“We’re being freed from Homestuck”
Alright if you’ve been in the fandom only for the Era Of Pauses I want to tell you something.
Back when this comic was Hussie upd8ing whenever he finished a panel, be it two AM, one PM, noon, six PM, whatever, upd8 culture really could feel like a trap.
Make no mistake I regret nothing and I think it was super awesome but in a way your life DID have to revolve around Homestuck, because when the upd8 hit you had to be THERE, whether that meant frantically sneaking a look on your phone in class, or being called awake by your friends in the middle of the goddamn night, or whatever. Going out to dinner in the evening when there hadn’t been an upd8 that day was a Dangerous Game because the upd8 could hit while you were at dinner and then you’d have MISSED IT and you MISSED THE FUCKING UPD8 and it was pretty awful.
And then the pauses hit and honestly? We’ve been freed. The frantic upd8 uncertainty is no more. We’re three days from the end and I can promise you the 413 upd8 will be at midnight EST. There’s no wondering. It’s……. such a weird feeling?!?!
I specifically remember an incident somewhere in the 2013 area when me and @snizabelle went to what was my first Homestuck meetup. It was at an ice rink and it was pretty low-key, maybe 20 of us max. A few of us were sat on benches while the others skated and we chatted idly among ourselves about the comic, cosplay, etc. Then one of the girls–I think she was dressed as Nepeta–shouted UPDATE and within the next minute every single homestuck at that gathering was huddled around her phone passing it around to read the panels.
It went from “fun happy ice skating time” to huddling in a tight group passing around the phone from person to person as we read in groups of three to four at a time, and muttered about what it could mean. The rest of the meetup was just talking about the upd8 and speculating and wondering when the next one would hit and what it all meant.
That was upd8 culture. It was texting my friends–or getting a text/tweet from them–that just said “UPD8″ and rushing to my computer as fast as humanly possible so we could chat about it. It was hitting up every homestuck I had on any platform with a messaging capability to hear what they thought or what was going on or to just inform them it had dropped.
Stalking the tumblr that posted the times and number of panels of updates and mass-reblogging it among the fandom to spread the word so people could camp.
Upd8 culture was WILD man.
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