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nebuletteart · 4 years

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The Problem with HS^2

(And the HS Epilogues)

Ok, so I think I’m gonna do another post on this, because I’m feeling bothered. I’ve been really frustrated because I just couldn't seem to get hype for 4/13, like, at all, and I couldn’t even do any homestuck art today. I decided that I wanted to reflect on why that is.

BTW I AM NOT DUNKING ON ANYONE WHO LIKES HS^2 AND SUCH!! If it makes you happy, go read it! And if you don’t want to see me dunk on something you love, feel free to skip this post! I in no way want to pressure someone into hating something they enjoy, I just want to pull this fucker apart and see why is doesn’t tick.

Ok so first off, the build up. Imagine it’s the tenth anniversary of a property you really love, and word is that something big is dropping today! You sit at your computer and wait and wait, all that hype and excitement building up and then? They drop three chapters of fanfiction. And tell you to wait for the rest. When this happened, I, as someone who’d spent the last four or five years deeply invested in this comic, I legit cried out of fucking disappointment. I know Homestuck is known for trolling, but that was straight up not the way to handle that sort of build up. But I told myself, “Well, the other chapters will be good! I’m sure they’ll bring back the art, or bring the story to an enjoyable conclusion!” And then a week later they dropped the rest. And it was, not great?? Like, it had good concepts, and some scenes that were funny. But overall it was a pretty bad and draining read.

Why?

I think the main flaws in The Epilogues (and HS^2 by extension) are the themes. The theme is Meat and Candy. Basically, too much of one or the other makes for bad story telling. And that’s interesting in theory, but little thing to take into consideration, YOUR THEME SHOULD NOT MAKE YOUR STORY WORSE. Writing something bad on purpose doesn’t make it any less bad. And another big detrimental theme is “Suffering makes a story” and like, NO?? NO NOT REALLY??? That’s not how that works. You don’t need to make your characters senselessly suffer for a good story, like any good writing tool, you use it in moderation. Good writers can make their story interesting without just throwing pain at their characters. The original Homestuck knew not to take itself too seriously and even in the face of suffering and tragedy, it kept a good blend of comedy to keep it from getting dreary.

And I think this focus on Suffering (+ the Meat/Candy binary) really does negatively impact the writing of The Epilogues and HS^2. It feels like by narrowing in on every single bad thing that could possibly happen, and making sure bad things do happen, they’re stretching the character’s to meet these themes. Many characters are basically unrecognizable due to how they’re pulled and stretched to meet the demands of the story, and as a result, characters act different than how they do in Homestuck proper.

Beyond this it also feels like the current team are pretty obsessed with inserting their headcanons and ideas into HS^2, The Epilogues, and Pesterquest, with no care for the source material. I am all for representation! I’m Nonbinary and I’m lesbian! I think rep is important! But going back in and retconning your rep when there’s literally no build up ain’t how that works chief. That’s not proper representation. I think the only character that they really managed to pull that off with was Vriska, and maybe Eridan, but even then it was still a bit shaky for me. But for many other characters (For instance June!! June is cute, but word of god is in no way good rep, especially since June literally has like, no build up or subtext or ANYTHING!) That’s basically the exact same as JK going back and saying Dumbledore (or whoever bc I never read Harry Potter) was gay! That is not rep. Rep requires time and writing, and that’s why I think (hold on a second I’m about to praise this not very good sequel) Nonbinary trans Roxy is done well. They took time to build them up, and their issues, in an authentic way. If you want to put rep in your comic, that’s how you should do it, retconning only alienates your fanbase, and makes characters seem even more out of character.

But beyond this, I think the most damning thing about the Epilogues and especially HS^2 is it’s very foundation. It’s just not built out of the same stuff, and as a sequel that makes it impossible for it to ever properly mimic Homestuck in any meaningful way. What I mean by this is, lets swivel over to look at the Patreon. Yall probably know what I’m about to gripe with. Bonus Updates. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, BY THEIR VERY NATURE THEY GO AGAINST WHAT HOMESTUCK IS. And you may cry, “support the artist!! They’re just trying to make an honest living!!!” BITCH, I am an artist! Lets just look at the content of the Bonus Updates themselves:

The Bonus Updates take place in The Meat Timeline and have potential to become important later on. That is sneakily putting important content behind a fucking paywall, which directly stands against the accessibility Homestuck had for young teens. (And I personally consider it shady practice to accrue more Patreon support) Especially considering that, guess what?? That doesn’t have to be the case! The Bonus Updates could yknow, have focused on the time before the timeline split in order to avoid being plot relevant. Or if the Bonus Updates are plot relevant, they could at least release them later for those who cannot afford the Patreon bill? They could stagger the release, after two months, release the latest Bonus Update? Oh, or they could do something entirely different, such as showing behind the scenes sprites and artwork-- OH WAIT-- They set that to the twenty fucking dollar tier. And another thing that feels a bit anti Homestuck, basing the amount of updates on Patreon support.

