>Start thread for MS Paint Adventures

Screwtape Letters made a very weird amount of sense to me. In a good way. Very good exposition on what it is to sin.

That book was a big influence on my views of morality and spirituality. Lewis was a smart guy.

CS Lewis is one of my favorite authors. The Screwtape Letters is a really interesting book, both in the sense of studying moral philosophy and as a story. I also think that The Space Trilogy is a really underrated work of Sci-Fi. It's weird (mainly because Lewis being Lewis, he mixes a lot of philosophy and theology into the mix), and has a really interesting approach to extraterrestrial life.

He's also written quite a few books on literary criticism. I haven't had time to read them in-depth, but what I did have a chance to look at was really interesting.

Lewis was friends with J.R.R. Tolkien, correct?

Now I'm wondering if someone ever tried crossing over The Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia.

"No Aslan! You can't carry the one ring it will turn you into Evil Aslan! Or Ra's Al Ghul."

"The one ring is no match for my Jesus powers. I will now maul the riders, and the Eagles will return a lot sooner, and I can revive Boromir."

Even Legolas sheds tears at Aslan's perfection.

Afterwards Aslan creates the perfect adaptation to The Silmarillion which is so perfect that all fans from the casual, to the intense They Changed It, Now It Sucks! can and will enjoy it.

It's also paced perfectly.

edited 8th Oct '15 8:12:01 PM by DrPsyche

And Lion Jesus and Wizard Jesus team up to kick ass together.

I just spent an hour at 12 at night doing math for a test I have to show up to college at 9 in the morning for and I'm sure to fail

Welcome to my special hell. Welcome to my special hell. Welcome to my special hell. Welcome to my special hell. Welcome to my special hell. Welcome to my special hell. Welcome to my special hell. Welcome to my special hell. Welcome to my special hell. Welcome to my special hell. Welcome to my special hell. Welcome to my special hell. Welcome to my special hell. Welcome to my special hell. Welcome to my special hell. Welcome to my special hell.

edited 8th Oct '15 10:04:56 PM by ShadowDimentio

@Ninety: Yeah, Screwtape Letters is definitely a book with a lot of depth and ideas. It's probably one of the best descriptions of morality and how evil can thrive. It get's disturbing when you realize how much you see yourself in it.

@Shadow: Ouch, good luck.

Math sucks. I never knew how many heads I cut off...

edited 9th Oct '15 12:27:11 AM by WolfMattGrey

I can totally sympathize, Shadow. Best of luck.

@Shadow: Ugh, I've been in that position. Good luck, man.

Fun Fact: Lewis and Tolkien were actually working on co-writing a book on language, but Author Existence Failure meant it was never completed.

Been a while but some A Lee Martinez

Hoarded.

Wren and Hess setting. The constables get called in by the ancient dragon Vulzarnius-too-many-syllables-for-most-people-to-bother-pronouncing when some thieves try to raid her hoard

Clean Plate Club.

Part of the Divine Misfortune setting but you don't need anything from the book. Norse goddess of the underworld Hel tries to get a kid to eat their vegetables.

Wow I really just don't have the time to read all the pages I miss here if I don't check in at the library daily, jeez.

So if you have anything important for me, PM's the best idea, I think.

Anywho, two things:

[S] GAME OVER. not happening is actually a consequence of Aranea not being there, not one of Vriska being there. Well, they both would stop it, but, specifically, all the deaths in [S] GAME OVER. are caused by Aranea, directly or indirectly, as was Jade's beforehand. Seriously.

Vriska being there is preventing the pre-retcon Alpha's events from happening, and those events were probably "Grimbark Jade enforces Condy's plan pretty damn well", and I would like to point out-

Retcon tangent:

-That Vriska being retconned into a living state has nothing to do with Aranea not showing up when she did in [S] GAME OVER., it's an entirely separate timeline.

I can never stress enough that it's not just separate via retcon instance, the Session we're following now, with Vriska in it, is the Alpha timeline, after a number of retcons; [S] GAME OVER was a doomed timeline, and we saw it with less retcons present, as some were made during the time we were looking at it. After those retcons, the timeline that we saw holding [S] GAME OVER. still happened, though maybe not as we saw it, because of possible retcon influence. However, it seemingly has happened roughly how we saw it, according to that most recent flash. The big implication of this is that Aranea still got the Ring and died, as opposed to just not being able to find the Ring, so she'd still have whatever Character Development and motive change that entailed for her?

Which means a retconned timeline seems to have existed in two states at once, but there was a lot about that with the P4SSWORD retcons, really, having dug into them.

End retcon tangent.

That aside, the point remains: Vriska's planning didn't avert [S] GAME OVER. It probably helped avert a different disaster, and her presence itself almost certainly did, but it wasn't [S] GAME OVER.. Credit where credit is due.

Anyways, number two. The suggested idea for a Homestuck Visual Novel to have a "relative timeline viewer" would be hard, but not impossibly so, as long as it only showed how scenes actually in the shown narrative lined up with each other? Because then you could filter by retcon state, whereas, if you were trying to arrange them into two grand big lines of pre-retcon and post-retcon with a character sort, it wouldn't work?

