Featured Creative Internet Jewel

The internet is a wonderful treasure chest full of people's personal projects because if there's one place to do whatever the heck you want, this is it. I've been fortunate enough to come across some of these wonderfully creative outlets and I'd love to share some of them with you.

Today's featured CIJ iiiiiiiiiiiis...

MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck

http://mspaintadventures.com/     [Warning: explicit language.]


 It's tough to describe to you exactly what this is. Wikipedia will tell you it's a webcomic, but really, it's so much more. It's like a game, but without options. It's like a movie, but you read a lot. It's like a third grader's first experience with Paint Shop, except for the beautiful scenery every once in a while. It pretends like you're playing a game, then acts like the characters are playing a game that is the characters' lives, then goes off into tangents that you think are unrelatable, only to tie back in later.


The timeline, the characters, the plot... it will mess with your mind. All while acting totally casual.

The world is impressively involved. In Homestuck, characters reference comics that you can actually read on a separate website and they wear clothes that you can actually buy on another website. They list songs they wrote that you can actually listen to -- and they aren't half bad. You know how if you hear a phone number or web site in a TV show you can usually really go to that and it'll have something to do with the show? Well, creator Andrew Hussie has made sure that if there's something referenced a lot in the game, it will exist, even if he has to make it himself.

There's apparently a pretty large fandom based around it, but you might have to dig deep in your social circle to find the people who know about it. It's wacky, it's creepy, it's a huge time-waster-- but it's oddly fulfilling and often quite genius. Even when I haven't "played" it for a while, I still remember it often. It stays with you, maybe because you can never quite figure it out. It's also over 6,000 pages. Don't let that deter you-- you can click through a ton in about three seconds. But it goes deep.

Fan Art by Eyes5 of DeviantArt.com

So check it out and let me know what you think! I think it's kind of a love-it or hate-it kind of thing, so I'm curious what others' impressions of it are.

What CIJs have you found on the internet?