Considering their rate is 2000 supporters a month, at the very least that would be 4000 dollars a month, if everyone payed the lowest tier. But most are likely paying the five a month for access the the Bonus Updates, so you could very likely bump that up to about 10,000. This is a ridiculous amount of money, especially considering the lackluster updates, three a month if you take into account Bonus Updates. I’m sure everyone get’s a smaller piece of the cut, and some of that goes into other HS^2 related projects, but that is a lot of fucking money, and definitely more than enough to pay the team if managed well. I don’t think that they should, and I don’t think that they even need, to use bonus updates to force invested fans to pay. If they were confident in the content they produce, they would certainly still have the backers.

Lastly,

Kanaya would not wear this ugly anime ass outfit are you kidding me. And this is also a not well preformed callback panel (like literally all callbacks oh my god none of the old Homestuck gags hit right in HS^2 at all!!) I could understand Dirk (Even though I think him looking more like Bro would have been a cooler symbolic thing but whatever), Terezi’s outfit was a stretch but I’d accept it, but Kanaya??? KANAYA??? You know she has more fashion sense than the entire Homestuck cast combined she would not be caught dead in this outfit.

#anyway #whew this got long #i spent like #three or so hours writing this goddamn post #happy 413 #i guess lmao #hs^2 #hs^2 spoilers #hs epilogue #homestuck #hs 2 hate #hs^2 hate #just in case you don't wanna see that shit #pesterquest #this 413 was pretty disappointing tbh #i think I'm gonna leave the fandom soon #kanaya #why would they dress you like this #homophobia and an attack on kanaya's fashion sense

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mst3kproject · 7 years

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K09: Phase IV

Remember I said the movies were all coming together? Well, Phase IV is definitely a prequel to Overdrawn at the Memory Bank. Think about it – why are the people of the future nothing but replaceable cogs in a few giant companies, or colonies if you will? Why is individuality so strongly discouraged? Why does everybody hate anteaters? Because the world is ruled by ants! See? See? It's all part of one great ur-movie!

And honestly, that's as seriously as I've ever been able to take Phase IV. It's a shame, really, because despite lurid posters in which ants eat their way through a human hand, Phase IV really wants to be a serious science fiction movie. It's trying to imagine humanity confronted by an intelligence greater than ours, from the most unlikely source – man humbled before God's humblest creatures! The title apparently refers to all life on Earth eventually merging into a single super-consciousness. I can definitely see where they were trying to go. Sadly, when the journey isn't boring me to tears, it's making me giggle like a Tickle-Me Elmo doll at things that weren't supposed to be funny. Was Tickle-Me Elmo really over twenty years ago?

Dr. Hubbs is an entomologist studying a frighteningly intelligent multi-species ant colony in Arizona – or are the ants studying him? He calls in a cryptographer, Dr. Lesko, to help him try to communicate with the insects. For the next hour or so, the scientists do scientist stuff and the ants do ant stuff. Occasionally something happens. The ants tear a house down, and the people inside flee only to be accidentally sprayed with a massive overdose of pesticide. The scientists have praying mantises to keep the ants from getting into their little moon dome, but the ants take them out with ant assassins. Stuff like that. Eventually Hubbs dies of an ant bite, but the ants capture everybody else to do... something... to them... and then the movie's over.

For the most part Phase IV is deathly boring. We're either listening to the scientists talk about whatever, or watching ants wiggle their antennas at other ants that are never in the same shot because in the real world two different types of ants put together will either ignore or eat each other. Dr. Hubbs goes off on poetic flights about the perfection of ant society, and shows that he is the Mad Scientist of the movie by discounting the deaths of actual people. Dr. Lesko translates ant-language to come up with weird oscilloscope traces and geometric diagrams that might or might not mean anything. Desert Wildlife Stock Footage appears and there's a teenage girl named Kendra who has to hang around because going outside would mean crawly formic death. The soundtrack is kinda trippy but at the same time impossibly dull.

In fact, it's because Phase IV is dull that I often find it so funny. Since nothing much is happening, my brain wanders off on odd tangents with the sparse information the film gives me. We begin with Dr. Lesko's narration telling us that this was all caused by some kind of unspecified celestial event. Really? A conjuction of the planets created smart ants? Jupiter is in retrograde and Mercury is rising in Libra, so be conservative with your investments – and watch out, because this month's full moon is the perfect time for ants to suddenly develop a superintelligent hive mind!

