Q&A: January 2023

Hello again, dear readers! It's a brand new year, but it is still time to ANSWER some QUESTIONS.

As always, thank you so much to all the patrons that took their time to ask a question! And holy shit, there were a LOT of you this time around. This is the biggest Q&A post we've ever done! So much so that we decided to leave a few of them for next month, so if one of your questions didn't get answered this time around, it will be eventually! We are giving each and every one of you a kiss on the cheek, mwah.

1. Which [S] pages (or specific sections of [S] pages) were the easiest / hardest to develop?

KOHI: For me, I'd say that the most difficult was probably [S] Turnin: Check social media. Hoooly fuck, did that one have a lot of different features. We had a lot of different spreadsheets, assets, and designs for the content in that [S]. Scripting and layering everything to work as well as it does was a royal pain in the ass. The fact that we cranked it out in just over 3 months? Still unbelievable to me.

The easiest that comes to mind was probably [S] BEGIN: UPON THE TWELFTH HOUR. It was as short and as sweet as could be.

2. Have you considered making something akin to the Unofficial Homestuck Collection to archive DCRC content, or simply to be able to read stuff offline?

KOHI: It’s definitely something that I’ve considered. We’re still in the throes of researching and planning some large-scale changes to the site as a whole (we’ve been calling it DCRCv2), and some of the planned changes would potentially make it easier to build desktop or mobile applications from the revamped codebase. For now, though, we do have an API with public endpoints for published comic page data. I couldn’t tell you whether or not the data plays nice with TUHC, though.

3. What made you decide to start using fluid animation (like Jentha wandering through her Land) in the comic's GIFs?

AUSTIN: The comic has always sported a bit more frame-by-frame than its older brother, even going back to the earlier flashes we had smooth motion and even puppet rigging in [S] Calder: Elevate. It's not just there to show off! Even though we do more than a bit of that too.

EDDIE: Also we got Tyson on the team. IMPOSSIBLE not to want to show off a little when you have that kind of talent ready, willing and raring to go!

AUSTIN: Vast Error is a constantly evolving beast in all forms, art style included. It's not just iterating from its source material, but also evolving from it and finding new methods to showcase that. Including these types of animations help emphasize what we want to accomplish with the story. We're using our medium to its fullest advantage, and when you get offered high-quality 2D sakuga you don't just say: "eh, no thanks."

4. Snowbound Blood Vol. 3 mentions unpronouncable nonsense names like "Zhmbfg" are common enough for people like Secily to make pseudonyms out of, yet in the comic proper at least three confirmed characters have had their names changed. If names are that freely changeable why wouldn't it be that common for people with garbage names to change them?

AUSTIN: Name changes on Repiton are often seen as signs of a change in personhood, obviously so. The confirmed characters are all transgender, and thus had a reason to wipe their original denomination loge gobbledygook from their files. Past that, the only verifiable name changes we have are for celebrities and actors who change their names into something more "high class" and "unconventional" in order to make literal names for themselves- like Brendan Fraser. This is actually a holdover from the Bizkantine Empire, in which their god king claimed the pseudonym Durst to strike fear into all those who never learned how to keep on rollin' with the changing times.

Otherwise, I think those with garbage names who keep them are comfortable with themselves. If you were born into a planet where everyone was named some variation of Dimshitz Von Gutengaben, you probably wouldn't think twice about your grim reality either.

5. Considering they are used by regulators to ID suspects who might use them to try and defend themselves or escape, why don't the trollodex cards, at least the ones in '[S] Murrit: Open booster pack.', list survival abilities or psiops? Does Corporate really think Dismas is dead? If they do, why is Occeus and Ellsee's bond listed as off record when Murrit and Dismas's isn't?

EDDIE: Well, the trollodex cards aren't strictly for regulator use during cases — Murrit mentions in narration that they're pretty much regular government IDs that are tied to a Corporate database, which we can assume contains all that extra stuff that wouldn't fit or necessarily be needed if you were only looking up like, your social security number. This would fall under personal info that only the WORKER-CONSUMER in question could access... or any other authorized Corporate agent. You know, like the chief of police or something.

And yes, Corporate really does think Dismas is dead! Or rather, "assumed dead". His alive status is something that only people like the Principal or the Executive have access to, due to the whole keeping tabs on the Aspect Holders thing, and Dismas himself never bothered to update any of his personal information after that. This worked out well enough for him, because it's actually pretty ideal for a hitman to not have an easily trackable Corporate registry, as it turns out. As for the last part, that's because those specific trollodex cards Murrit makes are magic nonsense game items, so like he says, they "update in real time". Their actual ID doesn't have Dismas listed as their kismesis, because you can't bond with someone who's legally dead. That would be crazy.

