely you may notice there are a lot of songs with a similar melody, or "motif" to another song, and it *almost always* tells you something new about the characters in that scene.
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this also counts as a "better than harry potter" entry btw. if you enjoyed the "midnight madness" party when each book came out? Deltarune has those too and they're queer-er. hell yeah.
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---
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## [5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel](https://www.5dchesswithmultiversetimetravel.com/)
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Thunkspace, 2020.
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look, maybe you weren't into homestuck for the characters. maybe you liked all the puzzles where someone goes back in time to assassinate someone else but then they get stopped by someone else who also went back in time or whatever, maybe you enjoy complicated time travel for its own sake. wanna play chess?
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"5D Chess" is a chess variant in four dimensions. Pieces that can move backwards in space can also move backwards in time, at an exchange rate of one space equals one turn, and pieces that can move sideways in space can also move sideways in time, at a rate of one space equals one parallel timeline. I don't know what the fifth dimension is supposed to be. I think they just called it that because it sounds funny.
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you *do* need to understand normal chess in order to play this one. but if you enjoy chess and time travel, and have a friend who also enjoys at least one of those things, then this is a fun little game where you get to experience being The Terminator and going back in time to assassinate someone. |