MSPA Prophet

It all started on December 31st, 2012, when a bunch of old amusing photos of Andrew Hussie were found in an unsecured directory on his site (along with the full text of Hussie’s incomplete Wizardy Herbert novel, but for some reason nobody really cared about that). If you were around that day, you may remember the insanely overblown reaction Tumblr had to those photos. I had some time to kill, so I casually watched the storm play out on the #hussie tag. Funny image edits were being made, laughs were being had, and all was going well—until this post was made.

I had no idea what that post was talking about, so I followed the link it gave. It went to some phpbb forum. Specifically, a profile page.

Oh, it was only a spam bot. Nothing exciting about that. But what was the forum itself? Why is there a forum hidden in the depths of andrewhussie.com? Surely this was worth investigating. So I went to the main page.

Curses, nothing visible to guests. Nothing except the member count and the…

Hmm. That post count number seems pretty familiar…

It’s almost… !!

The number of pages MSPA currently has!

That was when I was 90% sure I had stumbled upon something really excellent. If my hunch was correct, then the back end of MSPA was secretly, of all things, a phpbb forum. Probably with Jailbreak, Homestuck, Ryanquest, etc. all in their own topics, with each post becoming another page of the adventures. Yes, that sounded logical.

But what about that absurdly high member count?

… Oh.

From there, all I had to do was confirm my suspicions. After doing some basic math with the various missing pages and, unnumbered extra pages, I determined that it was at least feasible for all known MSPA pages to fit within the limit posed by the forum’s post count. And as a bonus, this also gave an upper bound to the number of theoretical undiscovered pages that may or may not exist. (I didn’t bother saving that number when I calculated it, but I believe it was around 20.)

At that point there wasn’t much else I could do. I tried registering an account (how could I resist?), but accounts needed to be validated by an administrator to be able to log in for real. Considering what would inevitably happen if this wasn’t the case, I am definitely glad everyone who wasn’t Hussie was locked out. (This is also why I decided to keep my source a secret until now—just in case there was some way to get in, I did not want to expose MSPA’s back door to anyone with bad intentions.) All I could do was wait for the next MSPA update to come, and then check back on that post count to see if it increased.

… But as a fellow MSPA reader, you should know how antsy we can get when waiting for an update. I bookmarked the page, and I found myself checking it every few hours. It was just like the old days, back before MSPANotify existed. Except instead of trying to keep up with the story and the fandom, I was trying to stay one step ahead. And then, through sheer chance,

I checked at just the right time. Andrew was online and posting. One by one, the post count increased over the next few minutes—until finally, MSPANotify signaled that an update had gone public—with exactly as many pages as had just been posted. I had my confirmation. Now I needed to figure out what to do with it.

At first I kept it to myself and a small group of friends. With the help of a page monitoring Chrome addon, I created my own personal update “prenotifier” as I called it, so I could cut the F5 habit before it became an addiction again.

I gave it an appropriate notification sound, and it went to work. For the next few days, everything went perfectly. Updates came, and I found out about them—not in that order. But it didn’t take long for me to realize I could be doing so much more with this knowledge. That was when I decided to make the Prophet.

The idea started as nothing more than a social experiment: updateiscoming.tumblr.com, on which I’d post “update is coming” every time my prenotifier went off, to see how the fandom reacted to someone ‘predicting’ updates before they happened. And to see how popular it got, if it caught on at all. Honestly, the “MSPA Prophet” title was an afterthought. In the early days of the blog I just referred to it as updateiscoming, and I assumed everyone else would do the same.

The first week was slow. We were in Act 6 Act 5 Act 1 x2, so the updates were twice as long, and they took twice as much time to make. I had also not yet automated the Tumblr posting, so I was always paranoid of missing a chance to prove myself. (Luckily, that only ever happened once or twice.) Despite those setbacks, everything was working as planned. Some people were noticing, and every day there was another person asking how I was predicting updates. There were plenty of other asks, too, including this one:

First of all, no. I do not agree with that rumor. Hussie did not swindle everybody. The game is being made. That isn’t my personal insider scoop; that’s just public knowledge. It has a confirmed developer. If the Kickstarter was all an elaborate ruse to rob the fandom, no developer would have been announced. Now a professional company is risking their professional reputation on successfully making this game. For it to all be a lie at this point is absurd.

Now, whether Hussie will ever update again is a different story. There is no intuitive argument that makes it obvious Hussie will finish the comic, so I have to admit there is an extremely small chance this part of the rumor is true. Just like there’s an extremely small chance Hussie could update tomorrow, or even today. But that’s looking at the question from a purely logical standpoint.

Now let’s look at it realistically.

Hussie has been working on this comic for five years. He has an insane work ethic that other webcomic artists admire. In January he claimed that he was deep in the process of writing the rest of Homestuck and that it probably needed another month of writing before he could start working on panels.

It should be noted how often Hussie mispredicts how long a task will take him. Examples: [S] Descend was originally intended to be the 4/13/2010 flash. In March 2010 he thought he might end Homestuck on 8/26/2010. He originally estimated Hivebent would last one month. Then in early July 2010 he estimated Hivebent would take only three more weeks. He originally estimated Act 6 would be shorter than or approximately as long as Act 5. And probably many more instances that I can’t remember or find on his old formspring. (If anyone else out there can tell me some of the instances I’m forgetting, I would greatly appreciate it!)

My point is, if Hussie estimated he’d need one more month of writing, it probably means he took three more months of writing. But in any case, we have little reason to assume Hussie was lying about writing the rest of Homestuck. I mean, when have we ever known the great Andrew Hussie to lie to us?

Homestuck will update again, eventually. Again, this is not my own insider knowledge. This is my personal opinion based on my faith in Andrew Hussie to deliver a finished product. Will it update this year? I’ve seen a lot of people predicting update dates of either 10/25 or 11/11, but frankly, I don’t think either of those will happen. If Hussie finished the writing somewhere between February and April, then that was 4-6 months of Gigapause spent only on the writing (not to mention the writing for the game, which Hussie stated at the time was a higher priority). We can probably safely and arbitrarily assume that another 4-6 months of work went into drawing the rest of the panels of Homestuck, which brings us to somewhere between June and October. (This is also ignoring the numerous conventions Hussie attended over this time, constantly breaking up his work flow.) So why isn’t Homestuck finished already???

Animation.

In Hussie’s original Gigapause announcement, with regards to producing the rest of the comic, he stated “most of the effort will be tied up in animation chores.” Now, I’m not suggesting we take this statement literally and account 51%+ of the Gigapause to animation duties, but we can at least put it on equal ground to writing and drawing and add another 4-6 months to our total. Which gives us the extremely broad range of October 2014 to April 2015.

I can understand with the lack of progress updates from Hussie that people are starting to lose hope of Homestuck ever updating again. But, we are still well within a reasonable time range for Hussie to still be working on the comic! Especially with all the conventions and game minutiae he’s had to attend to, which probably add another 1-2 months to our ETA: November 2014 to May 2016.

So there you have it. Homestuck will probably update any time from right this very second, to eight months from now. That’s as specific as I’m willing to get, and even then, there’s a good chance I’m wrong.