Retcon tangent number two.

There's, I suspect, something of a possible misconception perpetuated by the language of retcons and I think I'm partly responsible in it, but mostly the language predates me; That there's a pre-retcon and a post-retcon, and that these are complete sequences of events that are in binary existence; there's one, and then there's the other, and the latter occurs "after" the retcons. This is entirely true, barring misuse of timeline, and not a misconception at all. The misconception is that there's a pre-retcon timeline and a post-retcon timeline, and just them. That's not the case. Firstly, if it wasn't already obvious, when you have a timeline that's, say, before all the retcons, it's part of a Paradox Space where all the other timelines and Universes and other spaces, like the Furthest Ring, are also before all the retcons. Secondly, the thing is, this divide between retcon states exists for every retcon. So there's no toggle between "pre-Retcon" and "post-Retcon", so much as there's "Before Retcon A", "Before Retcon B", "Before Retcon C", where "Before Retcon C" is after Retcons A and B, and thus shows their effects, but before Retcons C and D, and thus don't show theirs, because they haven't happened in this iteration?

Which is, I hope, pretty obvious, because we all saw at least one scene get retconned twice (that conversation between Jade and Dave, and any panel with both a splotch of oil and John's arm in it), but the language might not show it? Because there's a tendency to say "the pre-retcon timeline" or "the post-retcon timeline" as if there's only one of each of them for a general Retcons happened, with everything in between being in some kind of nonsensical limbo, which I do recognize some people actually think is true, but I assert it's not. I've fought a lot of arguments over it, and I'm not sure how many people understood the basic implications of it when they went on, (I certainly didn't, at first) but it's the crux of the whole thing? Everyone should agree that the iteration of P-Space before any retcons made sense by its own rules, because that's tautological, (although some people don't think that iteration necessarily existed, starting the whole thing with part of a retcon loop "in play", so there's that exception), and I hope anyone who cares any about retcon theory should hope the last iteration, the one with all the retcons in play, should also make sense by P-Space's rules. Or the whole business wasn't worth mapping out in the first place, frankly. But, if the starting product makes sense, and the ending product makes sense, then either the middle products make sense, or the process making the difference doesn't. ^Cotangent! It seems silly, to me, to go about just assuming something doesn't make sense when you can make it make sense. That last bit of logic was disagreed with, misunderstood, or just not made properly evident, in a fair number of cases, which led to counterpoints like "Or, the system might not make sense, so your statements about it could be wrong", which, ultimately, aren't so much wrong as just useless? ^{Continued for fear of breaking the format} For the record, if you don't think the system makes sense, and thus my fledgling efforts were pointless, that's fine. But that means you can't really get much farther than "Well, I think that one weird opening assumption of yours isn't necessarily true", to which I can't say much but "Yeah, you're right, it isn't, but I can't get anywhere if it isn't, so it's kinda my postulate", at which point probably I and the figurative third-person you there should go and talk about something else. So, basically, if you really engage in the model, and don't say "I don't think your predicates are actually necessary for a sensible model, and here's why", but argue against the following logic and the conclusions, it means that the arguments against it should be assuming the predicates, too. It's only good form. ^{And the last bit.} But a fair number of people, including myself, didn't adhere to that good form; I think a lot of it was miscommunication, no small part my own, and the fact that I only really realized my predicates after already being entrenched in a long argument already. (If you were wondering about why my retcon theory has something of a Reputation, and the fact that I've written this much in a single post and still am not done, wasn't enough, it's basically a combination of me being bad at clearly expressing things some times, using a lot of impromptu and pseudotechnical jargon, and what's elaborated in those labelnotes, there; rather, all the arguments that stuff led to.)

So, if you are of the mind that the starting product, ending product, middling product, or process leading from the first through the third to the second, didn't make sense, well, carry on. If you have a competing model that disagrees with what I've said, be it something you've formulated or just how you make sense of it all in your head, that disagrees with mine, that works too. If you just don't care, I'm kind of surprised you've read this far. Anyways, if you're one of those, you can safely disregard my assertion about the middle parts and process making sense, which was what I was talking about before yet another tangent, which I mostly hid away for the common good. Hell, even if you're not one of those, you can, I'm not gonna tell you no.

End retcon tangent two.

So, basically, that big tangent was just to justify why there have to be more than just a "pre-retcon timeline" and "post-retcon timeline". There's iterations equal to one plus the number of retcons, minus the number of "pre-standing" retcons, which are the theoretical idea of a retcon having always been in effect, even in the very first state, like some people suggest everyone retporting in during Caliborn's Masterpiece had to be. Which would mean that they existed before they happened, so, when they're done, nothing really happened. That'd make the retcons that were always already present either not retcons at all, or super-retroactive, depending on how you look at it, which are both things that I, in my professional opinion, find a bit dumb.

