readmspa.org

Part 1 (aka basically Acts 1 to 4) ran from 13 April 2009 to 11 June 2010, with 1989 pages at the rate of 4.7 per day.

59% were of the form Hussie considered typical: a media (i.e. image or Flash) panel plus some prose or a pesterlog. As many as 21% had more than one media panel on the page, though. (This reduced to 12% in Part 2, 8.5% in Part 3, and a measly 2.5% in Part 4.)

Part 2 (aka basically Act 5) ran from 12 June 2010 to 2 November 2011, with 2121 pages at the rate of 4.2 per day.

55% were typical. But, the story was getting more wordy. In Part 1 the mean number of words per page was 64, but in Part 2 it was 115. (This mean peaked at 136 in Part 3 and reduced back to 84 in Part 4.) The mean is consistently massively inflated by the wordiest pages, though: no Part has pages with a median word count more than 27.

Part 3 (aka Act 6 minus ActAct 6) ran from 11 November 2011 to 14 April 2013, with 2132 pages still at the rate of 4.1 per day.

It had the most "typical" pages: 61% of them. However, the images were more likely to be "higher quality" (if that means anything in this comic!) The mean size in bytes of an images increased from pretty much 70Kb in Parts 1 and 2 to 86Kb in this Part, eventually reaching 102Kb in Part 4.

Part 4 (aka A6A6 et al) ran from 12 June 2013 to 12 April 2017, including the huge pauses that meant its 1880 pages eked out at only 1.3 per day.

It still remained 56% typical. By now, 87% of the pages basically had just an arrow as their title. (This is another feature that changed smoothly over time: Part 1 has 5% such titles, Part 2 has 10%, and Part 3 has 35%.)

Talking of titles, the longest in terms of word counts form a nice sequence: Part 1 has fourteen word titles, Part 2 thirteen, Part 3 twelve and Part 4 eleven. (But all four Parts have the same longest title length in terms of character counts: it always maxes out at sixty. Pointless quiz: find all twenty-six titles of this length.)

There were two new pages, timestamped as published some minutes before the start of 10/25 in EST. Although the second (the video) is linked from within the first (the click through Flash), both are accessible as regular pages with increasing numbers same as normal (p=010029 and p=010030) and they work coherently enough with the rest of the narrative.

So, even though Hussie described this as "post-canon content" (which I read as a nod to the idea that the kids in some sense escaped their story at its end) when it comes to measuring that story I've decided to just plug it in as two more pages at the end of Act 7 in Part 3 of Homestuck. The only slightly unusual choice on my part is to not include the sound, art and shout out credits in the word count - I figure you wouldn't usually include that kind of meta stuff as part of a work. I have included transcriptions of the snaps though, since they're more part of the story.

To expand on the why ("assets and archival") - actually, it's probably others who would have most use for the art assets. It's the archival purposes I'm more interested in.

By its nature [S] Act 7 will remain a video, and it may never make sense to try to host a more complicated and platform-demanding collision of SWF(s) on the official site if the YouTube embed is working just fine. but... given that the eighteen minutes of [S] Collide do exist in their more native Homestuck form, it opens possibilities.

Most commonly the enquiry comes from an ardent fan who is hoping for an archive copy now so that they have personal  insurance against such an event.

TL/DR: I feel you - we fear for what we love. But: shoosh, pap, covered.

Actually, shortly after I first gave an archive copy to a guy who added a few extras and made a very fancy “Disc 1” DVD copy for an offline friend, the “what if?” question came up in a thread on the official MSPA forums. One of the Homestuck creative team (if I remember correctly, tynic?) was fairly scathing: it wasn’t going to happen. Andrew and all friends with access to his digital treasure simultaneously vanish from the grid? There were, I believe tynic said, “more pertinent paranoias you could be having.”

(And I’m not totally sure what he said any more because… the entirety of the official MSPA Forums recently went offline and seem to be lost forever. Ah, how delicious the dramatic irony is right now.)

But for what it’s worth: if the work was ever lost, of course I’d get a copy up into the Internet Archive. And if you really want to multiply in the chance that I’m missing too - over time, there have been sufficient individual copies of the archive made in appropriately special circumstances that I’m confident someone else would do it if I didn’t. So settle yourself into something appropriately bulbous and comfortable: Homestuck’s not going anywhere.

Relatedly, I'm letting Homestuck remain unfinished according to my stats calculations - not out of a desire for plot closure or an expectation that the hypothetical epilogue will provide it (I feel otherwise) but because at the time of writing it sounds more likely than not that there will be an epilogue that we should consider part of that story.

Flash is surely a nasty proprietary format - and I’ll talk another time about how to meet the threat that eventually brings to the future of Homestuck - but it does have the advantage of working exactly the same across all the platforms that deign to support it, and being really really compact. I know Act 7 will stay as it is, but I hope Hussie releases the original SWF for Collide eventually.

Anyway, using workarounds with links that you can open in other applications in the worst case... the cross-platform testing I’m able to do suggests I’ve gotten away with adding only 280MiB of single format (H264 in mp4) content without leaving too many readers potentially unable to see the ending.