STROGGSTUCK!

I'm from a particular group of internet dwellers, a generation who were first dipped into the fetid waters of the web just as it was gestating. Hacks on LinkedIn call us 'Digital Natives', humans call us 90's kids, and I... well I just call us weird. Anyway, because of that whole generational homogenisation that happens in the information age, there were a few experiences, events, THINGS that every one of us 90's weirdos with a computer was exposed to... one way or another.

A particularly loud example was the webcomic Homestuck

This thing was EVERYWHERE, memes, fan comics, conventions, merch.. Even if you couldn't give the smallest of fucks, you will, at the very least have been aware of it just by osmosis. Until February of this year I was not one of them.

As nightmares tend to do, this all started with an innocent question:

"What the hell was Homestuck again? It had something to do with grey paint right?"

It took my friends all but forty seconds to realise I wasn't talking out of my arse, and that they'd been handed the mother of all opportunities. Here was this (otherwise) normal woman who'd lived through the webcomics meteoric rise and peak, yet completely and utterly missed the boat. Like a remote amazonian tribe or medieval anchoress completely unexposed, naive to the long since faded hype and furore.

The perfect person to tell them if it was a good as they remember

So, drunk in the shower I began reading the webcomic that had a near chokehold on particular corners of the internet, cataloguing my thoughts in a stream of consciousness on a Discord thread. And now that I'm about of a quarter of they way through I can confidently say.. its weird. Yes, the comic itself is weird as fuck, I mean the first EIGHT HUNDRED pages were a garbled mess of data structure jokes, jabs at the early 2000's internet and the author's own batshit sense of humour. No, what’s weird is me reading it in the here and now. Yeah, an adult in her mid 30's solo-reading long after the party has ended was always going to be a different experience, however that's not the weird part.

Its how much is still relevant..

The general pacing of the jokes, theme, and especially the chatlogs pesterlogs are still kind of relevant. Not so much in an endearing classic kind of way, but more an arrested development. Did we "not grow up" or was this thing a little more ahead of its time than people give it credit for? Who knows, or cares!? But its something that was completely unexpected, and after all there's still another SIX THOUSAND pages to go, plenty of time for it to get better or worse.

In the meantime I'll keep ploughing on, as painful as the first leg was we're genuinely having a blast. So much so, that I'll be pulling my liveblog out of that discord thread and onto its own site, so it can live on as the digital curio that it is.