EDIT. I keep saying all this stuff, which is pushing the album announcement way down. Just to remind/inform you, the Homestuck album 4 is out.

I also meant to serve up props to Alexis for coding the Google LOWAS page I put up a few days ago. We hustled that together pretty fast and it slipped my wicket to mention it. I gave him this giant 5 megabyte map and some other doodads and I said make it do this, and he did in like an hour or so. Pretty cool huh? Yeah.

Also hope you dug the huge Bolin music dump on this page. He made all those songs at least 6 months ago, and now here they are. I basically dragged my personal Bolin folder into the Flash file. And then Dave and Rose started dancing of their own accord. TRUTHFACTS.

Here's some reading material. It will help you understand more about... well, it will cause you to look at your screen for a while.

Later.

A bunch of community members banded together and annotated the recap page with many, many hyperlinks to relevant pages throughout the story. This page now serves as a pretty nice index of the whole story, and functions as a convenient gateway to just about anything you might be looking for. Thanks guys! (I originally tried doing this myself and got a few paragraphs in before I started reaching for the gun I keep under my desk-side tree stump.)

Speaking of gateways and communities, I should link to the MSPA community portal again, another community-driven initiative. I'm planning on putting a permanent link to it somewhere. Making site changes is always something I procrastinate. Even little things.

Something else I've been meaning to mention is this outstanding Lil' Cal plush given to me by the outstanding Eyes5. Not only is he rigorously crafted to the exacting standards of an elite puppet fetishist, but when you hug him he actually says my name. That isn't a joke, it's a serious thing it really does. I was going to take a video of this, but I was afraid it might freak you out a little. (It would have.)

While I'm dishing out crazycool things, here are some pieces of very sweet HS art by my best friends Darren and Lexxy, respectively, in that respective order.

Sorry to report to anyone aiming to see me at C2E2 that I won't actually be going. I feel like sort of a douche backing out of it, but it turns out I just can't pull off so much traveling! I'm sure I'll make it to that neck of the woods not too long from now though.

Also here's a really cool Dave game a guy made which you might enjoy if you have a PC. If you have a Mac you will not. You will go sulk in the corner is what you'll do.

Ok a whole mess of announcements here so let's see if I can keep it short and sweet!

Homestuck Volume 4 is here. 13 songs. $4.13. Comes with a cool wallpaper! Check it:


There are a few very nice remixes in this album, done on pretty short notice. Everybody pulled this one together really fast! Nice job guys. And nice job as always to Miss McMittens for rallying the troops and piecing it all together.

Additional trivia: if you're wondering where the old-timey clip at the beginning of "Black" comes from, check it out. (1:29)  It's from a song recorded exactly 100 years prior to Homestuck. Toby slapped it on the beginning of his remix and I thought "cool" and rolled with it, but it wasn't until now I found out where it was from. Maybe he mentioned it to me once and I was like pfffff, not remembering THAT fact, nice try. This is a good example of how the music strongly influences how I put together the animations.

Next topic: The MSPA Community Portal.

This is something some members of the community have been working on for a little while, and it's really cool! It's a very convenient gateway to access anything to do with MSPA, chat with people about it, and to GET GENERALLY INVOLVED.

I haven't written anything for this. It's a totally fan sponsored and maintained initiative, so that odor presently filling your nostrils is PASSION. I know you will enjoy mingling with these people. We all must strive to associate with those who are eager to facilitate and celebrate our obsessions.

There's probably more to say about stuff. I'm sure there is. But I think I'll can it for now and start pondering how to kick off year two. If anything important to say pops into my head, I'll be down here below all the cool images waving and kicking up a fuss.

Thanks to all the well wishers and congratulators out there who've had something to say about Homestuck's first year run. Your patronage has harvested my vehement gratitude. It is a thankfulness so intensely focused, it could be employed as a hot cutting device to free people from wreckage.

A new album will be added to the collection later today. Volume 4 will contain 13 songs. It will be dirt cheap, costing you four dollars and thirteen pennies. That's like two cups of coffee, but coffee doesn't really sound as awesome.

And thanks again to the whole music team for riding out a year with me on this thing. But especially pointed thanks right now to Toby Fox for making this cool remix ("Black") of his own song from the MC album ("Liquid Negrocity"), and also the song used in the previous animation ("Atomyk Ebonpyre"). There will be more to hear from this guy soon. His work is colorful, energetic, and generated with absurd prolificity. I have come to regard the LIVELY SPECTACLE that is MSPA to be quite well matched by his compositions, and you will too.

4/13/2009 - 4/13/2010

tldr; no updates until April 13th!

