The HSO Announcements Blog!

(This is Ink and Ink alone—Re has left fandom and I’ve no desire to bother hir for the sake of this ask. But we’ve discussed the subject before.)

Fundamentally, neither of us really wants to endorse another HSO or tap a successor, and whatever our intentions, that’s what handing over the comm would do. We would like to lay HSO, as it existed last year and this year, to rest. I think we are well within our rights to do so, and I hope all of you can respect that.

If someone else wants to run an HSO-style challenge, I can’t encourage you, precisely—I think Re and I have made it clear we don’t recommend the experience to anyone—but you are well within your rights to do so. I wish anyone who gets that far the best; I hope it goes well, and I hope everyone has fun.

This is the last post I will make on this subject. Good evening to you, anon, and to anyone who’s reading this.

We can’t and won’t stop anyone from running an event based on the HSO. However, we are not comfortable with providing any sort of endorsement, affiliation, or involvement should you choose to do so. We do request that you use a different event name/title for clarity and continuity’s sake, but have no interest in pursuing an argument if you do not comply.
On a more personal note, are you sure this is something you want to do? This experience completely fucked me up in a way that chairing three different student organizations, organizing a month-long festival, applying to graduate school, and working two part-time jobs while writing my honors thesis did not. Ink and I are fairly experienced mods with about a decade of fandom history each, but this was something we were absolutely not prepared for. We had a full team of about 7 main mods plus a few assistant mods, most of whom put in 5 hours a day, 7 days a week on top of jobs and school for most of the HSO, and even so, we were constantly falling behind. Personally, I pulled all-nighters several times, working 20 hours in a row or more—and that’s even with the infrastructure we set up for HSO 2011 in place. At no point was it even a tiny bit fun or rewarding.
We are glad you enjoyed the HSO, and we appreciate how much you want it to continue. I just want to make sure you know what you’re getting into, because I certainly didn’t: if I’d known what a nightmare it would be, I wouldn’t have run HSO 2012 at all.
-mimicre

Thanks for letting us know, and best of luck to you in running it!

There is no round 4! The round after R3 is the collab round; the prompt for the collab round went up at the same time as the R1 prompt.

It really depends—all three of the mods who generally answer email work full-time (personally, I leave for work around 6:30am and don’t get home until about 7pm), so stuff sent Monday through Friday tends to pile up. If it’s REALLY urgent and it’s been 48 hours, go ahead and send it again; otherwise, I would wait until sometime on Sunday to give us a chance to catch up. It’s been a bit slower this week, fortunately, but on average we get about 20 emails per day—and of course the numbers are closer to 50/day whenever deadlines approach.

Yes, that is correct! Also, just so there’s no confusion: image descriptions are not mandatory and do not count towards the final wordcount. However, if there is text on images (like a screencapped pesterlog), that does count towards the wordcount and does require a transcription. Transcriptions do not need to be in the body of the submission and can be emailed to us or linked on pastebin or whatever.

The Homestuck Shipping Olympics is an annual event for Homestuck fans who ship, and are enthusiastic about shipping. Its goal is to encourage fans to create a bunch of fanworks for their ships and others’ ships—and also to create a space where fans can hang out and make new friends.
If you like, you can go take a look at HSO 2011 to get a better idea of how this’ll work. We’ve made some changes since then, but the general spirit is the same!

We’re currently in Round 3 of work creation.  More info can be found here and on the rest of the dreamwidth.

For Phase 2, you will read all the sectors! You should have already read one sector, so you’re really just assigned the 36 listed for the other sectors.
For R2 Phase 1, you will read a different sector than the one you did in R1 Phase 1. We accidentally listed them incorrectly; sorry about the mix-up!

Yes, you may.

We are not cutting any teams, except by consent of all their members. If you did not submit an R1 entry, you may continue on with the bonus rounds and R2 regardless. However, you will not earn participation points for this round or be eligible to earn points in the voting.