Then the narration starts talking about ants 'doing things ants don't do', like holding meetings. This bodes ill for mankind, sure, but the word 'meetings' just makes me picture ants at tiny tables, sipping tiny lattes while they discuss how best to put the wasp nest under the porch out of business. Never mind that Lesko's voice is over footage of ants doing... well, exactly what ants do; grooming, fighting, and carrying stuff through tunnels. The shots cut back and forth from one ant to another of a different species in a way that suggests we're probably supposed to be imagining a dialogue between them, but there's not even any squeaking sounds dubbed in. I admit that this is realistic, because ants communicate chemically. It still looks ridiculous.

How about the bit where the ant queen (who I'm pretty sure is not played by an ant – the animal we see looks more like some kind of wasp) assimilates an insecticide, producing offspring that are immune to it? Sure, scary idea, but Dr. Hubbs intones, 'we challenge with yellow chemistry, they respond with yellow creatures'. Is that how that works? Because now I'm pondering the artistic possibilities of feeding Skittles to the ants.

Or how about when the ants decide to cook the humans in their hideaway by focusing solar radiation onto it? Revenge for all those kids with magnifying glasses, am I right? Or how Dr. Lesko blasts the tops off the ant towers to try to get a reaction? That seems a little extra, when any bored six-year-old knows much easier ways to get an ant colony moving. How about the fact that at the end everybody runs off into the desert in their bare feet when they know damned well there's seventy billion pissed-off ants out there?

The ants only get one moment in the movie that's really effective, when it does seem like there's a higher intellect at work behind these millions of mindless drones in perhaps the same sort of way as billions of neurons come together to create a conscious human brain. That's when the ants bring a sample of the yellow pesticide back to the hill for their queen to examine. One ant carries this as far as it can before the poison kills it, then another one picks it up and does the same. Individual ants are expendable. There are just so damn many of them that it makes no difference, and the colony can always produce more to replace what has been lost. This uses what makes ants scary even when they're not superintelligent, along with reminding us that their purpose here is to study our weapons and learn to neutralize them.

The dead ants laid out in rows like the aftermath of a battle is also sort of cool, but it has the opposite effect, actually humanizing the ants by depicting them as individual lost lives. Hubbs has already explained to us that's not how ants work, and if ants are individuals who care enough to gather up their dead colony-mates, they become a lot less alien and therefore a lot less frightening.

The behaviour of the ants also suffers from the same problem as a lot of killer animal movies, in which their intelligence seems to have come with a few lessons in electrical engineering. Intelligence does not automatically confer knowledge – INT is a stat, while knowledge is a skill! Humans have sophisticated brains, but much of what we do with them depends upon thousands of years of accumulated learning. Before we could build a generator, we needed at least a primitive understanding of the physics of electricity. It is true that destroying a generator is simpler than inventing it, but how did the ants even know what the significance of the generator was? How did they know what the air conditioner was, never mind how to shut it down? These ants have been sentient for a couple of months at best, and during that time they seem to have been too busy building towers and exterminating their predators (things that actually seem like pretty plausible ant priorities) to go to trade school.

These are all quibbles, though. The biggest problem with Phase IV is that it raises a lot of questions and then never bothers to even try answering them. Dr. Lesko makes some progress at communicating with the ants, and the fact that the ants bother to listen and reply suggests that they do want something from these humans... but what? Hubbs dies of the ant venom, but Lesko and Kendra are captured and taken inside an enormous ant hill, where the ants begin doing something to them that seems poised to begin a real dialogue. In the final moments of the movie we're on the verge of finding out what's really been going on... and then it just ends.

So what was all that leading up to? We don't know! And Lesko's final words of narration, we didn't know for what purpose, but we knew we would be told, just seem to rub the anticlimax in our faces – he found out, but we never will! I'm left with the impression that writer Mayo Simon didn't have any real idea, himself. I guess the point is supposed to be that the ants are such a completely alien mind that Lesko probably couldn't explain it to us if he wanted to. Fair enough, but still a lousy non-ending to a boring eighty-four minute movie.

All this movie needed was a conclusion. Not even a conclusion to the overall 'smart ants take over the world' thing, just a conclusion to the 'kidnap Lesko and Kendra and make them members of the hive' thing. Are the ants after human knowledge? Do they need human emmissaries? Human spies? Human slaves? Humans to play the slots in Vegas while the ants manipulate the machines to pay out big wins? A fertile couple to be the progenitors of a new race of Ant-People? See, there I go again, off on tangents trying to supply the entertainment this movie so conspicuously failed to give me.

