Anachronist's Library
(Published 1/30/2025.)
This is a challenging news entry to tackle, not really because this update is gobsmacking different from the rest - although there is a lot to get excited over! - nor because the wiki's course is changing - it isn't, except in the usual ways! No, it's challenging because... we're late. LOL. We planned for a new years release, and, well, you know how plans go.
To kick this off, here are the albums now new to the wiki:
- Added by Jebb, we've got the full two discographies of Kalibration! You'll recognize Kali from Upward Movement (and such later hits as Stride), as well as one of the earliest fan-unofficial albums, Tomb of the Ancestors. His music outside Homestuck is stirring and pretty intensely diverse. Jebb also added the fanventure discography for Stalemate, and mines' recent space sim soundtrack for Extermination Shock!
- Both of Bowman's latest releases, Your Majesty and Bowmanstuck, respectively added by Surge and ruby! We've personally shuffled the first of these about a hundred times, and Bowmanstuck is the canonical collection of all Bowman's own Homestuck music. A delightful listen, too, of course. We've also reworked Archive into its proper 2024 form, now with all its own history comprehensively consolidated in one place.
- Both the latest releases from Oceanfalls - the third solo Oceanfables album, Foresight & Retrospect by Wights End, and the latest team release, { Oceanfalls } Vol.6, featuring as ever many new and returning artists! Plus, recent SAHCon collab FRAYMOTIF FIGHTERS, dual-disc Desynced team album Anthology II, and Deconrecon albums Duodenary by Cristata and In Medias Res from the team! (Contributions here vary wildly. Thanks to everyone that helped out!! Go get the full info in the changelog!!)
- Courtesy Lilith - a huge, and mostly fandom variety! Albums include Loftlocked Vol. 1, both Freeroam volumes, Sweet Bro & Hella Jeff: The Album of Sock Ruse fame, In Isolation by David Ellis, and improvised touhou music with annoying commentary by Toby Fox; also whole fandom-discographies in 8reath of light, Raid, LudicrousFalcon, and plenty more besides!
- And from ruby, on top of all The Paradox Music Team's GBA Pokémon Unbound 187-track fan-soundtrack and remaster series, also more works with contributions from Toby Fox! These include Itoki Hana album PRAY (they'd later collab on Skies Forever Blue and The Greatest Living Show), Houshou Marine single Dead Ma’am’s Chest and premiere album Ahoy!! You're All Pirates ♡, Camellia's U.U.F.O. and Camellia/Toby collab Theatore Creatore!
Phew! That's a lot of music. As ever, all the additions are in the changelog. There's a lot of stuff besides, so we really encourage you to check it out, but of special note, many, many of the Official Discography tracks now have a lot more commentary (plus lots of fandom stuff too). Those additions are thanks to serious web-scouring and wiki-formatting efforts by Lilith (so please say thank you Lilith!!), as well as transcribed from Bowman's big SAHCon 2024 walk through time. On top of that, we've filled properly dated citations for nearly every bit of official commentary, large or small, and noted what we still can't trace earlier than our original commentary source!
But did you know this update... comes with new features?? A lot of them, even!? It's true!
Our favorite new feature is, well, sorry, chronology links. Again. It turns out the last design just didn't last, and now we've rethought chronology links all the way through. Here's where they are instead!
Graphic design is my passion.
Chronology links now live in the main content area of just about any wiki page, instead of using room in the nav bar. You only ever see one set of chronology links at once - the one for the artist you're hovering! - and you get to see names, not just generic "Previous" and "Next" links. And most exciting to us, this works for any kind of credit or contribution, all over the website. Which albums is an artist the album artist for? Which albums did an artist do banner art for? Which tracks did an artist do, just earlier and later? Follow their chronology links!
We also added this big new view you might've noticed on some group info pages - it's the "albums, by series" list, which collects all the albums in a group into manually curated sequences. There are a bunch of examples for these, including in existing groups - for solo artists like Kalibration and Toby Fox, for team discographies like Cool and New Music Team and Oceanfalls, and for the Official Discography, too! Series also show up on album pages, so right from the sidebar or nav bar, you can conveniently browse a whole series (or jump between series - or between groups!).
Plus there are about a million smaller spots of polish and improvement. Previous and next links in the nav bar are more stably positioned, just dimming out if there is none further, and are spaced apart by dots instead of commas - easier to click for sure! Commentary (and news entries and such) now make links to external websites, with those dandy little arrowheads, "absorb" most punctuation that comes right after - so the end of a sentence doesn't get awkwardly pushed aside.
We've got short descriptions for some track sections (like on Homestuck Vol. 1-4); prettier commentary entry headings; custom-presented "featuring" credits; additional names for albums; "closely linked artists" on group pages, and vice versa; and a dandy little "Album cover for..." message on tracks without their own artworks.
Oh, and artwork references. Those are pretty flipping cool, too. (Thanks to Makin for all the initial data here, comprehensively covering everything from the CaNMT!!)
This update is late - we were targeting new years day, 1/1/2025 - for a handful of reasons. The plainest one is that we (QN) got a job, again, working IRL for the first time since after Ball Drop '23. Of course, last time, we went on a wiki hiatus pretty much as soon as we left to work. This time around, not so! We've been at our job since August, active on the update this whole time - alongside all the awesome wiki-contributing community, of course.
We also ran clean out of storage room. Actually, preview updates for this update harshly contested space on the server graciously sysadmin'd by nata, which since 2021 we shared with our own personal site and a handful of other internet places. Throughout January we worked out precise plans to get the wiki moved to its own dedicated server... and pulled them off!
The wiki is now hosted via Digitalocean Spaces, with a pretty bog-simple nginx frontend (via Digitalocaen Droplets) managing URLs the way we need. You shouldn't notice much of anything different - except that all our media files are now under media.hsmusic.wiki, and the preview site is now preview.hsmusic.wiki... but for us, it means we get 250 GiB of space! The wiki takes around 15 GiB right now, so we should be tidy for a nice long time. And total expenses are comparable, so it's just as sustainable on that end (only we manage our own billing now!!).
Also there is a proper 404 page now. Oo shiny!
Just for fun, even though we didn't exactly meet the milestone, here are comparable stat updates for everything new in the last two years:
- Tracks: 3405 → 10,457 (+207%)
- Albums: 150 → 508 (+239%)
- Duration: 166 hours → 495 hours (+198%)
- Artists: 1615 → 3535 (+119%)
- Art tags: 265 → 551 (+108%)
(We don't have an exact stat for commentary entries handy, but in June 2023 around happy birthday nannasprite, there were 230k words across roughly 2000 entries. There are now 417k words across 5,449 entries.)
The wiki's approximately tripled in scope in those two years. We don't have anything as sappy to say about it as another recent time, but... well, we still love getting to be a part of this. And to share in that with everybody around the wiki - the contributors and friends we chat with every day, and the invisibile, anonymous visitors, all the people who silently get use out of and care about the wiki, alike! There's a lot that's still very exciting here ahead of us, and we're delighted to get to keep continuing at it.
As ever, we want to give endless thanks to everybody who contributed to this update. (There are tons of data fixes, presentation improvements, and more particular additions that we didn't mention in this news entry. You can explore it all, like always, Changelog.) And thanks to everyone for all your support and feedback! It eternally means the world!!
~ Quasar Nebula