How did this guy stick to such a crazy work schedule? I just don't understand it

How did this guy stick to such a crazy work schedule? I just don't understand it.

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he graduated with a degree at 21 and worked in a decent paying field for years before he ever considered doing comics as a serious career endeavor. i think whistles came out when he was 23? he started MSPA at 25, and was 28 when homestuck started, it also helped that his parents were fairly affluent so he never had to worry about things like student loans.

i say this because he had a money buffer to literally just say "fuck actually going to work, i'm going to pursue my artist career!" and he poured his life into it

one of the few, one of the lucky

I understand that financial freedom allowed him to undertake the endeavor, but what about the sheer focus needed for multiple daily updates?

In a way, that's a kind of talent that only a few people posses.

what was his career before comics?

professional autist

He's probably some sort of genius. No dick sucking. His ideas in problem sleuth and sheer mechanical scope in early HS are insane.

He did some kind of programming for his dad's company I think. He said something about it on his blogspot years ago

link?

I couldn't find anything on his blogspot so he may have deleted it or I read it elsewhere.
But I did find this reddit.com/r/homestuck/comments/4s1vm9/did_hussie_have_a_job/
which confirms I didn't imagine it

Well.... In the end he didn't, and that's what fucked over Homestuck.

He worked super hard until the moment he didn't

I can relate, I literally wrote a million word fantasy epic over three years and now am so burnt out that the only things I can do are watch youtube videos and argue with strangers on the internet

Might need some adderall or something to get me moving again

By being dedicated to his work

It wasn't lack of dedication that fucked Hussie or Homestuck though.

Act 6 lasted for four fucking years - now compare that to Acts 1-5, which were done in two(And make no mistake Act 6 is longer than Acts 1-5 combined)

Yet despite him working so much on Act 6, Act 6 is where the story fell apart

He programmed the Perrybible Fellowship comic website as well.

The website used to say "programmed by Andrew H" but it was taken down.

Better question - What went wrong?

Remember when it seemed like Homestuck was the toast of the town?

he was a glorified NEET living the dream of making his waifus come to life

now they are my waifus.
When he dies they will live on through ME.

do not worry hussie, vriska is in good hands

Today I learnt that many prominent papers published in the 1940s on the topic of theoretical time travel, used billiard balls as subjects rather than humans.

The more you know.

Andrew approached homestuck with a few things in mind I believe. He wanted to portray internet culture. And he also had the ending and the mechanics of the story in place very early on. Homestuck ultimately is a creation myth with the four kids as the Gods of creation. But the stories within that mythology he left up to the reader. The story was always going to end with the genesis frog being created and the new universe, but the steps inbetween he based on reader suggestions or popular fandom trends.

In that sense, Homestuck became shit because of the trolls. Because the trolls attracted a more larger, and more terrible, audience. And Andrew continued his plan of having the central elements of the story planned from the start but having the journey decided by the fandom. And when the fandom became obsessed with teen romance and drama and bullshit, the story went to shit. The trolls are to blame for attracting a shitty fandom. Andrew just kept to his plan.

But Hivebent was good. I know people hate Vriska, but Act 5 Vriska was great.

Mostly cause she died and had a complete albiet tragic albeit well deserved fate

This isn't about the quality of the trolls. It's about who they attracted. The trolls were added at a time when the fandom was still pretty good and, as Andrew based story directions in part on the fandom, the story was still solid. But the trolls attracted a terrible fandom. And the story became terrible as Andrew sought to take ideas from these new additions to the fandom.

read the rest of his post, he agrees

But didn't Hussie disable User Prompts in Act 5?

User prompts were a more direct way of taking user input. But there are a lot of different ways of taking ideas from the fandom. It's about reading the mood of the fandom and trying to piece together story elements that you think they will enjoy. It could be fanart, theories on the story direction, cosplay ideas; all sorts of things.

Imagine Andrew as a chef. Homestuck started with a table of 4 patrons who would shout out ideas on what they wanted to eat. Andrew would take one of the suggestions and make that food for the table. There was also table talk on what would be a fun thing to eat or speculation on what Andrew could be making. Some of the patrons even made their own dishes or brought their own ingredients. As Andrew gained a reputation for cooking good food, more patrons would visit his restaurant. His success as a chef depended on pleasing his current patrons as well as attracting new ones.