There are people who really like this movie. El Santo of 1000 Misspent Hours says it's one of his favourites, because it makes him think. It made me think, too, but about all the wrong things.

#mst3k #reviews #phase iv #the movies are all coming together #70s

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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Hyperallergic: Why Googling “Miami Inmates” in South Florida Leads to Their Poetry

View-Through Bulletin North Miami, Florida (photo by Gesi Schilling)

MIAMI — This article was written with students from three prisons in Miami-Dade county who are enrolled in writing classes offered by the nonprofit Exchange for Change. The text in italics was written by the students, including Alden Stephenson, Richardson Francois, Scott Hartman, Big Puppy, Allen L. Dorsey, Sr., Luis Aracena, Jeffrey S. Worley, Luis Hernandez, G the Seer, Brenda “Stormy” Dixon, Corey Jermain Still, John Barrett, Thant Lallamont, Paul Harris, The Fenix, Austin “Ice” Patrick, Radge Zap, Edwards A. Thomas, Brian Rudolph, Steve Wonder, Willie Collins, Jason Jewett, Zerrick Dixon, Rod, Ronald Barnett, among others. Individuals usually called “inmates” or “prisoners” are generally referred to in this essay as “residents,” “individuals,” or “students.”

* * *

I am determined to get out and do positive things.

I have four kids and a loving wife I adore.

I am a human being!

Thanks to organizations such as the Prison Policy Initiative and the Brennan Center for Justice, the inequities of the United State criminal justice system are widely broadcast. You’ve seen the statistics: we house 5% of the world population but 25% of the world prison population (the numbers are closer to 4.4% and 22% — which you can check with a quick Google search).

People need to know what a waste this prison system is to society.

Yet there is one group whose voice is conspicuously absent from the conversation: the people currently serving prison sentences. Without them, our understanding of the criminal justice system is incomplete.

Not many are asking why it’s important that my voice be heard.

This April, the literary arts organization O, Miami, the prison-writing nonprofit Exchange for Change, and artist Julia Weist are using the internet to amplify the voices of 110 individuals in correctional institutions in Miami, so that when South Florida residents Google the term “Miami inmate,” they can find content produced by the inmates themselves — poetry, for example.

If I am not heard . . . I don’t exist.

All of the poets are students enrolled in writing courses at Exchange for Change, founded by writer Kathie Klarreich, and supported in part by O, Miami, which hosts a poetry festival each April that aims to bring a poem to every person in Miami — residents of correctional institutions included.

There are education and therapy aspects as well as the chance to say, “I am still human.” I’m still a fat kid inside, and it’s right up there with cake. Been in a lot of programs in these 30-plus years. They have helped me find a deeper meaning to my worth, in and out of these fences.

The project, called View-Through, aims to highlight and subvert the way prison populations are systematically isolated and effectively silenced by various institutional policies. For instance, with the exception of a few law clerks or residents in work release centers, the Florida Department of Corrections denies incarcerated individuals access to the Internet and email, regardless of their status or the length of their sentence.

We are more isolated in this time of universal interconnectedness than we were 20 years ago. People don’t write letters anymore. We prisoners need access to our families by way of media they actually use and are familiar with.

In prisons across the country, communication companies exploit incarcerated people and their families for profit. Almost immediately upon taking office this year, the Republican administration removed the cap on how much telephone companies can charge incarcerated individuals.

Learn of the truths about our judicial system. The injustice of it, the cruelness of it, the draconian element of it.

View-Through is a community operation. Since March, thousands of participants (mostly from South Florida, although searches have been performed from five continents) have been strategically searching the internet for six specific poems written by Exchange for Change students in Miami-Dade County prisons.

This is being taken seriously.

The massive search activity has created search trends, effectively publishing the poems within the autocompletes and suggestions of Google search engines. Each poem begins with a term that is used to refer to prison residents, like “Miami inmate.”

As for me, and most others, the chance of actually having a voice is great. Especially when a voice is something you don’t have.

I hope that I’m heard and felt.

Google search autocomplete (image courtesy Julia Weist)

Finally, by including search engine-optimized content with partner websites, View-Through also ensures that the Google searches lead to links relevant to the project, such as webpages with additional poetry by incarcerated individuals, well-informed articles about the prison crisis, and websites like Ladies Empowerment and Action Program, Emerge Miami, and Community Justice Project.

Communication and reasoning are what separate us from other animals. Best to listen to and read from the entire population.

