this is my only custom reward on habitica
memeticsymbiote asked: How did you write the Non-Lucid excerpts and other bizarreness in TNC? Do you just have a thing you can turn on and produce, glossolalia-style, things like "we first must undergo the ninefold transfigurations underwriting the low tone of cleanth matrid and gravid" or "I in my precompletion maintain nonparallel paths for the lower frequency bands of my designated subdomain"?
It wasn’t quite that intuitive – it was actually a lot like writing the other characters’ voices, where there was a certain amount of “mentally stepping into the role,” but also just thinking “what sort of words and constructions would this person use? what sorts of words and construction would create the effect I want here?”
I like reading stylistically unusual text, and I like trying to write in various different styles myself, and the TNC excerpts on the same spectrum with all the other stylistic variation I do. They’re just especially extreme.
galacticwiseguy asked: hi! read TNC last year and loved it, reread it just now and loved it. Both times I thought that there was something being very implied by how similar Lugnut's screeds were to Salby's journal--they leapt out at me as similar immediately. Consistent shorthand and missing letters or strange spellings, especially noticeable on "Choicecurt/chscrt." Disdain for grammar. Repeated asides to disparage either specific people's views or modern society in general ("2day's YUTH"/"modern, degraded theories.")
(cont.) At one point Lugnut even deliberately groups himself in with Salby and Chen. But, that story thread never really goes anywhere (except for paul’s vague implication that he’s getting in touch with him?) and then in your tag I read that Lugnut was just a reference to a commenter you used to see. So…did I imagine the whole thing/read too much into it? (Would be very appropriate to the work.) Or did you start with a random parody of Internet commenters and then expand it as you wrote?
You’re not reading too much into things, don’t worry.
Lugnut’s nature and role in everything are meant to be mysterious – is he just some internet weirdo, or does he have some special insight into (or connection to) Salby-related stuff? But for that to be an open question at all, the latter possibility has to suggest itself to the reader, as at least a possibility. So you’re not wrong to notice that it’s a possibility.
Utopia as the Mundum-as-told-by-Paul Hive: immense moral duty (not easily explicable to others) pervading every moment, noticing sub-optimal physical features of the immediate environment, sublunary/celestial, “it’s so arbitrary that everyone just lives on this little sphere”
crimsonaardvark-deactivated2018 asked: Hello! I really love The Northern Caves (re-read it this weekend), and I have a question regarding the personality and image of Leonard Salby: was the concept of this character influenced, in any way or form, by Henry Darger? It's not that I feel that there are direct similarities between the two, but as I was re-reading chapter 10, I was almost randomly struck by a 'huh, I wonder if the author is interested in Henry Darger' feeling. Apologies if this has already been asked.
I’m definitely interested in Henry Darger! (Here’s an old, long post of mine about John MacGregor’s book on Darger. N.B. some of the opinions there are out of date and I was a worse writer in 2011 than I am now.)
I didn’t consciously have Darger in mind when writing TNC, although now that I think about it there are some obvious similarities (isolated and frustrated man, long strange text). My earlier novel Floornight has some elements that were consciously influenced by Darger, BTW.
razetrip asked: Hey there! I read the Northern Caves and I enjoyed it; I was wondering if you were inspired by anything that might have happened online around 2001 - 2010? Your story is creepily similar to some things that I experienced and I'd like to share, or ask if you've experienced the same. Thank you!
The plot itself isn’t inspired by any particular real incident, but the day-to-day aspects of the forum were (as you might expect) based on my own experiences on similar forums (about video games in my case) during the same time period.
I saw a post about the Homestuck game and tried to remember liking Homestuck. I mean, I still like Homestuck – the parts of it I liked have not changed (well, except for the blue arms) since I read them back in 2011, and although my taste has probably changed, that’s not what’s making me see it this way. I think what’s happened is basically that I’ve grown to dislike Andrew Hussie, and that makes it hard to immediately enjoy (as opposed to “enjoy by remembering how I used to enjoy it”) anything in his very distinctive style.
