(Oh wow, I had thought these were going to roll out much more slowly!) At the time of writing, my statistics page doesn't yet include the epilogue content. I do plan to include it, since is sure looks like a real part of the Homestuck story to me. My main reason for not jumping on it right away is that I'm out of town, away from my statistics generating code. I'll need to update it, because as usual when Homestuck grows a new appendage it gleefully breaks previous assumptions. (By the way, I love this.) Text only and branching narratives shouldn't be an issue, and scraping the new content reliably will just involve a little scripting. But. Hmmm. Is a page of the story one web page, or is it a stretch of text with a "> Title" at the top? Do I need new concepts? And this morning, I haven't even yet read through the main epilogues, so perhaps there are more structural surprises to come.

My first impressions of the VIZ Media relocated official website are pretty positive.

Content is pretty complete, not many problems (not my doc btw.) It's a pretty light (and self-aware) makeover in terms of the surround.The experience of reading the work/story is very substantially the same, so if you were thinking of asking for a copy of the offline archive because you really miss specific pixels of mspaintadventures.com - please don't.

Mostly, I'm hugely happy that there is an official effort to rid the story of its dependency on Flash. Long term, that dependency was going to really hurt the availability of this wonderful story. I had a variety of plans in place myself to battle this, but all approaches looked like they'd involve a huge amount of work which I was dreading having to undertake.

You open the book to a random page

In honor of Homestuck's eighth birthday, let's try to explore what the average page of the story was like.

As Hussie described on his Formspring when inventing the thirteen year break, there's a lot of variation. "Most MSPA updates are a single panel, with some accompanying text. But [...] There are several hours of animated Flash footage mixed in with the updates. There are several more hours of interactive gameplay. [...] Many updates are accompanied by several pages of dialogue."

When a population contains outliers, the median can sometimes be a better average to consider than the mean. I'll take care to distinguish those concepts here, otherwise I'd have to hand in my stats badge.

In fact what I found was that the nature of the average page progressed over the course of the story. (”TYPICAL CASE OF QUADRANT VACILLATION”, right?) So I have split out most of my calculations across its four different "Parts".

The official Homestuck map was recently updated, giving names to the final ActActEtcs. (Turns out that The Rapture is simply the name of the Act 7 "anime".)

More significant for my bookkeeping, Hussie did take the previously discussed route of splitting Act 6 across Part 3 and a final Part 4, which evens things out nicely.

He also introduced another layer of hierarchy, splitting Homestuck into two Sides. And did other slightly odd things like including Act 7 and the Credits in Side 2 but not in Part 4. (Is that a canonical escape clue, or am I rubbing salt in old wounds?)

Stats including visuals updated as usual.

Where Credits Due

This post is basically about where those recent credits pages fit into the story according to my stats.

Seeking [S] Collide .swf

Does anyone have any way to help make this happen?

Update: heavenlyevan points out this implies it may have been released straight to video, as it were - i.e. no SWF.

Epiphenomena

According to my ad hoc rules, the Epipause is thirteen days old today, and it has just entered the list of ten longest MS Paint Adventures hiatuses.

Video file/phobe

Although web TV is a progressively happier video streamy wonderland, it hides a lot of horrible OS/browser/container/codec incompatibility behind its corporate servers. As someone compiling an offline archive in the form of a static local copy of the website that you open up in your browser, I had trouble with the final YouTubes.

Andrew Hussie

I do not understand why nobody is talking about this most excellent pun and reader command. Get to it!

Andrew Hussie

We could be waiting for a while. Using the method employed by Andrew Hussie in an old Formspring post, given that MSPA started full production on 09 Mar 2008, then to produce the 9803 pages since at the perfectly fine rate of one page per day would take until 11 Jan 2035, earning him a 18 year 9 month break starting from today.

And I have no more words. At least: not as many as I was expecting to get at Homestuck’s end today. Have to make do with just the 817,612 of them.

Since everyone already celebrated three days ago, I’m a 21st Century Pedant, but: that right there was the 10,000th p=page of MS Paint Adventures.

MSPA P10K

As I'm sure many of you noticed, the last page of today's update is p=010000. There aren't actually 10,000 story p= pages on the mspaintadventures.com website yet because reasons, but we now know we will just pass that number by the end of Homestuck because leaks.

Edit: updated given April 9 update contained both ah and rings.

Edit: and again given April 11 update had only half of johndad.

As this 4chan theory describes, some Homestuck page metadata has been uploaded in advance of the pages/art, and ipgd additionally leaked that Act 7 will be just two pages. The initial assumption was that there would be one named set of pages from the metadata leak for each update before Act 7. In practice they didn’t match up quite so evenly (and I’ve been editing this post in response!) But unless April 12 or Homestuck in general contains more than we expect, we currently have a pretty firm idea of how most stats will end up.

Homestuck will end on page p=010028. Its stats will show 2559 days, 8124 pages, probably 14911 panels, probably 164 [S]s. Can’t  sensibly predict how many words will feature in Act 7, but I imagine at least thousands more to add to today's total of 817,754.

At that point the stats for MSPA as a whole will show 10002 pages. Yes, we barely pass a very round milestone if we count the number of unique p= pages found in stories on the website. That simple definition cuts an arbitrary line through a bunch of edge cases about what a page really is and deals with some missing/duplicate numbers: you can read the messy details here.

I won't update any of my running stats ahead of time; I'll let them update themselves if/when it really happens.

Long build up

We won't know for sure until after the brief pause, but that should be just about the end of A6A6I5. There are usually some closing curtains, so unless the EoA6 Flash straddles sections like [S] Game Over did, I guess we'll get at least one more page, assumed below.

For a denouement build up section, A6A6I5 turned out pretty big. My crude percentage breakdown reckons it is 8% of the whole story. Its 88,187 words form 11% of the Homestuck total, and a 636 page count will equal that of A5A1. My old breakdown visualization (which updates itself when new data comes in) shows what a big chunk of A6A6 this one intermission was.

...yeah, OK, this post is just the statistics version of an antsy pants dance while waiting for Wednesday.

Statistical conclusions

Says the Huss on the news page:

“Starting today, there will be 6 days of updates (about 125 total pages). Then a brief pause. Then on 4/6, I'll post the END OF ACT 6 animation. That should immediately be followed by 7 days of updates (about 40 total pages), ending with an update on 4/13, the 7th anniversary of Homestuck. That update will contain ACT 7 in its entirety.”

Numbers, yay. Etc. Robo-calculating...