Publishing the poems this way has several advantages. It has reach: the people searching for “Miami inmate” probably won’t be looking for poetry. It also happens fast: searchers won’t even have to click a link to see the poems pop up in auto-complete and in the suggested searches.

To make everyone a little more humane.

This manipulation also exposes the infrastructure and bias beneath the search platform. Although there’s a sheen of objectivity to a Google search, results are different depending on factors like your past searches, or recent searches in your geographical location.

I am not just my mistakes. I am also my victories and good deeds.

Suggested searches on Google (image courtesy Julia Weist)

Along with the search result content most readily accessible, the language suggested by search platforms can either encourage or challenge assumptions and bias. When 90% of searchers don’t go past the first page of links, they’re not getting the full story.

Some of us are as bright, witty, and caring as those who are free.

More and more, we see that meaning is made, confirmed, or challenged online. Subtle interventions, like the ones performed by View-Through, show that a few thousand voices are enough to change the narrative.

Pretty liberating to know that my perspective will be made known and shared with others. We aren’t allowed many freedoms here, as I’m sure you know. So to tell my story — more than anything to have it heard — is pretty cool.

These shifts are taking place constantly on the internet, and sometimes we can’t measure them until they’ve passed. “View-through” is the technical term for when an internet user sees, but does not click an ad, but then searches for it later. (If the user clicks the ad, that’s called a “click-through.”) The view-through rate cannot be calculated when the impression is first made on a user, only after the fact, when they act on it.

Being that I’ve never been a part of something like this, it’s like, damn, I need to make this good.

The concept of “view-through” reminds me of Rebecca Solnit’s mushroom metaphor for activism in Hope in the Dark: there’s a network growing underground, and then, as if out of nowhere, the fruiting body pops up. It’s impossible to say when or where or how it originated. It came from everywhere.

I hope this helps people incarcerated.

This is also, subtly, how poetry works. It’s not a call to action. It, in the words of W.H. Auden, “makes nothing happen.” Instead, the repeated act of reading poetry, the practice of critical and creative thought, works slowly on a person. Then one day, perhaps, there’s a shift.

We share a different style and have many important things to say. We contribute a unique perspective.

One of the main goals of View-Through is to facilitate ways for those on the outside to empathize with those on the inside. Instead of arguing for empathy, poetry provides a specific, firsthand expression of what it is like to be imprisoned.

Who I am as a person, my personality.

There is no believing or not believing a poem. It is simply there, a direct line. At a time when facts seem more pliable than ever, poetry, which does not deal in fact, remains constant.

This is different because it gives me an individual voice whereas other projects gave me a group or a collective voice.

Currently, over 6 million Americans are denied the right to vote because of criminal disenfranchisement laws. More than 4.7 million of these citizens have left prison and are in their communities — working, raising families, and paying taxes — and yet cannot vote. People of color bear the brunt: over 1 in 13 black citizens of the United States are disenfranchised.

(image courtesy) (click to enlarge)

After 15 years, I’ll be “free.” I would like to be welcome in freedom. It concerns me very much I won’t be welcome. The thought of having the stigma of imprisonment after imprisonment is terrifying, depressing, hard to bear.

Coupled with gerrymandering, mass incarceration is the single greatest obstruction to democracy. Real democracy will have a chance only when the people with full rights mobilize on behalf of the people who have had theirs taken away.

Other projects, and there aren’t many, don’t engage with the free world. This is the primary difference. Prisoners often ask each other their opinion, but the free world never asks us anything.

When we think of and treat incarcerated or formerly incarcerated people as merely criminals, we limit the infinite positive ways they can exist, or influence our society for the better, the way all human beings can.

Prisoners have a high degree of aptitude and their suffering and pain actually translate to the highest form of poetry.

I am a caring, giving person, one who likes taking care of people. Being a caregiver comes naturally, I took care of my sick mother for eight years before her passing.

I still can do positive things.

The artist collaborating on View-Through, Julia Weist, created a similar project in 2015, in which the obscure word “parbunkells” was printed on a billboard in Queens, and Weist tracked the Google searches for the word. “Parbunkells” became a sort of obsession: no one knew why it was there or what it was. People made memes. They created websites. They made art and sold it online.

To find an exit for their loneliness.

To get these crazy ideas in ink.

Weist hopes that View-Through can create a similar effect.

There is a lot of talent in here.

The power of any art project is not just in the art itself.

I am part of a movement.

It’s also in the wave that comes after.

View-Through is part of O, Miami Festival, which continues through April 30.

The post Why Googling “Miami Inmates” in South Florida Leads to Their Poetry appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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