Anyways. All that, right up there? That was fun to write out, and I cranked it all out in response to, like, four fairly innocuous sentences, max. That's because I love talking about this shit, and can just expound and expound more or less endlessly, because it's fun.

Whereas, trying to fit it to correspond to later events in the comic? It's not, not at all. I've got the creeping suspicion that it's just not making sense anymore, since I've got at least one Plot Hole, and now we have apparent inconsistencies with how the retcons were previously shown working, at first with a plausible mechanic for the differences (Terezi's Mindy influence), but none in sight with Caliborn's Masterpiece's apparent necessitation of a retcon before it should have happened. The conversation loop with Jade and Dave presents similar problems, but at least there's a state before the first step in those.

I can Hand Wave the Plot Hole and try and work out explanations for the latter, but they don't assuage the feeling that the retcons aren't following a consistent mechanism anymore. Or at least, not the one they were before; put shortly, causality's not being so rigidly conserved.

Maybe I'm wrong, and letting dissatisfaction with recent developments poison the attitude I examine the new events in; maybe I was just always wrong and Hussie didn't particularly care about causal consistency; or maybe he just recently dropped it in the name of what he thought would make a better ending, or for some other reason.

But, yeah. For all my gripes with it at present, I'm still wearing that tarnished crown of "Retcon Model", and probably will for as long as I hang around here. But, I should probably find some other fictional cosmology to develop; I was imagining stripping out the early meta-time model, earlier, but maybe I should craft something more wholesale. There's not much to do with that model, now that I've made it, aside from welding it into a setting, and I'm not actually all that interested in time travel beyond the actual mechanics of it. So I could try for something else? But I'm not sure what to start with, or what to do with it. More complex planar mechanics in Dungeons & Dragons would be one thing, but the constraints of D&D require tying it into classical elements and alignments, somehow, but... those, as metaphysical elements of great import, aren't exactly my thing.

Anyways. I hope you enjoyed this giant post, that, sadly, is not a page-ender.

edited 9th Oct '15 12:21:47 PM by RaichuKFM

I have no idea what you just said, but good job at expressing it.

Raichu, if you want a page ender, make sure it's the 25th post.

Wish I read what you said though instead of TLD Ring it and vaguely seeing retcon stuff. But I'm way too busy drawing an online bday gift for a lovely cosplayer friend of mine and yawning when I look at my bed. Beds are biologically programmed to make you feel asleep when you look at them, you know.

I promise I'll read it one day though. I'm probably the only person here (save Gilphon) to be totally interested to your wall of texts. Maybe because I have to potential to write wall of texts too, but I'm too lazy to do it. Save for that one theory/continuity realization I barely remember doing. Was it about Dirk maybe? I think so.

Yeah, I know that page-enders are the ones with numbers divisible by 25. If there were only two posts or so until that happened, I would have waited, but I wasn't gonna just hope for twelve to happen before I had to go, so, why bother waiting.

Dammit Raichu I'm actually somewhat interested in what you have to say, but you can't except me to make sense of that mess.

What I will say is that I find your use of 'before' and 'after' retcon states as a meaningful concept is somewhat suspect. I'd argue that it's probably more along the lines of the retcon power not trumping P-Space's ability to have every possible state to be something that always already happened- the rules are just a bit different from normal time travel. Typheus was ready for the retcon power, after all, which (to me) means it was always baked in as thing John might be able to do.

But I'm not certain if that's even disagreeing with you or not.

edited 9th Oct '15 2:24:28 PM by Gilphon

tfw you say a small thing and get a wall of text

i kinda read all that i just couldnt follow most of the second tangent

Bambi has never been closer to the colour of Terezi's blood than he is right now.

edited 9th Oct '15 2:49:19 PM by Elfive

This sounded like me and it turns out it was.

i have no idea what you just said

Teal Deer.

edited 9th Oct '15 3:19:42 PM by Gilphon

I'm not even directly referring to the wall of text (I've made my fair share while in this fanbase), but I think there was a certain point where Homestuck literally just turned into calculus and we all just kind of rolled with it.

At this phase in the story I'm not even really sure what's going on anymore. I'm not so much concerned with how the retcons worked so much as the narrative implications of the retcons so much as how rewriting a good third of the story to better fit the endgame events could ever be justified at all. There are so many plot strings in the air that I can't possibly see how Hussie'll manage to tie them all in with a satisfying conclusion, and even if that DOES all happen I'm not even sure I care as much as I should.

I think sometime in the story I just kind of stopped caring about the main cast that we were following because of just how much we've been with them. I want Hivebent so much because of how it introduces so many new things and characters to the Homestuck canon, because I'm really getting tired of the current crop. They aren't bad characters, but I just think there was a certain point where I kind of stopped caring, focusing more on the resolution of abstract narrative character arcs than any sort of emotional attachment to the characters themselves.

well sorry i'm not up to that yet but was spoilered

you just spoilered me even more

i hope you're happy

ANYWAY you just debunked my reason not to kill Vriska! *prepares dimension-hopper and weapon*

"Don't read the discussions until you're caught up" is pretty much fanbases 101.