However, when he introduced the trolls, something he created to please his current patrons as well as attract new ones, the number of patrons visiting his restaurant exploded. Instead of a table of 4, you had a full restaurant of 400 people all yelling what they thought was a good idea. Andrew stopped taking direct orders as, with 400 people, any potential idea was always possible. However, that doesn't mean he stopped listening to table talk, speculation, or looking at what dishes his patrons created or the ingredients they brought with them. Unfortunately, the new patrons had terrible taste and shit ideas. And Andrew started creating terrible dishes that the new fandom devoured relentlessly. His fandom grew, but the quality of the restaurant plummeted.

I think you're putting undue blame on the "fanbase" here.

Sure, Act 5 opened Homestuck to a wider audience, but Hussie had no obligation or reason to change the story to please them

In fact it seems like a rather silly mistake, as his natural process is what attracted that wider audience in the first place

Don't forget how the ingredients that brought these new patrons got stale fast, so they left, and the totality of all the ingredients alienated the majority, leaving Andrew's frankenstein's dish pleasing nobody.

Andrew wasn't forced to take ideas from the fandom. It was his intent from the start. It's the nature of mspaintadventures. The means of taking fandom input just evolved.

...

fuelled by pure autism

I would have loved if Homestuck continued in the same vein as Act 4 to the end, and was twice as short. It had the potential to be a masterpiece, instead of the pile of shit that no one wants to be associated with now (including its creator).

But user, that story already exists.

It's called Problem Sleuth.

For real though, if that did happen, Homestuck would be just as unknown as MSPA and Andrew were before tumblr and deviantart caught on in act 5.

A masterpiece maybe, but an unknown one.

A troubled genius, too.

>Vriska
>not Terezi

>terezi
she's not loyal and would sleep around like the whore she is

>student loans.
The one thing I fear after graduation.

This is a good metaphor for sure, but it still leaves me wondering, why /did/ the trolls attracted a new, shittier audience? The common explanation around these parts seems to be that, like the Sonic friends or that one show, they provided a simple template to create OCs. Fair enough, but what percentage of the newcomers was into that? Not most of them, probably. It's got to be more than just that.

I have no answer here myself. Maybe, like eith Sonic, it's the "attitude" that attracted the worst fans?

I would appreciate more opinions and wild speculation on the matter.

the quirks were probably a big part of it

Is AH bipolar?

yeah, it was a simple, relatable way to discuss causality and how wormholes and shit could hypothetically fuck it up

i seem to remember my high school physics teacher talking about the billiards thought experiments a bit

>but what percentage of the newcomers was into that? Not most of them, probably
Remember when Mortis Ghost's OFF was flavour of the month? Why was that popular? As far as I can tell it wasn't the french surrealism, nor the atmosphere, or the puzzles, hell, they're panned. It was basically husbando material and 'muh dark story'. It's superficial as hell.

There were homestuck 'fans' who read half of act 5 and then dressed up in cosplay representing HS as a whole to the public, hell, somebody in the current mpsa /cgl/ thread said they were on a homestuck panel having not even read homestuck.

"But for whatever it's worth, I've never actually had a job."

All the programming he did was hobbies or favors, not part of a job.

I'm completely convinced you are Andrew Hussie now. You've used the same wording he used when I met him at PAX.

Andrew, please, reveal more facts about SBURB.

I downloaded OFF (and Space Funeral before that) thanks to a random blog post recommending it, so I'm mostly unaware of the fandom. A shame if it's that bad.

It was because of shipping, silly.

That's literally all it takes. That troll romance system instantly manifested a horde of teenage girl fans. The OC potential was just a bonus.

The story for OFF was actually pretty good. It was simple, but interesting. It left a lot up to interpretation. Otherwise I guess it was the weird art style that drew people in, because the gameplay was shit.

What I don't understand is why it got so fucking popular that many years after it released

when the gigapause started, the first english translation of OFF had just completed, and gained small traction on a few tumblr blogs, but then the HS fandom found it. it was pretty much the only thing to tide the homestuck fandom over until updates. only updates never arrived and they jumped ship from OFF to steven universe.

Caveat: Kismesis is a totally useful concept to have a word for. I'm glad Hussie came up with it.

