Questions #1-10

Who do you think should be the next president of the United States?

dumb



How many updated have you done drunk? I mean, how HIGH do you have to be to do something like that?

how many questioned have you done drunk?



Have you ever stopped in the middle of drawing/writing an update and asked yourself, "What the fuck am I making?"

sometimes, but i don't think i ever stop drawing. just now and then while i'm drawing i probably form an expression of befuddlement or disgust at my present behavior.

one example i guess was when i was making the dutton panel:
http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=003278

and i had to make a "doodle" that looked like a whimsical random sketch, but the tablet interpreted as a dutton head. so i think i wound up drawing about 30 or 40 quick random sketches on top of dutton's face before i got one that looked right, and i'm sure at some point in the process i stopped to think what an odd practice this was for a person to be engaged in out of context. (or even in context)



I think the major downside to those interactive pages is the anxiety that we won't make the right choice and thus won't be able to experience the best thing possible. It's the idea that we'll miss something important.

here's something else to note about it:

even though the interactive pages seem like a RADICAL DEVIATION in common storytelling practices, they're really not.

many of us have played hundreds of hours of RPGs like final fantasy doing the same thing, running around, talking to everybody in a town, making sure you don't miss anything.

i guess it's less unnerving in an RPG because that's A) what you're expecting to do, and B) what you're doing CONSTANTLY through the whole game, with little pockets of story progression interrupting now and then.

so keeping a reader/player comfortable is mostly about conforming to their expectations, and staying within the established parameters of the medium.

i guess i'm not that concerned with reader comfort! this isn't a luxury automobile. it's more like a rickety jeep, serviceable on an outrageous safari.



Hey could you add in an icon indicator for chat-log pages like you do for [S] and [I] ? It would make tracking down this troll chatter WAY LESS OF A FUCKIN' NIGHTMARE HEADACHE. ;D

go to "search" and browser-search for "pesterlog". it will serve the exact same purpose as such an icon.



The Act 4 opening, while epic in its own way, was much less interesting than a simple flash animation or multiple ones would be. I don't think it was worth the effort you and your team put in. I love it, but you could've saved time and made it better.

on some level i agree, but to scrap initiatives like that entirely goes against the grain of the experimental nature of this thing. (also in this case my "team" is really just me and gankro. there wasn't THAT much more effort involved than usual, save his coding efforts done mostly in tandem with the art.)

dramatically speaking, it would have been more powerful to arrange a hard wired animation set to cool music, and dictate exactly what the reader is supposed to see and learn about the story. but the downsides are you sacrifice the curveball element, and fail to push the envelope on the medium. i prefer keeping these upsides, even if just in small doses.

i found it kind of interesting to see the variety of reactions to that page, specifically that there appears to be a class of people who are grumpy about the concept, when faced with having to do something themselves to drive the story. which is a somewhat understandable reaction. if you go to a movie and all you want to do is tune out to what's on the screen and let the director do all the driving, you'd probably be perplexed or irritated if a controller popped out of the seat in front of you half way through and you had to control the characters for a while. but that's not quite what you're signing up for here. anything goes, and the only reason i don't do stuff like that more often is due to the labor involved.

but when i see that sort of reaction to it, it makes me think i should be doing it more. people get comfortable with the status quo very easily, even when that status quo itself isn't all that old (i've only been including these heavy duty flash animations in mspa for less than a year). meandering outside this comfort zone gets people agitated, and the more people get agitated the more i'm tempted to think i'm on the right track, or at least further exploration is warranted. sometimes a good idea has to be really rammed down people's throats for them to understand it's a good idea, because you'll always have to surmount their curmudgeonly resistance to innovation, and as always, the preposterous love affair the masses seem to have with mediocrity.



Is GC blind because Libra is Scales, symbolic of Justice, and Justice is Blind?

yes, yes, and yes



Oh god where did you get that real life puppet cal in your avatar???

http://www.metroidhat.com/gallery/lilcal.html



Is MSPA basically the outward manifestation of your deep psychological problems?

no.

all of my psychological problems are quite shallow; it's low hanging fruit.



oy will you just wrap it up all ready!!!! 3514 im good now hurry the fuck up and start something else already!

3514 (as of the posting of your question) is not homestuck's page count. it is the total number of pages in all the stories in mspa.

HS is currently 1667 pages long.

to A your Q: nah