Bottom line up front

Since November 2023 The Unofficial Homestuck Collection has been entangled in legal discussions with Homestuck and Andrew Hussie.¹ This has gone disastrously bad, from almost the very beginning.

Since Andrew has now sent us a DMCA takedown demand and persistently threatened us with spurious lawsuits, I am taking down The Unofficial Homestuck Collection’s web presence at Homestuck’s demand. The current set of legal demands does not affect the GitHub repository itself, so releases of the reader are still available. An outdated copy of the reader and some assets are currently also available from a copy Homestuck made of the collection against our wishes (homestuck.github.io) — more on this later. However, the original team behind the collection (Bambosh and Gio) has been forced to stop supporting our work.

This was not driven by copyright concern, community relations, or any healthy professionalism, but an unprofessional spite and demand for control on the part of Andrew Hussie.

Hostile Takeover

In November 2023 Homestuck sent me and Bambosh (co-creators of the UHC) an offer to collaborate on The Unofficial Homestuck Collection. We initially engaged with this offer because it came with a commitment to respect the project’s independence and for the collaboration to be fully insulated from previous personal grievances.

But this pretense of constructive collaboration turned out to be false almost immediately. For the entire period of time since the first communication — now multiple years — Homestuck has used threats, lies, legal shakedowns, and other psychological pressure tactics to attempt to seize control of The Unofficial Homestuck Collection in a hostile takeover. There was never a legal basis for Homestuck to control The Unofficial collection, and so they have been attempting to use extra-legal tactics to do so.

While the archival impact is unfortunate, the main complaint here is not that we were entitled to distribute Homestuck and it’s wrong that we’ve had to stop. We have no particular legal right to reproduce or distribute the copyrighted Homestuck material, and so did not feel entitled to continue doing it. The fact that executing the takedown demands we’ve received results in material being inaccessible is a side effect of a deeper problem.

The problem is that the way Andrew acted is completely unacceptable. They demanded control over work that was not theirs, demanded we denounce their personal enemies, demanded we recant previous criticisms, and more. This was all done under a pretense of constructive collaboration with the community that turned out to be false from the beginning. Ultimately Andrew has demanded (in violation of their own assurances) that we denounce previous criticism of Homestuck management and give full managerial control over the independent Collection project over to Andrew and their chosen delegates. Under this extortion we would be required to participate in Andrew’s attempt to sweep their past professional misconduct under the rug, and we would remain subordinate to any other demands they made to use the project to attempt to control the fan community.

We have not allowed this hostile takeover to happen to the UHC. Since Andrew has fully committed to hostility towards us and fan projects in general and demanded things we cannot give them, I’m choosing to disengage rather than face a perpetual series of baseless legal attacks and other harassment.

SUPERHOT VR released in 2017. Then in 2021 the game’s entire story was removed.

What’s happened here is fascinating, but somehow nobody has talked about it seriously. Because it’s censorship in a video game — a topic the gaming community cannot be normal about — it is nearly impossible to even think about the issue through all the noise. Anyone aware of this topic at all seems to be screaming about Woke, or complaining about games becoming “political”, as if “political” is just a switch you can throw to make media worse.

Wikipedia summarizes the discourse as:

The choice to remove these games led to the game getting review bombed on Steam, with some users claiming that Superhot Team was giving in to “snowflakes” and others believing it to be a form of virtue signaling

But this is insane! A historically significant VR game — one of the greatest of all time — had one of its defining characteristics removed, without any explanation or replacement. This isn’t some Stellar Blade fake controversy, something weird happened here. There are real, understandable things to object to, and none of them are right-wing culture war buzzwords.

But what is SUPERHOT?

SUPERHOT was originally developed for the 2013 7 Day FPS Challenge game jam by Polish team “The Bricky Blues”, directed by Piotr Iwanicki. In September 2013 it was released on the Blue Brick Software and Embedded Systems website in three separate “episodes” because the levels were developed in parallel in three separate unity projects for the jam.

After the demo received positive feedback, SUPERHOT went to Kickstarter (after they got Kickstarter to support Poland) and was successfully overfunded in June 2014. (With the success of SUPERHOT, the Blue Brick company seems to have been abandoned.) SUPERHOT (2016) was then released in February.

If¹ you’ve been subjected to advertisements on the internet sometime in the past year, you might have seen advertisements for the app Replika. It’s a chatbot app, but personalized, and designed to be a friend that you form a relationship with.