I should clarify – Andrew Hussie may well be a great guy if you know him in person, I have no idea and don’t mean to suggest ill of him. By “dislike Andrew Hussie” I largely mean “dislike Andrew Hussie’s style,” but it’s more than that – maybe “dislike Andrew Hussie’s creative persona.” His public comments on his work, and his pattern of behavior (in update schedule, interactions with fans, etc.) seems like it forms a continuous whole with the style. I’ll just write “Andrew Hussie” in quotes, to distinguish this from the real human being.
“Hussie” feels very … limited. There’s a brilliance to his style, but you get the feeling he couldn’t possibly create anything that wasn’t obviously created by him; you don’t get the feeling he ever learned the ordinary rules of art or fiction or humor or even the English language, although it’s easy not to care, since his breaking of rules is so often clever or interesting rather than just clumsy. He can write, for instance, in this particular tone of ironic grandiloquence which is full of crunchy, tasty turns of phrase and arresting images and metaphors, but you don’t ever see him dial this down to an “normal,” unironic, subtler elevated style – you get the feeling he can’t do any of the constituent pieces on their own, just the whole thing, like a gesture he can do with his hands but can’t explain. He has his own distinctive sense of humor, which is obsessed with fiction tropes (specifically, declaring that reality “should” follow tropes, whether it really will or not), and with lovingly detailed ribbing towards “bad” media. This is often hilarious by anyone’s standards, but he does it – that specific brand of humor, down to the individual beats sometimes – more consistently and repetitively than anyone would unless they couldn’t do anything else.
“Hussie” also has a creative persona which resists all criticism and asks all to trust in the artist’s sacred creative vision. This fits with the style: he cannot adapt to criticism, he cannot be what anyone else wants him to be, he can only do the one thing he knows how to do, and push it to further and further heights, and trust in the fact that the rest of humanity has generally been delighted with this eccentric performance so far. The voice he uses when talking as “Andrew Hussie, creator of MSPA” feels not too distinct from “Andrew Hussie, the narrator of MSPA”; both write in a way that superficially feels very artificial, knowingly bombastic, hiding everything behind an ironic wink and an assurance that if you just relax and let yourself enjoy the show, the master magician will deliver. This can be immensely frustrating, because you want him at some point to let up the act, to step out from the various ironic personae and “this is so much like that one bad movie” framing devices and talk to you straight, as a creative adult who puppeteers personae and framing for fun and profit. But that never, ever happens. Whether or not this is as deep as Hussie goes, it is as deep as “Hussie” goes. Scratch the surface and you keep finding more surface; nothing is ever not a joke or a reference or a put-on, nothing is ever not implicitly in quotation marks (or more aptly, being recorded on a low-budget movie camera). The hall of campy mirrors is endless.
If it isn’t already clear, I find this all very #relatable, and have often felt like I am doing tricks for the world in exactly this way. But maybe it’s this that makes “Hussie” just so frustrating to me. You want him to perform the final trick that is making the audience forget they’re at a magic show, to perform so hard he breaks through into the territory where you literally can’t tell his “acting” from anyone else’s “real behavior.” I feel like I’ve reached that point in a lot of my, well, life, and it feels wonderful. Whether he wants to or not, “Hussie” never quite gets there, and being who I am, it can be painful to watch.
Actually, he did get there, for a time. Homestuck at its height can give you this feeling of transcendence, where every frame you can try to box it into does not fully capture it, and for a time “Hussie’s” style feels not notably limited but notably limitless. The geeky, referential comedy is pulled off with such finesse that it feels like the work of some godlike being who’s whimsically decided to try its hand at a dorky webcomic and (accidentally, because it performs any act with equal godlike power) creates a dorky webcomic that is better than most things on planet earth. The absurd plot, full of tropes and comic book powers, is somehow sustained by a crystalline deterministic structure of incredible intricacy which you feel you’d need a seminar course to fully understand. The characters are crude cartoons, and yet they speak in such eerily animate voices you can’t quite believe any of them aren’t real people. Everything works on every level of irony and non-irony, self-awareness and naivete, crudity and brilliance. You stop checking Hussie’s antics for formal compliance with ordinary-person standards because he keeps passing your tests, even though he’s doing something clearly ridiculous.