Change of plans again. I was going to do a couple animations before 4/13, and then a BIG ONE on the day of 4/13, the one year anniversary of Homestuck's starting date. My schedule is not going to permit this though. I'm going away this weekend, and as anyone who travels knows, that will consume a block of time greater than the span of the travel dates themselves. It will screw me up way too much to be in super-crazy production mode. I can pull off regular-crazy production mode, but note super-crazy. In summary, this week is toast. And in any case, there's really no reason to rush this thing just to squeeze something critical into a meaningless date.

So instead I will do ONE animation, take my time with it, and post it on 4/13. That will be the next update you will see.

Then after that I will move it along to the end of the act. I will still post the animation I was originally planning to post on 4/13, but at a somewhat later date. There won't be much ambiguity here. When I do post it, you will know exactly which date this animation was originally slated for.

But the good news is I think we can get the Volume 4 album out on 4/13. Keep an ear out for it.

So as long as we're here with almost a year's worth of HS under our belts, why don't we hit pause and check our game status.

Homestuck:

4 kids
365 days (and counting)
1667 pages (+1 on day 365)
2024 images
85,000 words
62 Flash animations (+1 on day 365)
5.5 images per day, every day
1 Flash animation every 6 days

Some Flash data:
1 hour total of animated footage
3000 imported graphic files
53 songs
3 albums (+1 on day 365)

1 sacred urns toppled
1 mystic ruins desecrated
1 hallowed tombs defiled

15 Sweet Bro and Hella Jeffs

---------------

The Problem Sleuth data, for your convenience:

3 detectives
365 days
1621 pages
1915 images
45,000 words
0 sacred urns toppled
0 mystic ruins desecrated
0 hallowed tombs defiled

I remember writing after finishing PS that I didn't really notice the effort involved over the course of the year. That is very far from the truth this time. Believe me, this felt like a serious undertaking. Clearly I not only surpassed my previous page counts in less time, but added major animation chores on top of all that, which proved to be the most labor intensive part of it! Even disregarding the animation, the extra detail in the the static pages, the larger environments, the heavier use of color, the more rigorous character design and game mechanics, the doubled word count, it all added up to something much bigger than PS. Then pile huge Flash projects on top of all that and you have something that's certifiably insane. The good news is that I got faster the more I challenged myself.

I've easily worked twice as much on HS as I did on PS. Probably more. There have been more all-day-all-night affairs than I could count. Weekend breaks mostly nonexistent. I just don't recall that sort of relentless exertion during Problem Sleuth, except maybe during the final moments of the battle. Even the whole Sepulchritude thing strikes me as a pretty quaint endeavor now. That would really just be a run of the mill battle animation these days.

Why am I jumping the gun and reviewing this all now rather than on 4/13? Probably because I know I won't feel like it by then, just after I post an animation, and with more to do right away. This isn't QUITE as monumental as the PS year-end spectacular, since obviously the story's just going to keep going. To be honest, I feel like recently Homestuck has been just starting to warm up. Let's see how she handles in year two.

Anyway, I got work to do. See ya.

I went back and upgraded this page to add a miniflash animation, and included a little sleeping tune Mark made a while ago called Bed of Roses.

OH ALSO. I am going to be at MOCCA this weekend (SAT+SUN) if you feel like dropping by and standing somewhere idly within my INTERACTION RADIUS. If you're into that then see you there.

edit: look for me there with Topatoco.

Ryan North of course has my permission to continue practicing foolish behavior. As far as I am concerned, he can keep hornswoggling us SO HARD.

I must however continue to forbid publicly traded companies from indulging in foolishness of any sort. Just put on a tie and go to work you assholes.

Trust nothing you see or read on this date!

Except stuff hosted on this website. I'm not all that partial to the compulsory global prank-off.

OR AM I?

The answer to this question is no.

But sometimes I play April Fool's pranks on accident. Remember last April when I started Homestuck in Flash, then decided not to and just called all those pages the HS beta? That was sort of like a retroactive 4/1 prank. The joke is there was no joke, which in a world made of jokes, can be the best joke of all.

So is there anything pseudoprankish about this year's 4/1 offering? I can see why the jape-jaundiced eye may regard it with caution, if not actual disdain. (You see why this holiday is nothing but trouble?? It befouls the lighthearted with the curmudgeonly taint of skepticism!) All I can say is, give it a day or two. 4/2 should be anointed a special day in its own right. A day for those drunk on gullibility to nurse their hangovers. Like the day after St. Patrick's, but instead of green beer you drank lots of lame bogus press releases.