I found that most of the OFF fandom jumped ship to Undertale, actually. Since OFF is such a tiny game, you can speculate all you want, but you'll run out of material pretty quickly. The fandom only stayed alive as long as it did because of fancontent incessantly spiralling into very far removed AUs.
That's when I had to leave, anyway.

first translation was in '11 actually, that's where the cult following began, correct about homestuck popularizing it though.

>OFF fandom jumped ship to Undertale
OFF as a fandom had been dead for nearly 2 years before undertale came around, though I will say that an indie game made by a guy related to homestuck was prime bait for their return.

What is there that's like Homestuck that isn't Homestuck and preferably is still ongoing? Comics or plain old prose or whatever.

That's a good point. I guess I didn't notice because I was still in the middle of it.

If you haven't watched LOST yet I would recommend that despite what you hear about the ending. Andrew said that lost was an inspiration and that if he were to make a TV show, it'd be in the same vein.

I was into it before I got into homestuck, and I must say, the feeling of magic that you get when you start piecing the exile narrative together feels very much the same in lost.

then again this was like 7 years ago so I may be overstating/romanticizing it.

It's funny how the HS and the SU fandom are both progressive as fuck, to about an equal degree, but the works they are built around aren't nearly the same that way.

Steven Universe is literally just Homestuck the cartoon

Unsong

no

SU: gay, cutesy aesthetic, ptsd, holy shit the only ftm representation I've ever seen and lgbt characters who are allowed to be shitty people

Homestuck: convoluted, sprite aesthetic, nobody has ptsd or is affected by experiences at all, gay pairings (well pretty much all pairings) feel stale.

both are character-based and have aliens.

Lovecraft and Tolkien. Similar scope, plus their mythos are never over. As a bonus you get literate fans who aren't Tumblr.

Fine Structure by Ra (web thing) has a lot of the same timefuckery and plot threads coming together; it's got the YEARS IN THE FUTURE thing going on too.

Basic premise is that people discover a script which contains all the physical laws of the universe, but when somebody tries to exploit a law with certain tech, it only works once and the universe reacts to destroy the offender.

obligatory Worm rec. (twig is better though)

>Lovecraft
Please no, I'm a big lovecraft fan, but when you say lovecraft you really mean August Derleth. That's where all the stuff the fans want is. Actual lovecraft (no elitsm intended, really) is more akin to blackwood or chambers, and you won't see people outside of small circles reading that. I don't mean to be a litfag, but come on.

Lovecraft was also inspired by Lord Dunsany's work, and I think that'd be more appealing to Homestuck fans, just Lovecraft is more horror-focused (literally he is the godfather of modern horror, he's why Zombies are a thing)

Horror is something Homestuck never really tackled, apart from Gamzee, which I think is a shame. Damara/Handmaid's situation alone is prime horror material.

You are comparing things based on SJW content

SJW please leave.

How odd. I know several people who read Lovecraft but I've never met anyone who's actually read Derleth - and I've met a Ligotti fan IRL. (Unless what you mean is who's had the greatest influence on the "plush Cthulhu" culture of today.)

>Lord Dunsany
good point. I'm sure you can understand what I mean when I say that it isn't what people are expecting in terms of a 'mythos' as compared to what popular culture sees lovecraft as.

>Unless what you mean is who's had the greatest influence on the "plush Cthulhu" culture of today
that is precisely what I mean, it triggers me hard and I usually make the assumption that that is what people are referring to when they talk about lovecraft.

anyway this is completely unrelated, but has anyone here read discworld? How does it compare to Homestuck? I hear it's pretty meta and has a quirky sense of humour along with it's worldbuilding. so the parallel sort of makes sense

Twig will be better when it finishes. Worm would be better by Twig if we only compared them from the beginning up to current word count, because it hadn't made it to the timeskip yet.

Seconding Worm, and Fine Structure. Ra (I think you mixed his second story with the author, qtdb or something) is weirder. Both stories are fucking weird, to be honest. Really not for everyone.

Unsong is fucking amazing, but it's nothing like Homestuck. It reminds me of Pratchett and Adams being imitated by Eliezer Yudkowsky or a shitty metaphor like that.

I think I've figured something out.

At their purest form, Life and Doom represent the Tone of the story. Life is for Fun, Doom is for Serious.

Whereas Hope and Rage are about the Suspension of Disbelief. If you have Hope, anything is Believable, thus Rage is about Contrivance (rip Textalks) where actions are unrealistically impossible.

What do you think?