That’s not why you’d remember the advertisements though. You’d remember the advertisements because they were like this:

And, despite these being mobile app ads (and, frankly, really poorly-constructed ones at that) the ERP function was a runaway success. According to founder Eugenia Kuyda the majority of Replika subscribers had a romantic relationship with their “rep”, and accounts point to those relationships getting as explicit as their participants wanted to go:

So it’s probably not a stretch of the imagination to think this whole product was a ticking time bomb. And — on Valentine’s day, no less — that bomb went off. Not in the form of a rape or a suicide or a manifesto pointing to Replika, but in a form much more dangerous: a quiet change in corporate policy.

Features started quietly breaking as early as January, and the whispers sounded bad for ERP, but the final nail in the coffin was the official statement from founder Eugenia Kuyda:

“update” - Kuyda, Feb 12 These filters are here to stay and are necessary to ensure that Replika remains a safe and secure platform for everyone.

I started Replika with a mission to create a friend for everyone, a 24/7 companion that is non-judgmental and helps people feel better. I believe that this can only be achieved by prioritizing safety and creating a secure user experience, and it’s impossible to do so while also allowing access to unfiltered models.

People just had their girlfriends killed off by policy. Things got real bad. The Replika community exploded in rage and disappointment, and for weeks the pinned post on the Replika subreddit was a collection of mental health resources including a suicide hotline.

Cringe!

First, let me deal with the elephant in the room: no longer being able to sext a chatbot sounds like an incredibly trivial thing to be upset about, and might even be a step in the right direction. But these factors are actually what make this story so dangerous.

These unserious, “trivial” scenarios are where new dangers edge in first. Destructive policy is never just implemented in serious situations that disadvantage relatable people first, it’s always normalized by starting with edge cases and people who can be framed as Other, or somehow deviant.

It’s easy to mock the customers who were hurt here. What kind of loser develops an emotional dependency on an erotic chatbot? First, having read accounts, it turns out the answer to that question is everyone. But this is a product that’s targeted at and specifically addresses the needs of people who are lonely and thus specifically emotionally vulnerable, which should make it worse to inflict suffering on them and endanger their mental health, not somehow funny. Nothing I have to content-warning the way I did this post is funny.

Virtual pets

So how do we actually categorize what a replika is, given what a novel thing it is? What is a personalized companion AI? I argue they’re pets.

Sonic ‘06 is infamously bad. It’s glitchy, it’s a meme, et cetera. But actually, it turns out that it’s really bad. It’s a bad game. I played it. I played so much of it. I own the DLC. It’s honestly hard to describe. So here’s a description.

I’m trying not to include general shoddiness here, which there is a lot of. Also, I’m not numbering them. This isn’t Buzzfeed.

---

There is “Very Hard” mode DLC. You could pay money for it. This shipped after the game released and they knew about the issues. Sega’s reaction after shipping Sonic ‘06 was to try to charge people for more Sonic ‘06.

In addition to the hard mode DLC, there is DLC for an extra story called “TEAM ATTACK AMIGO”, where you play through a number of stages as side characters. Like End Of The World, you have to finish the whole gauntlet in one go with one pool of lives.

Apparently the game basically loads the whole overworld into memory any time the item layout changes or anything needs to be repositioned, even though really everything is in memory that should be there. This leads to hell situations like the box counting minigame. Oh god, the box counting minigame.

Sometimes steam will give you a coupon for a random game that isn’t very popular. And so this is how my evening went:

One of your questions was whether I thought Gio was a stalker. It’s my personal take that he probably does not technically qualify as one, but I also don’t think it’s a simple “no” either, given his antagonistic fixation toward people at WP, and his persistent invasiveness has made the women at WP uncomfortable.

Suffice to say for now, I don’t trust him, I will never speak to him, and probably no one from WP ever will either.

After the backer update came out, I took at look at Gio’s revisions to his article, and unsurprisingly, he just rearranged all the new facts so that he could draw all the same basic negative conclusions he’d already drawn.

I think this would be a bizarre conclusion to reach for anyone who was looking at that update objectively, and just indicates that the facts never really mattered because he had already made up his mind.

The only explanation is what everyone at WP suspected all along.
He’s a troll.

*record scratch*
*freeze-frame*
You’re probably wondering how I got into this situation.

That’s right, I’m writing a story about me this time. It’s my blog, after all. First I wrote a history, then reported on a rumor, and now it’s time to tell the story of this dramatic little farce.

This point, early October 2020, is when I originally published this article. Time keeps ticking on, and Hiveswap updates continue to slowly drip out.