I've been really busy lately. That I've been able to squeeze out a few simple pages here and there has been a little beaded string of glittering miracles. I finally had some time to grind out a really cool animation though with a guy doing flips and stuff, so I thought that was pretty sweet.

Jan found some time to do some editing too, which is always promising. We'll kick out some more of these soon I hope. He will edit. I will shout funny ideas at him, and wave around this stick I found. I will not edit though. No, because:

I will be doing a lot of animating soon.

Let's address another date in April. Not the one marking a shitty holiday no one cares about, forcing big corporations to feel obliged to foist weaksauce stunts on everybody, revealing their PR departments to be stocked with wannabe writers for The Onion. No this shit is SERIOUS. We are talking about April 13th, exactly one year since Homestuck began. The original plan was to end the story on this date. (A plan which predated the first page of this monsterpiece. A plan thus rooted in peril and ignorance!) My plan has managed to deescalate in its sweeping architecture and now reads as "do a really kickass animation, if you have time." The plan also includes shoehorning a couple other kickass animations into the archives between now and then.

Will I have time? Only I can answer that question. The likelihood for an affirmative is gravely influenced by the measure of abuse I will cause myself to endure. This measure is forecast to be: CONSIDERABLE

At the very least this announcement will chronicle with some precision the standard I have set myself up to fail to live up to, so hey, we're accomplishing stuff here.

Humor is dying a slow death cause everyone's trying to be so funny so hard at me all the time. Everybody pipe down and sell me shit.

New shirt in your grill like a hot god that rolled down there.

My apartment smells like an old aquarium and I'll probably have to move now. On top of this I have fallen ill. These items will appear on a memo you will receive on your desk, and this memo will read at the top REASONS WHY ANDREW AIN'T GETTIN' MUCH SHIT DONE LATELY.

For the last week or so I have been enjoying a series of adventures which are not especially remarkable but of the sort one's friends and/or webcomic audience will happily entertain if sufficiently inebriated. I was sleeping in a strange room the other day and I woke up in the middle of the night and didn't recognize where I was. I saw this huge poster of Bob Marley gazing at me and I screamed aloud.

That reminds me of another story but it happened less recently. I was once singing the Harry Potter music in my sleep and woke myself up with my own performance.

These are just a couple of many such wake-up stories. With material like this clearly I should discard this preposterous MSPA endeavor and take up a journal comic.

Apparently it poured in Massachusetts while I was away, holed up in our cardboard castle completely oblivious to cross-continental weather conditions. I came back to a flooded apartment. The irony is it didn't rain a drop in Seattle. The weather was exquisite.

Lots of stuff got soaked, but the good news is my computer stayed dry. If I lost my computer, well... GOODBYE MSPA.

Anyway I rescued it and scurried off to somewhere dry. I'll try to wring some updates out of this soggy dungeon nightmare soon.

So hey thanks to everyone who stopped by to say hi to me over the weekend! Let's say hi again some time ok?

That I fixed my computer. Now let us never speak of this matter again.

I'm out for the weekend! No updates here until next week. (Probably Tuesday.)

But it would please me if you would accept this parting gift.

My computer seems to have its heart set on pitching a fit. I tried to talk some reason into it but it has made its intentions clear to me through a spectacular display of histrionics.

I think it's another hard drive failing. I've probably had like ten of these things fail on me over the years. Apparently that's just what they do, without provocation. But I mean it's fine that they do that. Really. It's not like the whole world runs on these things or anything. Let's all be cool with them sharing a rung on the technological ladder with disposable cameras.

So I might not post anything for a few days while I get this sorted out.

OH. And because I am going to ECCC this weekend, that will be another pretty solid 3 or 4 days I won't post anything. [HEY HOW ABOUT THIS DOUBLES AS A REMINDER THAT I AM GOING TO ECCC, JUST IN CASE YOU WANT TO GO TOO.]

Wow so it turns out if I was like most folks I would never update this site. You will note that I am characterizing most folks as simply those who tend to have plans and problems.

Do interrogative thoughts haunt your mind like spooky poltergeists? Does the essence of inquiry press up against your soft membranes and secrete from your porous carriage as a curios black fluid? Do you harvest this fluid in the inkwell reserved solely for the quill you reach for when finishing a sentence with a question mark?

If so, you sound like sort of a lunatic. There's nothing I can do to help you.

Let's change the subject. I've been answering a few questions on formspring, if you want to steal a gander.

Hey, look at where I am going. Will I see you there? I am afraid that is a question you are more qualified to answer than I. Fingers crossed though.

I found this Problem Sleuth based puzzle from MIT to be pretty amusing. Can you figure it out???

Probably not. Here's the answer.

And while on the subject of intellectual stimulation.