Who cares if this weird kid’s fourth-grade teacher says he can’t do any of the homework and should be held back a grade? He just proved the Riemann Hypothesis. Admittedly, instead of concluding the proof with the customary “Q.E.D.” or Halmos symbol, he scrawled “OMG BUTT LAZERZ” all over the final page, but you see that’s actually a masterstroke of construction when one takes into consideration its echoes of his earlier work [five page explanation follows]. The weird kid is being being nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. It is for his novel Stacey is Annoying Because She Keeps Asking Why I Get to Have Cookies Even When I Have Told Her a Lot of Times That My Mom Packs My Lunch and I Don’t Really Get a Choice, Also She Keeps Talking About Weird Girl Stuff: A Comic Opera (in Prose). The synopsis doesn’t really do it justice, but read it, and you will understand.
uu: WHAT MOST GIFTED ARTISANS WILL TELL YOU. IS THAT. CIRCLES ARE BASICALLY FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE TO DRAW.
uu: TRUST ME.
uu: IT’S LIKE A PARADOX. A SHAPE WITHOUT ANGLES. WHAT??
uu: SO I FUCKING CHEATED.
uu: I NAVIGATED THE IRRATIONAL PERIMETER BY MAKING A LOT OF EASILY UNDERSTANDABLE, TOTALLY LOGICAL MARKS. FORMING A WHOLE BUNCH OF LITTLE RIGHT ANGLES.
uu: THE CHEATING PART HAPPENS WHEN I DO THIS A LOT. SO IT GOES IN A ROUND DIRECTION.
uu: THIS ONE CAME OUT WELL I THINK. BUT THERE’S ROOM TO IMPROVE.
uu: I HAVE THEORIZED THAT IF I KEEP MAKING BOGUS CIRCLES LIKE THIS.
uu: WHILE DRAWING MORE AND MORE ANGLES. BUT SMALLER. SO SMALL THAT YOU START CAN’T SEEING THEM.
uu: THAT THE ILLUSION OF THE CIRCLE WILL BE COMPLETE! AND PEOPLE WILL BELIEVE IN THE FAKE CIRCLE. LIKE A BUNCH OF SUCKERS.
uu: I BET NOBODY HAS THOUGHT OF THAT CIRCLE STRATEGY. I THINK I’M THE FIRST AT THIS IDEA. AND BEST AT IT ALREADY.
uu: PEOPLE THINK I’M DUMB. ESPECIALLY THE VOICE IN MY HEAD.
uu: AND THEY MAY BE RIGHT ABOUT ME BEING DUMB.
uu: BUT WHEN IT COMES TO THE SPECIAL WAY I DO THINGS. WHICH IS ALWAYS ACTUALLY. THE PERFECT WAY.
uu: I AM.
uu: A GENIUS!
But after 2011 “Hussie” was up to nothing except his old tricks, and those tricks got a little worn out, and “Hussie” was always – reliably, infuratingly – himself. The finale was an animation about a frog, which the weird kid had been dreaming about for a decade – executed by a team of up-and-coming artists who had become his acolytes. It was, sources quote him as saying, “totally epic.” The weird kid’s next novel is also about a frog, because frogs are cool, but this one has a funny top hat and raps about how dumb Stacey is. The new frog’s flow is impeccable, but the critics focus sensibly on other matters, and they are ruthless this time.
