Chapter Text
==> Homestuck Fan: Finish your masterpiece.
Sweet. You put the finishing touches on your latest fanfic, uploading it into Ao3 so that your adoring fans can bask in its greatness. Or, you know, the three people that follow you. Shut up.
There's only one problem, and that's your prized pesterlog section. There are literally pages of solid gold rants from your favourite characters, but you can't get them to look right. You're particulalry proud of the argument between Karkat and Dave, but it just doesn't look right if it isn't in grey and red. Le sign.
==> Homestuck Fan: Read this guide.
This is already getting too meta, cut that shit out.
==> Narrator: Okay fine, open up the "Edit Work" tab.
You scan down the edifice of grey, searching for the fabled "work skins" menu. You know it's here somewhere. At last, your search is at an end, it's at the bottom, just above your carefully crafted words of genius.
==> Homestuck Fan: Enable the Homestuck Work Skin.
Hooray, your quest is at an end! This thing will magically convert all of your pesterlogs for you, right? You hit preview...
Oh. It looks the same. What the hell do you do now??
==> Homestuck Fan: Chill out and appreciate the majesty of the Homestuck Work Skin.
Even though you don't know how to use it yet, you silently thank the angels of Paradox Space who spent their time figuring out what colour and style every kid's text should be. You offer them your soul. They politely decline.
==> Homestuck Fan: Master HTML like a boss.
You toggle the text entry to HTML, ready to step out into the deep end. You don't need no Rich Text water-wings. The experience bumps you up your Echeladder to AMATEUR SYNTAXIDERMIST.
Congratulations!
==> Narrator: Stop messing around and get to the point.
With the pesterlog section in front of you, you examine what the HTML reader has done to your work. Apparently it's seen fit to sprinkle mysterious <p> and </p> symbols everywhere. Naturally, it is immediately obvious that the <p> symbols specify the beginnings of paragraphs, and the </p> the ends. This HTML business is a piece of lovingly prepared birthday cake with some decorative fake arms shoved into it.
Some finesse is going to be needed in order to get the text looking the way you want, though. You consult this guide in a totally non-meta way, nearly sidestepping an authorial paradox. It tells you the following.
You find the beginning of your pesterlog section, which in this case reads:
<p> turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering carcinoGeneticist [CG]</p>
You won't settle for plain old body-text. You're going to Homestuck that shit. You change it to the following:
<p class="pesterlog"> turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering carcinoGeneticist [CG]</p>
You hit the "Preview" button, and choirs of angels sing in celebration of the sight of your wonderous formatted text. This only happens the first time, so don't get used to it. Angels are very busy, you know. They're basically throwing you a bone here.
Your text now looks like this:
turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering carcinoGeneticist [CG]
Have a biscuit, you've earned it.
==> Homestuck Fan: What about the rest of the pesterlog? It's still not colourful enough.
Now is the time to thank the beings of pure light who made the work skin. For thine is the power to colourize your text.
The next bit of your fic reads as follows:
TG: dude i warned you about bananas
CG: SHUT THE FUCK UP STRIDER, YOU HAD NO IDEA THEY WOULD TURN MY HORNS YELLOW.
let's format it until it can't see straight. As before, you change the <p> command to something else. In this case, you run with a hunch and try just typing in the kids names. If the skin is so awesome, that should be it, right?
<p class="Dave">TG: dude i warned you about bananas
<p class="Karkat">CG: SHUT THE FUCK UP STRIDER, YOU HAD NO IDEA THEY WOULD TURN MY HORNS YELLOW.
You hit preview....and...
TG: dude i warned you about bananas
CG: SHUT THE FUCK UP STRIDER, YOU HAD NO IDEA THEY WOULD TURN MY HORNS YELLOW.
Balls. It looks the same. What gives?
==> Narrator: Comfort suicidal Homestuck Fan. That stump is looking way too tempting right now.
You're not looking at the goddamn stump. It holds no interest for you. You wonder how this comic still has any fans left considering the author left a loaded gun lying around for whenever they get the slightest bit confused.
==> Narrator: OK fine. Tell them how to fix it.
With pleasure. It turns out that the work skin requires you to use names without capital letters. HTML denies the existence of capital letters for religious reasons, much in the same way many robots deny the existence of numbers other than 0 and 1. You de-capitalize your commands in solidarity with HTML.
<p class="dave">TG: dude i warned you about bananas
<p class="karkat">CG: SHUT THE FUCK UP STRIDER, YOU HAD NO IDEA THEY WOULD TURN MY HORNS YELLOW.
You hit preview once more...
TG: dude i warned you about bananas
CG: SHUT THE FUCK UP STRIDER, YOU HAD NO IDEA THEY WOULD TURN MY HORNS YELLOW.
Huzzah! Success!
You wonder if this approach will work with any character's name?
==> Narrator: Yes it will, apart from characters that use another character's text color.
Oh, you get it. So instead of typing "meenah" you'd need to type "feferi". Or for Davesprite it would be "dirk".
That sounds pretty easy.
The only thing that remains is to add a cheeky little </p> to the end of your pesterlog.
HTML is basically a passive-agressive English teacher at heart, and if you forget, it will bat its eyelashes at you while sweetly whispering "but I thought you wanted the other 10,000 words of this piece to be in angry grey text, because you didn't say stop."
Remember to say stop, kids. Always use a </p>.
==> Homestuck Fan: Recieve a boon from your Narrator.
The narrator bestows upon you enough experience to climb yet another rung on your Echeladder. You are now a majestic PESTERING DILLETENTE.
==> Homestuck Fan: Wait a minute, the pesterlogs always show the kids chumhandles in their colour, and I tried to write a quadrant symbol and it came out all weird. Clearly we aren't done here.
You'll have to enrol in the advanced class for info like that, my old chum. By which I mean wait for the next chapter to come out.
Happy Formatting!