My god, they eloped…

KOHI: Yeah, Eddie’s right about the limited information on Trollodex cards. There’s a Corporate stronghold mentioned in the comic nicknamed “The Masshole” (official designation SH TMA-619) that serves as a huge underground archive for physical record keeping, even prior to Corporate. Dossiers on trolls (note to self: canonize the name “Trossiers”) were originally more comprehensive records that slowly evolved into hand-delivered Trollodex cards and finally into access-controlled data on a Masshole server. Maybe there was some security/privacy risk involved with putting survival abilities on personal information that left Masshole premises?

6. What is Serpaz's favorite Weird Al song?

AUSTIN: Anything from his pre-Jeopardy era that doesn't involve occult chanting, screams of torture, manic laughter and probabilitized scripture of futures that will come to pass.

Oh, and Hardware Store.

7. Was it fun to code the new website? How did you go about the design and CSS used for the panels themselves?

KOHI: Oh, I always get to enjoy myself whenever I need to write new stuff for the site. Most of the time, I’ll get a design prompt or a general idea from Austin or the rest of the team and I’ll start demoing up some ideas based on the suggestions.

The CSS for the Hyperthetical was a fun one. My goal was to make a neutral theme that could be used for any pages that peeked into one of the possibilities within the Hyperthetical. Victoria already had some solid work done on animating its appearance, so I took inspiration from that when adding the different types of doors to the frame and the background of the theme.

8. Multiple little questions in this number, but is there anything you can tell us about Occeus’ and Sova’s relationship that we haven’t seen already? Also, what’s in get better juice? TRIPLE also… Are there any other “strange” places troll food comes from ala hot dog plants?

EDDIE: Sova and Occeus are a very understated friendship that's not particularly major in terms of plot. They're not like, super close friends or anything — Sova is extremely shy and Occeus tends to isolate himself without meaning to, which is not the greatest combo — but they nonetheless enjoy each other's company and find it quite easy to keep a conversation going, whenever that happens once in a blue moon. It's like that friend you talk to every other month while going "huh, why don't we hang out more often?" and then neither of you ever get around to it. And obviously, inside the bottle of "get beter juic" is a juice that makes you get better.

God I'm gonna be honest, I am not great at coming up with stupid food-related worldbuilding. Austin's our master chef when it comes to that, but he has tossed this question on my plate so you're unfortunately stuck with me. There ARE some other things we already made up that I don't think exist in the comic's text though, so here's a few easter eggs: did you know that on Repiton, milk comes from a specific type of stalactite harvested from underground caverns? That's right, there's beautiful subterranean milk pools out there somewhere.

Food for thought!

9. What’s the process like for uploading an [S]/animation heavy page as an HTML5 vs what it was like when it was a Flash? Is it easier? Harder? Completely different? Worth it over just embedding a YouTube video?

KOHI: The process of uploading [S] files is the same regardless whether or not it’s a Flash or an HTML5. The main difference between the two is that all the assets of a Flash are compiled into a single .SWF file, while the assets of an HTML5 are individual files that reference each other.

I’d be lying if I said that HTML5 was easier than Flash. Adobe Animate still has limited capabilities on what you can do in HTML5 canvases. Establishing an HTML5 template and getting good practice through repetition has helped streamline the workflow for making the [S] publish-ready.

I think having YouTube mirrors is good for us to have as an alternative viewing option, but I don’t want it to be the only option. If we did that, then that means that a part of our comic (a very engaging part) is beholden to the whims of whatever content restriction policies that YouTube decides to test in production. We decide what happens to the content we create together, not YouTube.

10. Is it easier to reuse/edit assets for new pages (ex:sprites, bgs, etc) or creating unique art/compositions for them?

VICTORIA: It's very contextual, but in terms of actual labor necessary, it's almost always easier to reuse stuff. Whether it's coagulating a big ball of sprite mode assets, or just calling back to an old panel with the same layout, it's work that's already been done. Sprite mode stuff especially is meant to be reused quickly and efficiently. At the absolute fastest, a sprite mode panel could be done in a matter of single-digit minutes, when drawing the same thing from scratch, which could be anywhere from half an hour to several hours. The downside to this is that if this reuse is done incorrectly or thoughtlessly, it can feel cheap. But even worse, IMO, it can create unintended meaning if the context of the original asset isn't put into consideration. Part of the reason the crafting segment switches into sprite mode for the bulk of its run isn't just because it's faster, but because it's engaging with the mechanics of The Game, you know?

11. Does bonding with more than two people in a lifetime have physical ramifications in some way, or is it just a big social taboo?