October 2020

Act 2 Trailer

Homestuck@homestuck

Sun Oct 25 20:12:59 +0000 2020

A new trailer is posted for Hiveswap Act 2. It opens with “years ago, but not many” as a reference to how slow the development process has been going, I guess?

Hiveswap Act 2 is delayed to November 2020.

Hiveswap.com is also updated with a more “streamlined” design. The new design removes many links to other projects and independent artists that were previously only accessible through the Hiveswap home page, so all of that content is now inaccessible unless you have a direct link already.

In the background, the entire whatpumpkin.com domain now force-redirects to hiveswap.com, breaking innumerable important links like this one and this one and that one.

The new website also has a screenshot with this troll who has not previously been seen in promotional material or as part of the Troll Call. This is Fefsprites’ fantroll Idarat Catlaz, in the game due to them winning the comic contest. Nice!

When I wrote the Hiveswap article, I left a note asking for people to contact me if there were any facts I got wrong or major events I missed. A number of people took me up on that, which I am thankful for.

However, there was one big report I got that was too significant to just edit into the article. Because these allegations were new, and from a credible source, I thought they warranted their own article and research.

By the request of the source (because Andrew is known to be aggressively litigious), I have edited our conversation into a synthetic document summarizing their position. This is a summary of the claims from the source to preserve their anonymity and ensure clarity. I am not yet asserting anything, just stating what the source said; I’ll hold my personal comments until after the whole thing. Here is that report:

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Supposedly: What actually happened with The Odd Gentlemen

The biggest reason there’s an NDA in place about The Odd Gentlemen’s involvement is that Andrew wanted to cover up the fact that much of the blame is on Andrew’s failure to deliver a workable plan to the studio in the agreed-upon schedule.

While parts of the ipgd post are true, the post distorts what happened into a story designed to make Andrew look like he did no wrong. What actually happened is this:

Continuing from Viz Media and the release of Act 1....

November 2017

SBAHJ Kickstarter

Andrew Hussie, in conjunction with comedy writers KC Green and Dril, launched another Kickstarter for a hardcover spin-off of the Homestuck sub-comic Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff.

This campaign was a success (180% funded) and the book was written, printed, and shipped to backers in 2018. Make That Thing is a subsidiary of TopatoCo, a book publisher which previously handled MSPA merchandise.

One interesting note is that Andrew Hussie made a new Kickstarter account for this, possibly in violation of the Kickstarter terms of service, because Hiveswap is in such poor standing that Kickstarter has banned Andrew from starting more Kickstarter projects. If this account were set up just to evade the ban, that would explain it.

Troll Call

A newspost on mspaintadventures.com announces the “Troll Call”:

Continuing from the kickstarter campaign and the work of What Pumpkin NYC....

December 2015: WP NYC Dissolve & A New Look

Update #22 (Public)

We’ve been taking the last several months to pause production on Hiveswap and revise the overall approach to the game, as well as the visual direction, to make things a little more cost-efficient, and more rapidly producible over the full span of the series.

So. You may have seen this one coming. Maybe my language gave it away, or you just know what Hiveswap: Act 1 looks like.

But Hiveswap’s artstyle is 2D now. This means that all the previous assets for the characters and items that were made, shaded, and rendered in 3D won’t be used, including everything shown in the preview video, trailer video, and the rendered 3D screenshots.

Let’s hear more from Andrew(?) before we rush to judgement, though:

The real “story” of Hiveswap isn’t found in the universe of the game. Instead, when people talk about Hiveswap, the conversation is dominated by stories about the development and history of the game as a project, which started as a Kickstarter success story but then bounced from scandal to scandal for years. The story of how Andrew Hussie burned through a $2.5 million dollar investment over eight years to produce almost nothing is fascinating, convoluted, and poorly understood especially among newer Homestuck fans.

Right now, this meta-story mostly exists in the form of oral history. This is probably due to the fact that a lot of the key sources have now been deleted, but I think it’s also because it feels premature to write up a “postmortem” on a game’s development before it’s even an eighth of the way finished. Not canceled, just… in limbo. There is also significant pressure on people in the know — even fans who just lived through backing the project — to keep quiet about all this, for reasons I’ll get into.

I’m documenting the story so far so that the Hiveswap Story isn’t lost to time, and so there’s a decent summary of events so far, and maybe even so new Hiveswap fans can catch up. I dug through every page, announcement, interview, blog post, FAQ, and tweet I could find, and the culmination is this the most comprehensive — as far as I can tell — explanation of Hiveswap to date.