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MagnetoHydroDynamics comments on Rationality Quotes April 2012 - Less Wrong
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Andrew Hussie
Is there a reason all the b's have been replaced by 8's?
Character typing quirk in the original.
The typing quirks actually serve a purpose in the comic. Almost all communication among the characters takes place through chat logs, so the system provides a handy way to visually distinguish who's speaking. They also reinforce each character's personality and thematic associations - for example, the character quoted above (Aranea) is associated with spiders, arachnids in general, and the zodiac sign of Scorpio.
Unfortunately, all that is irrelevant in the context of a Rationality Quote.
<nitpick> The character in question is named Vriska. You're thinking of Aradia. </nitpick>
<nitpick> Actually, he's not -- the quote comes from Vriska's recently introduced pre-Scratch ancestor, who's got a similar but not identical typing style. </nitpick>
You're right, never mind. Still internalizing the new set of ancestors.
I hate to downvote Homestuck, but there I go, downvoting it. The typing quirks and chatlog-style layout are too specific to the comic.
Every time someone mentions Homestuck I resist (until now) posting this image macro.
I spent a few minutes reading Homestuck from the beginning, but it did not grab me at all. Is there a better place to start, or is it probably just not my cup of tea?
(Speaking of webcomics, I have a similar question about Dresden Codak.)
It starts pretty slow. Most of the really impressive bits, to my taste, don't start happening until well into act 4, but that's a few thousand (mostly single-panel, but still) pages of story to go through; unless you have a great deal of free time, I wouldn't hold it against you if you decided it's not for you by the end of act 2. Alternately, you might consider reading act 5.1 and going back if you like it; that's a largely independent and much more compressed storyline, although you'll lose some of the impact if you don't have the referents in the earlier parts of the story to compare against. You'll need to front-load a lot of tolerance for idiosyncratic typing that way, though.
Which brings me to quotes like MHD's: for quotation out of context, I would definitely have edited out the typing quirks (or ed8ed, if we're being cute). The quirks are more about characterization than content, and some of the characters are almost unreadable without a lot of practice.
Dresden Codak, incidentally, doesn't have this excuse. If you've read a couple dozen pages of that and didn't like it, you're probably not going to like the rest.
I've never been sure exactly where and how to get into the Dresden Codak storyline; but the one-offs like Caveman Science and the epistemological RPG are some of my favorite things on the internet.
The first real "storyline" Dresden Codak comic can be found here, That said, a lot of people I've spoken with simply don't like the Dresden Codak storyline in any form, and prefer the funny one-offs to any of the continuity-oriented comics.
A couple dozen pages of Dresden Codak is almost a third of the entire thing...
Perhaps it's just me, but I think it's sufficiently short that the naïve strategy (start at the beginning, click next until you get to the end) would work in this case.
(Incidentally, when you get to Hob #9, remember to read the description at the bottom of the page.)
I disagree with Nornagest: I think the best place to start is at the beginning. They pretty much had me at "fetch modus", I was hooked from then on. A lot of really inspirational things start to happen later on, f.ex. the Flash animation "[S] WV: Ascend", but it might be difficult to comprehend without reading the earlier parts.
I would also advise starting at the beginning because I'm starting to grow dissatisfied with the double-meta-reacharaound tack that the comic is taking now... The earlier chapters had a much more coherent story, IMO.