EDDIE: It DOES have physical ramifications, yes. I'm going to invoke the "weird alien biology" card here and not go into too much scientific detail, but the gist is that repitonians have a pheromone-esque process that "links" you to specific people through sexual acts, which creates a chemical dependency on those specific people — that's where the much-mentioned withdrawal symptoms come from. It's pretty fucked up! And also a huge thematic deal. All the cascading ramifications of that will continue to be explored the further we go along, as one of the major points of world-building in the comic, but coming back to your point: this being the case, bonding with too many people would start to overwhelm a troll's endocrinous system, which would be Bad and cause a ton of health issues, on top of just being increasingly harder to manage.

That said, if a troll decided to bond with, I don't know, three people instead of two? I think they would probably be relatively fine, from a biological perspective, and it'd also depend a little on their individual physiology (as is the case for most things related to personal health). It would still be a permanent commitment for the rest of their life, however, and the potential fallout? Oh boy. Like, you can't register more than one matesprit or kismesis, so that's a hard cap on two bonded partners recognized legally by the system. And while I'm sure that wouldn't necessarily bother some trolls, it is still a very deeply ingrained social taboo which would, at best, raise some serious eyebrows.

Needless to say, sluts are the most oppressed members of repitonian society.

12. Does anyone (besides Dismas) know about Murrit's various crimes from when they were younger, like Calder or Laivan?

EDDIE: That's kind of an open secret at this point, I figure. Calder brazenly mentions Murrit's "destructive patterns that defined him in his youth" in this one log and everyone seems to understand what he's getting at, so it's pretty safe to say that's general group knowledge. Now, the extent to which every individual person knows all the juicy details is up for debate — I think it's a pretty safe assumption that the ones that are a little more aware of everything Murrit got up are (obviously) Dismas, Jentha and Calder. The others I feel probably have just a more general overview of "lots of crime", "violence" and "nasty business".

13. Are corpora manually inscribed onto an alchemist like a tattoo or do they show up on their own?

EDDIE: They show up on their own! Alchemy is an arcane and mysterious process tied to the very fabric of the solitary universe, so just adding some sick ink to your palms wouldn't do much of anything for you. You can see how they just turn up on Edolon's hands after Lefty's sacrifice on this page!

14. Is there a notable difference between red blood and bronze blood survival abilities, like there are with yellow and green bloods?

EDDIE: Nope, not particularly. Those yellow and green guys are the weird ones.

15. Can we get Turnin's phone screen background without the clock numbers? Also, what does NOshog mean in reference to Racren's profile?

EDDIE: Sure thing! Here you go:

AUSTIN: And a "NOShog" is the name given to fans of NOS energy drink, which is primarily used by punks and skaters and comes in these big blue plastic bottles. You can see one in Racren's block!

16. What is the relationship between dreamselves and transgenderness? The dream self is said to be the "idealized self" so could one's gender be different, whether it be internally-known or externally-presented, between the waking self and dreamself? Did Albion's dreamself play a part in her gender awakening or the other way around? Could a dream self's gender change on a whim, by choice or otherwise?

EDDIE: Well, I think you just answered the first of your questions yourself! Dreamselves are supposed to be representations of what each individual truly aspires to be the most, deep down. It goes without saying that that includes unresolved questions of gender identity, if that's something that's present in the character. As for Albion specifically, I believe that it was an organic process — meaning, as she realized things about herself and her sense of identity as a trans woman coalesced in her mind, so did her dreamself change in order to reflect that.

As for the last part, that would be a no! You can't intentionally manipulate what your dreamself is like, they're subconscious projections of your thoughts/feelings/ideals. Now, if a very powerful external factor were to intervene with someone's dreamself somehow... that's another matter entirely.

17. What's the most fun part of the process of creating interactive pages like the Murrit hairstyle one? Was there an "engine reuse" between that page and the drawing pages in Burning Down the House? Feel free to use this question as an excuse to shill Burning Down the House more by the way, that comic rules.

EDDIE: Completely right, I will do so right now: go read BDTH it fucking rules!

VICTORIA: One of the first bits of advice for getting into making interactive stuff is that you have to love the process as much, if not more than the end result. A lot of people get into making games because they love playing them, and then burn out or leave when they find out that actually, there's a lot of work to making a game that's not "the fun part". There's a lot of work that a player/reader may never think about but an author has to, since nothing in a project comes out of thin air. Minutia like getting the best "card swiping" sound you can when you're changing between trollodex cards, or how often the Saul body pillow should show up so that people *can* encounter it naturally, but aren't guaranteed to. Dealing with that is the stuff I, a notorious sicko, enjoy the most.

And yeah, the barbertron was built atop the bones of the draw Karkat page specifically. With the barbertron though, we had intent to sincerely consider hair styles readers drew, as well as present our own options, so naturally the barbertron is a bit more complex to accommodate that kind of expression. And making the little clear animation was a lot of fun!

WHEW, that's all for this round! Thanks so much for your insatiable curiosity, and we'll be seeing you all again soon for the comic commentary later this month!

- Eddie, Austin, Kohi & Victoria