We’re back with John examining stuff on his own bedroom walls. We are now looking at a calendar. We learn it’s the 13th of April (year not mentioned) John’s birthday as previously mentioned and a few days after the release of SBURB Beta.

Neatly, there’s a link to actually play SBURB it’s… familiar. It’s Homestuck? But with some minor differences. The linked version of the game looks essentially the same, slightly different, more freehand art style but is more animated and interactive with sounds.

Now for those not from the olden days, Flash had a unique vector graphic editor. The flash editor worked pretty decently with a stylus so this art style was pretty common. The SBURB version of John’s room has the magic chest at the foot of John’s bed, the hammer and nails are on the desk, there is now a poster for the movie Contact, is where the Deep impact poster was and the deep impact poster was moved next to a now smaller Con Air Poster. Also weirdly the view outside the “SBURB John” window is just blank. But, John has a view of a tree branch in front of a blue sky.

The beta ends with John receiving his “arms” page 7 of Homestuck. Now I point this out because I believe this was my initial reaction as well. I was wondering if SUBURB was the “endgame” of this Homestuck thing. Was Andrew Hussie building a point and click game based on the audience generated content being generated from Homestuck the webcomic? I was really curious on what changes were being made and what assuming the flash game would grow into a huge thing.

Off of this Beta tangent, let’s look at John computer.

He has some .^cake files. Possibly some kind of in-story language. I kinda wish I could actually see his “terrible” attempts to code, as my own code was probably about as bad in those days.

Anyway, someone is trying to pester John. Page 26 “John: Open message.” is the first example of a “pesterlog”. A prettier significant chunk of Homestuck is written through these. You can actually download it though it does not provide friends for you so good luck with that.

Pesterchum has some weird rules, these will be very annoying but also help us identify characters as we go through these. I’ll break this down as briefly as possible as these rules are explained organically. Other than the rules though Pesterchum is pretty similar to AOL messenger.

• usernames consist of 2 words
• users have a unique assigned colour
• all character in Homestuck have a unique typing quirk

Johns handle is EctoBiologist [EB] and He’s chatting with a TurntechGodhand [TG]. It’s revealed in this conversation that John has not actually received his copy of the SBURB beta yet. TG suggests that John go check his mailbox. Resulting in John looking out his window. Finally we acknowledge there is in fact a world beyond John’s Bedroom and since the “Arm-swingy-dealy thing” of his mailbox is up, he indeed has mail (It’s called a “flag” by the way). But John’s father has just pulled into the driveway in his car, and John doesn’t want to have his dad chat him up.

That’s a bit sad, the man probably just got home from work, maybe he just wanted to chat with his son after a long day. Also, as this is a re-read I can never look at that car the same again.

John takes a moment to perform his favourite hobby of examining stuff in his room (it’s like its his first time in there). He has a fun video game collection. 3 games being links to other MSPA projects, one is a Ghostbusters MMORPG (yes this will come up later), A little monsters video game by Konimi, which definitely did not exist but if it had I could only assume it was made by Hideo Kojima and it was his worst game of all time. Also something called Harry Anderson’s Call my Bluff.

I guess I need to research who that is and why he’s relevant… According to wiki he was a comedian/actor/magician who frequently appeared on SNL and “Call my Bluff” is a british TV show. I can’t be certain this is what the reference is about. But given the guy is a magician/comedian I can see why John may have liked them.