Chuck Tingle's like the Finger Family of gay erotica.
WhatPumpkin, LLC / Homestuck, Inc. : Chuck Tingle, Andrew Hussie and Friends - feat. Rachel Rocklin, Shelby Cragg, and Cohen Edenfield
- Thread starter D. Sweatshirt
- Start date
Munchingonfish
kiwifarms.net
I can't blame a game developer for wanting to ditch an internet fad project for a new entry in a beloved series by a well paying publisher.
Yeah, fuck Homostuck. I want King's Quest IX.
If you called me up and said "hey, we want you to help us with King's Quest 9", and I wasn't under contract...fuck it, I'm gone!
- Highlight
- #25
I actually know someone who worked as staff on two websites relating to homestuck, and both of them were run into the ground by WhatPumpkin themselves, encouraging the death of their own fandom.
I can't remember when exactly this happened, I'd have to look back in my chat logs and shit, but essentially there was a site called Gigapause which served as a Homestuck fansite, then a second one cropped up called Flarping, which was a Homestuck roleplay website. They ran purely off of ads and donations, they were completely fan-made. WhatPumpkin notices these fansites, and they threaten both of the sites with a lolsuit saying they can't run ads or make any money off of the sites because Homestuck is copyright Andrew Hussie and WhatPumpkin or whatever.
Eventually the sites dried up and had to close because Homestuck fans were all freeloading children, they all scattered and made shitty free forum sites in efforts to find refuge after the sites closed, and eventually all just went to twitter and kind of died off and moved on.
The reason I bring this up is because it was all done through a girl named Rachel, who worked at WhatPumpkin. I don't recall her last name and I don't care enough to look into it. I'll ask my friend about it, I'll share emails with you if they still have them or they're willing to share, and if any of you are interested.
Maybe most interesting is that during this, while the website Gigapause folded easily, the owners of Flarping were a lot sharper about it and stated they were willing to take it to court if that's what WhatPumpkin really wanted to do. Rachel never replied to that message, and a few hours to a day later someone hacked into the Flarping database and crashed the site, which the administrator traced to a Starbucks not far across the street from the WhatPumpkin HQ. That was a pretty petty move, and I find it incredible what lengths they go through for their money grabs.
I can't remember when exactly this happened, I'd have to look back in my chat logs and shit, but essentially there was a site called Gigapause which served as a Homestuck fansite, then a second one cropped up called Flarping, which was a Homestuck roleplay website. They ran purely off of ads and donations, they were completely fan-made. WhatPumpkin notices these fansites, and they threaten both of the sites with a lolsuit saying they can't run ads or make any money off of the sites because Homestuck is copyright Andrew Hussie and WhatPumpkin or whatever.
Eventually the sites dried up and had to close because Homestuck fans were all freeloading children, they all scattered and made shitty free forum sites in efforts to find refuge after the sites closed, and eventually all just went to twitter and kind of died off and moved on.
The reason I bring this up is because it was all done through a girl named Rachel, who worked at WhatPumpkin. I don't recall her last name and I don't care enough to look into it. I'll ask my friend about it, I'll share emails with you if they still have them or they're willing to share, and if any of you are interested.
Maybe most interesting is that during this, while the website Gigapause folded easily, the owners of Flarping were a lot sharper about it and stated they were willing to take it to court if that's what WhatPumpkin really wanted to do. Rachel never replied to that message, and a few hours to a day later someone hacked into the Flarping database and crashed the site, which the administrator traced to a Starbucks not far across the street from the WhatPumpkin HQ. That was a pretty petty move, and I find it incredible what lengths they go through for their money grabs.
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To think the guy at the center of this drama is the same guy that originally got popular making things like this.
This reminds me of a story I heard some few years back about Hussie's GF filing DMCA claims en masse. I'm not sure if that actually happened or not but considering what's apparently been going on over in whatever the fuck this circle is with Zoe quinn and political agenda pushing, it seems like the kind of thing that might happen if it has indeed been going on since at least 2014.
Homestuck was like, the hottest shit on Tumblr for about 2-3 years. Hussie could have made a kickstarter to fund nuclear missles aimed at orphanages with Homestuck characters painted on the sides and it still would have sold like hotcakes.