In my fullest period of Homestuck obsession, I frequently compared “Hussie” to Nabokov. This was a cute way of elevating “Hussie” and making myself sound smart, but there’s a real similarity there: the arrogant, seemingly artificial public persona; the unique and somewhat cramped sensibility, which is always great without stopping to be good; the indifference to all creative work besides their own and certain cherished reference ponts; the endless self-satisfied running-the-hands-over the artist’s own prior work and pre-existing obsessions; the elevation of those obsessions, in all their petty particularity, to higher and higher reaches of formal brilliance and technical achievement. (See also.) They take the treasured trivialities of their former years and make them “worthy of legitimate attention” by associating them with ingenuities of formal structure; to coin a word, they’re “nostalgebraists.”
Nabokov fooled them all, and got his star on the canonical map in the end, but “Hussie” may never pull it off. It feels, anyway, like he had a chance and then lost it.
Who was it who linked to the blog about how the Star Wars prequels actually make sense if you interpret them as being all about uncomfortable social class distinctions? It’s really interesting and I have no idea how I ended up reading it
Like, this one about Jar-Jar Binks in particular is blowing my mind right now
New post on the blog – apparently the author likes TNC!! (”But I must admit the parallels between this blog and Errants KnightsMove are… uncomfortable and obvious.“)
:D
(via nostalgebraist)
did you have this response to TNC?A little, to be honest! That’s not a knock against it, though- like I said, that stuff does what it sets out to do. Plus it wasn’t that bad because the supernatural element of the mystery was the ending, more or less- it didn’t say “hey, look, here’s this really unexpected phenomenon, keep reading to find out what the explanation is!” The open question for the whole story was “what the hell happened at Spelunk 04!?”, and not “why is this thing at Spelunk 04! happening?”. The question “what, exactly, does Mundum actually want?” is a question that honestly never occurred to me until just now, so I don’t feel annoyed that it didn’t get answered. I recognized my “oh, cosmic horror, yawn” reaction at the end, but it didn’t betray the rest of the story by being there.
@ followers who haven’t read TNC: The Northern Caves is a book Rob wrote which is sort of hard to explain but I guess I could summarize it as “psychological horror, but the setting is 2000s internet forum culture”. It’s really good! Admittedly I liked it more for the setting and character writing than the horror aspects, but that stuff worked better than usual too. Maybe read that because it’s cool?
Ah, interesting – I think what it comes down to, maybe, is that people who like horror more than you do tend to be asking it the kind of question that you asked of TNC.
You said in the earlier post that horror hooks you with its mystery, where I’d say what hooks me is usually the prospect of reading about a compelling strange and scary experience, sort of a “trip report.” Often unexplained mysteries are part of the experience in question, since they tend to be stranger and scarier in retrospect than things that have been subsequently explained. But the basic thing I want is to follow the characters through their experience, rather than to have my questions answered.
There’s a danger, though, that the unexplained character of the events will actually ruin the “compelling strange and scary” effect, by making the reader think not of the dark corners of the real world, but of the author pulling puppet strings. As you put it:
well, you see, it was all the master plan of this incomprehensible outer god whose motives are perfectly alien and inscrutable! and which just so happen, by fortuitous coincidence, to line up with the creator’s motive, which is to make spooky shit happen to scare you!
Avoiding this involves a balancing act, but the same balancing act goes on all the time in fiction writing: you show the reader some small fragment of an invented world or culture or community, say, and try to make it feel the way a real fragment of that type would feel, neither instantly intelligible nor totally lawless. Even with something as trivial as, I dunno, characters bantering about an invented musical genre, you’ve got to make the genre feel like it really does have its own coherent history and defining characteristics, without spelling out that logic baldly with unrealistic “as you know, Bob” dialogue (“I enjoy syncopated rhythms and low wavering vocals, such as the ones I’m sure we’ll hear tonight, from Roll music pioneer Duke Madden”). Likewise, you show the reader a little bit of what lurks in the dark, and it’s gotta feel like a glimpse of the truly alien, but also not like utter gibberish.
(A lot of my disappointment with the finale of Archive 81 was actually that it clarified too much, and made Visser/Samuel/the archive seem less like “dark corners.” So it’s possible to fail in either direction: make the corners so dark that it’s obvious you’re just making shit up, or turn on the lights at the end and disappoint readers who came for dark corners.)