turboshitnerd asked: "His politics may be completely abhorrent, but he's a great guy!" No he isn't.

Like… I don’t understand this line of thinking. Politics is not something that’s just magically separate from being a decent person. Neo-reactionaries are often practically fascists and you’re just supposed to be like, oh, he’s a nice guy? Fuck that.

I guess I just don’t really agree?  I’ve found that, in my life at least, the way people abstractly conceive of stuff like human rights and government organization is not all that directly connected to whether they’re decent to people around them.  There are people who are tolerant in the abstract (or in favor of tolerant government) who are pricks or scumbags in their personal lives, and there are also people who will be very considerate/fair/decent/etc. to people within their range of tolerance, while being intolerant otherwise.  Life would be a lot simpler if these things were always aligned, but they aren’t.

I also think kind of idea is a necessary part of the entire “privilege” concept — that being a “nice person” really isn’t always enough, that one has to look at systems and not just individual interactions to be ethical.  Redefining “nice person” to mean “ethical person” leaves us unable to talk about the kind of niceness that isn’t enough (though it isn’t nothing either).  When people say “his politics is abhorrent but he’s a nice guy” I know what they mean, anyway, and I’m not going to contest that usage of “nice” because it means something and I don’t know what to replace it with.

And TBH by this point I’m really wary of this kind of conflation — I’ve seen too many leftists justify remarkable levels of cruelty (etc.) to vulnerable people by doing the whole “I am one of the very few Decent Human Beings on earth” act (“well, if you stop talking to me because I’m horrible, who will you talk to?  Someone who’s not a Decent Human Being?  Nope, better stick with me”).  Presumably this happens with conservatives too (“I am your only anchor in a world that’s gone mad since the good old days”), I just see it less because I know fewer conservatives.

turboshitnerd asked: i nominate you for "let's talk about homestuck part 2" of euro talk simulator aka "let's talk about how homestuck sucks so much now" (but seriously i liked the episode on Henry Darger and itd be cool if you were on again, also i need to watch more of these)

Thanks, but I think (and given your use of “seriously” I get the sense you agree) that my opinions about how Homestuck sucks now are so well-represented in text that it would be kind of redundant to bring me on to voice them again

Maybe I can be on trucks again once I get a new obsession — alas, the current ones have been working for me for quite a while

turboshitnerd asked: yeah youre a cool friend, youre like... one of the only people i've met on the homestuck forums that id ever actually want to follow on tumblr like i do. or is that damning with faint praise lol?

Well, I did ask for “praise or criticism” so I surely can’t complain about damning with faint praise.  (I mean, I guess I could, but that would be a really weird set of standards.)

Anyway, thanks – MSPAF was often interesting in a sort of aggregate way but there weren’t many individual posters there who I’ve felt the need to keep up with, either, so I’m glad I rose above the noise.

turboshitnerd asked: re: Homestuck, I see your point but like, Hussie said back in Act 5 that the ending had been on his mind the whole time and hadn't significantly changed from his conception in the very beginning, and even now with A6 I feel like the ending he has in mind is probably still essentially the same. Plus, even though A6 is definitely different from A5, if you're reading it as a serial it's not "this comic ive been reading forever is suddenly hard to get through"... (cont)

if you’re just reading it from the archive, i feel like the reaction if you don’t like a lot of act 6 is just “well, it starts dragging a lot in act 6”. as long as the reader keeps moving i feel like some of the bad/weird/boring parts get minimized. like, with the trickster stuff, people often react really really negatively to it, but a serial reader had to wait like a month for the whole thing to finish whereas an archival reader gets through it in what… maybe an hour tops?

This is all true, and I guess I personally don’t have an archival reader’s perspective on A6.  OTOH I feel like I’ve heard archival readers talk about the same effect.  E.g. in response to my earlier post about this, an-animal-imagined-by-poe (who archive binged during the Gigapause) said:

This is pretty much exactly what happened to me - there are parts of act 6 I’ve enjoyed (and I’ll admit I actually like the ancestor stuff, with a heavy dose of headcanon), but mostly I just can’t stop.

A lot of what I’m talking about is serial reader embitterment but I don’t think it’s just that?  Also, anyone reading Homestuck right now will get the chance to be an embittered serial reader for a least a little while