Nowadays nobody who backed the kickstarter gives a shit about Homestuck so ain't nobody gonna buy this game if it comes out
Nowadays nobody who backed the kickstarter gives a shit about Homestuck so ain't nobody gonna buy this game if it comes out
I haven't paid attention to anything Homestuck since about 2013 but yeah the shit about Hussie's GF going psycho with lolsuits and whatnot isn't surprising. I remember her being pretty batshit back on tumblr, and I wouldn't be surprised if she was part of the reason that in late 2011/early 2012 there was a huge push from the official HS team to stamp out any sort of moneymaking fanart. Artists were still allowed to take commissions but they couldn't sell Homestuck prints, cosplay accessories, props, etc. I remember one of the staff artists also had to take down a "scalemate" pattern they had freely provided for a couple years, I don't know if it was directly related to that but I remember it happening around the same time.
On one hand I can understand wanting to protect your IP but it came across as very excessive to pretty much everyone. Especially because at that time the only official merchandise was a handful of t-shirts through whatpumpkin, they hadn't yet established the bigger specifically homestuck webstores selling the zodiac shirts, scalemate plush, etc, so it wasn't even a case of pushing people to buy official merchandise. Even later on Tobyfox's policy on selling Undertale fan content was no where near as restrictive.
I believe ToT made more progress on the game than Hussie's ex stated. I'd bet that WP LLC wanted to change developers anyway, and found/made-up an excuse to do so.
Just a quick update: I've reached out to @horror.jpg (thanks a bunch, man) and we should have those email logs from Rachel up fairly soon. I'll put them up in a reply post and add them to the intro as soon as I get them. Rachel also made tweets about confiscating fan merch at conventions a couple years ago but they seem to have been taken down.
- Highlight
- #32
So I still consider this thread a surprise. I read the comic, and for the longest time I got to observe both the Homestuck fandom and the "persona" that Andrew Hussie put out. Much of this is really eye-opening, but at the same time, really doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
See, Hussie's always had a Jhonen Vasquez-esque attitude toward his fans, that is to say, a barely-constrained contempt. And I don't blame him, as once Homestuck got real popularity off the MSPA site itself (it originally just started as a dumb text adventure that got input from its forum posters; which is even why one of the characters is named after a former MSPA forum user - Gamzee, in fact, ironically one of the most divisive characters in the fandom), it attracted ALL kinda of autists. It was one of the first 'big' Tumblr fandoms, which probably was a large contribution to that. For a while, Hussie used to interact with his fans (he had a Formspring at one point) but rather than actually contribute any kind of content, mostly just took the piss out of them - jokes about character appearances (Fat Vriska, the skintones/races of the kids thing) and ships/certain headcanons being stupid being frequent responses.
Then the comic got bigger. As did the fandom. This was no longer just one guy doing a dumb text adventure comic with input from some forum users, this shit had lore, and plots, and now it could actually make him money. This is around the time Hussie withdraws from the public eye and doesn't talk to people anymore, now he's got a company, and his girlfriend is basically left in charge of all the PR and business shit while he's just trying to draw. The company grows. More people are hired. Now there's other people running shit behind the scenes while he just draws his comic (this would be during the Gigapause I believe). Toby Fox lives in Hussie's basement for a while and makes Undertale and shit gets even MORE insane. But there's still no real public comments or appearances from Hussie while his co-workers, for lack of a better term, are running amok.
Do I think that he's associating with some shady shitlords? Yes. That's just the way the internet is now. You can't throw a fucking rock at a content creator without uncovering some kind of autistic cabal of shady wheeling and dealing. Especially in the webcomic circles (see: the mental breakdown of the Pictures For Sad Children guy). But Hussie is really reclusive and although he's a little spergy/weird (I mean you have to be to make something like Homestuck), he really has never given off the vibe that he's a malevolent figurehead in charge of some kind of SJW defrauding group, or that he'd let his girlfriend cuck him into becoming one.
His comic "edits" (like the caucasian thing) in the wake of SJW fan backlash mostly seem to be efforts at keeping his cashcow happy, same with his association with these controversial figures like Green and Quinn.
Either he's very good at hiding less than savory actions or he's really just made some shitty choices with the people he chooses to associate with...hard to say.
If more people can unearth information about the guy and his company and find out he's intrinsically linked to some of What Pumpkin's shitty practices, then maybe I'm wrong and he really is as awful as all this seems to imply.
See, Hussie's always had a Jhonen Vasquez-esque attitude toward his fans, that is to say, a barely-constrained contempt. And I don't blame him, as once Homestuck got real popularity off the MSPA site itself (it originally just started as a dumb text adventure that got input from its forum posters; which is even why one of the characters is named after a former MSPA forum user - Gamzee, in fact, ironically one of the most divisive characters in the fandom), it attracted ALL kinda of autists. It was one of the first 'big' Tumblr fandoms, which probably was a large contribution to that. For a while, Hussie used to interact with his fans (he had a Formspring at one point) but rather than actually contribute any kind of content, mostly just took the piss out of them - jokes about character appearances (Fat Vriska, the skintones/races of the kids thing) and ships/certain headcanons being stupid being frequent responses.
