Homestuck, the very first, has now been entirely restored in perfect quality, long-term online form, a day celebrated in all good Homestuck communities as well as the webcomic world, sequential art world, art world. A day not celebrated enough, perhaps, because it IS a bright day and an accomplishment for this fantastic franchise. Thanks and congrats again to the entire restoration team!
Furthermore, Problem Sleuth has been brought back as well, and The Homestuck Epilogues are on their way.
Fascinated in the history and trajectory of works of art as well as their proper curation and preservation, the informed soul will doubtlessly wonder at what exactly is different between the new Homestuck and the historical one
Because, while the objective IS to offer the same experience as much as possible, this is not the old website and never will be.
So what if we talked about the differences? Not as a request to get back to historical versions (there are reasons for the changes), but to gather knowledge, to remember what Homestuck once was!
I'd also like to talk about the changes the appearance of the website went through since 2009. In fact, ideally, it would be great to end up with a full timeline of the changes the website went through.
And, secondary but that's part of the interesting stuff and of the history of Homestuck too, I'd like to archive and learn more about the late Viz Media version of Homestuck. They did some strange choices and surprising mistakes there, I'd like to know more about them!
CHANGES:
- The URL is not mspaintadventures.com anymore, it is homestuck.com. The change dates back to the late 2010s, if I remember right, it came with some pretty serious rebranding.
- The website used to feature the logs of the latest page in the left margin (you can see a reproduction of this part of the layout in Mr Tambourine Man or Burning Down the House). I don't remember when this vintage configuration was changed, my bet is around 2014-2015.
- Viz Homestuck did not port the Flash games properly, but instead replaced them with series of screencaps roughly describing the action happening in the games.
- Viz Homestuck replaced Flash movies with Youtube videos.
- Viz Homestuck featured a bizarre glitch on one of the pages where June faced her first Imps: both the animation and music looped on themselves, resulting in an endless column of panels piled up on one another vertically and in a Eldritch soundtrack composed of overlapping repetitions of the same theme.
- The newsletter portion, under the pages, now features an all-new 11 September 2025 announcement by Cami, instead of the old series of Andrew newsletters.
This list will hopefully be edited in the future. Please, bring about your knowledge!