Mods delete this thread for off-topic and banned thread topics, okay? Thanks.

>banned thread topics
wanna extrapolate on that? because this happens to be about an author of many works, it just so happens we got onto talking about his most popular, which by the way has not been banned on this board.

You're not, LOST still holds up, but he's going to have to force himself through early season 3 and 6.

This is a thread about a comic artist making comics, how the fuck is it offtopic?

Sorry. Just a former #1 fan who jumped off just in time for the fandom to forget me.

It has >dat lore but Scott Alexander's presentation of the plot is too straightforward to compare. He must have written enough nonfiction to be viscerally disgusted by any accidental lack of clarity in the storytelling.

1. He had virtually unlimited free time to update after merch sales got to the point he could live off his webcomic alone

2. The majority of the updates were text-based and much less time intensive to do than drawings.

3. The baseline character art of Homestuck is barely above a Madness character and much easier to draw than the full-bodied "hero mode" updates.

4. Even when he DID do art updates he frequently fucked up and put out lazy shit (armless Karkat, any time a background character is just a smudge with some limbs)

5. The most visually intense updates were either not done by him at all (the playable flash games) or otherwise outsourced to other artists (virtually any [S] updates)


That being said, he showed a very impressive amount of dedication in making as much content as he did, but commercial artists would laugh in your face if you told them he had a "crazy" work schedule.

You realize he only brought back Vriska because he knew it would piss people off right

>3. The baseline character art of Homestuck is barely above a Madness character and much easier to draw than the full-bodied "hero mode" updates.
didn't andrew state at one point that editing sprite mode became such a hassle that he generally tried to avoid it partway through act 6?

I think because he worked off a template for cohesion, but it's his own fault if he tried to machine his stuff out. I don't doubt it was probably tedious to account for so much shit, but it's not like the guy was pulling mangaka-level art assets out of his ass on a daily basis.

Let's revise what else you need for a successful web comic. Never mind if it's good or evil.

1. Long and convoluted plot.
2. Characters that fans can ship.
3. regular updates.
4. expressive art style.
5. Forums and interactivity.
6. OC potential, maybe.
7. Quality dialog.

What did I miss?

Other than #3 I can think of successful webcomics that have none of those

Why was it such a pain?

new outstanding webcomic

youtu.be/FHxJRhRFd9A

I rarely complain about "camera work" in comics but this one had very annoying camera angles for some reason.

You're joking, right? It takes 20 pages for a character to exit the room after getting off a bed, and it's like a parody of bad tumblr design, both in story and appearance.

The only reason you even know about Neokosmos is that the author is friends with Andrew and he shilled the webcomic for her. It's got no good features whatsoever.

>You're joking, right? It takes 20 pages for a character to exit the room after getting off a bed, and it's like a parody of bad tumblr design, both in story and appearance.

We're talking about neokosmos, not homestuck.

>tfw when you get to be one of these

Homestuck existed way before Tumblr became popular, kiddo.

>anyway this is completely unrelated, but has anyone here read discworld? How does it compare to Homestuck? I hear it's pretty meta and has a quirky sense of humour along with it's worldbuilding. so the parallel sort of makes sense
I have never wanted to kill myself as badly in my entire life as I do after reading this. Thank you.

Worm is amazing
Haven't gotten to Twig yet though, but I plan on reading it

>student loans.
is that a real thing in america or just a meme

nova nigga

It is painfully real
tfw when I have $60,000 in student loans

Only idiots get student loans

Fuck nigga I would have to work 10 years with the pay I have now to have that much. Without paying for food and apartment.

Every doctor and lawyer that didn't qualify for scholarships is laughing in your face right now.

And for each one of those, there's 100 idiots that have $50,000+ in debt because they took a dumb major like women's studies

I'm starting to think school wasn't worth it
Despite getting good grades and doing things like independent studies and assisted research I'm having trouble finding a job that isn't minimum wage working at a McDonald's or some shit

Being in college is basically the last bit of assistance you'll ever get in finding a job before you're thrown to the wolves. Internships, part-time work, even a lot of entry level shit won't give you a second look if you're older than college aged. Take advantage of that shit while you still have it, man.

I just graduated this past May

If you date me, you won't have to worry about money

Woah there user
you wouldn't want to date me anyway, trust me

I dunno, I'm pretty lonely. Just hang out and play Streets of Rage 2 with me