Then the comic got bigger. As did the fandom. This was no longer just one guy doing a dumb text adventure comic with input from some forum users, this shit had lore, and plots, and now it could actually make him money. This is around the time Hussie withdraws from the public eye and doesn't talk to people anymore, now he's got a company, and his girlfriend is basically left in charge of all the PR and business shit while he's just trying to draw. The company grows. More people are hired. Now there's other people running shit behind the scenes while he just draws his comic (this would be during the Gigapause I believe). Toby Fox lives in Hussie's basement for a while and makes Undertale and shit gets even MORE insane. But there's still no real public comments or appearances from Hussie while his co-workers, for lack of a better term, are running amok.
Do I think that he's associating with some shady shitlords? Yes. That's just the way the internet is now. You can't throw a fucking rock at a content creator without uncovering some kind of autistic cabal of shady wheeling and dealing. Especially in the webcomic circles (see: the mental breakdown of the Pictures For Sad Children guy). But Hussie is really reclusive and although he's a little spergy/weird (I mean you have to be to make something like Homestuck), he really has never given off the vibe that he's a malevolent figurehead in charge of some kind of SJW defrauding group, or that he'd let his girlfriend cuck him into becoming one.
His comic "edits" (like the caucasian thing) in the wake of SJW fan backlash mostly seem to be efforts at keeping his cashcow happy, same with his association with these controversial figures like Green and Quinn.
Either he's very good at hiding less than savory actions or he's really just made some shitty choices with the people he chooses to associate with...hard to say.
If more people can unearth information about the guy and his company and find out he's intrinsically linked to some of What Pumpkin's shitty practices, then maybe I'm wrong and he really is as awful as all this seems to imply.
Completely agree. Despite this trove of information that's come up, we still don't really know much about what Hussie's been up to behind the scenes. Even with Homestuck in the state it's in, it's really hard to fault to the guy from what little info we have on him in this situation. Until something new pops up on him, it's probably better to instead look into some of the shadier people he's employed, like KC Green, Cohen Edenfield, and Shelby Cragg.
Cohen in particular is a very interesting to follow, given that he's now filling Hussie's shoes as main writer for both Hiveswap and for the Snapchat updates. He tends to sperg a lot about bringing more social justice politics into his writing, which is unsettling enough as it is.
just as long as this stupid shit stops bringing people joy and starts getting pounded in the butt by being "LOL SO RANDUM XD" humor.
also wtf is with that guy's lips does he give a lot of blowjobs or what
also wtf is with that guy's lips does he give a lot of blowjobs or what
Is there any way donators can get their money back from this or are they SOL? I mean, 15 dollars isn't too much of a loss for me but still, hate the fact that I donated when I was just a dumb teen thinking this game would actually happen and it's almost at Gen Zed levels of "never coming out"
I'll probably come up with something much more constructive later on in the thread, but I'll say something that other kiwis seem to agree with.
Hussie himself isn't a bad guy. I honestly believe that he just got roped into some shit and couldn't fight back, first because of his somewhat apparently non-confrontational nature, then because the cash was rolling in and life was doing pretty good-- Who wouldn't get comfortable with a shitton of money?
I'm really side-eyeing the people around him. Hussie is an artist and writer before being a businessman and internet figure or w/e, and since his shit was popular, people decided to drag him into a different scene and pander to a demographic who would be all to eager to throw cash at anything that would have [insert specifically labelled characters and criteria here] in it.
Unless I'm proven wrong, I'll grab onto this. I have some hope left.
Hussie himself isn't a bad guy. I honestly believe that he just got roped into some shit and couldn't fight back, first because of his somewhat apparently non-confrontational nature, then because the cash was rolling in and life was doing pretty good-- Who wouldn't get comfortable with a shitton of money?
I'm really side-eyeing the people around him. Hussie is an artist and writer before being a businessman and internet figure or w/e, and since his shit was popular, people decided to drag him into a different scene and pander to a demographic who would be all to eager to throw cash at anything that would have [insert specifically labelled characters and criteria here] in it.
Unless I'm proven wrong, I'll grab onto this. I have some hope left.
If he let his name be used for a scam where $2.4 million just disappeared into thin air, he's no longer an innocent, even if it's only because he's a pussy.
Ted Empty
kiwifarms.net
At the very least, reclusive and disdainful of his fanbase or not, he should apologize for having nothing to show for the money and take responsibility for what his team is doing with the money if they're even doing anything. Hell, Inafune did when MN9 didn't live up to expectations.
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