If you're using the collection I think you might have unlocked some stuff from the time period which Andy was interacting with the Fandom.
I did indeed!
Most of the news posts are pre-Homestuck, but interesting nonetheless. A lot of it's just housekeeping - announcements about donation commands, thank-you messages to contributors, short hiatuses from the comic, etc, but there's also a lot of interesting stuff to highlight.
Turns out Problem Sleuth really was bigger than I thought, enough for it to have millions of hits and a sold-out merch store.
I'd been assuming that Homestuck was Hussie's big breakout comic. Maybe it was, but they had a pretty sizeable following before it ever started.
Really everything that's happened so far [by the end of Act 1] probably serves as more of a prologue than a first chapter.
Hussie talks a bit about Act 1 after it ended, saying that the entire thing is essentially a prologue to the comic proper.
This is definitely the impression I got. The whole Act is just an elaborate tutorial sequence for John, after all.
Glancing backwards, I can't help but monitor my progress. 55 days, 247 pages (with 295 images). That's a little more than 5 images per day, which is almost the exact pace I set with Problem Sleuth over the course of a year.
Their pace at this point was an astounding five pages per day.
This is an average which includes time spent making gifs and Flash animations, so I'm kind of losing it over this. Webcomics are notorious for the exact opposite of this update speed, and there must have been a lot of optimization behind the scenes to make it work.
It's especially impressive considering that they were only updating a couple of times a week back in the Bard Quest days. They seem to have found their rhythm in early 2008, because this is a hell of a jump in productivity.
John's shirt, which of course appears to be Slimer from Ghostbusters, is actually a depiction of an Asian knock-off of Slimer called the GREEN SLIME GHOST. Rose's shirt was once a depiction of a character from a fake cute cartoon show which I totally made up called "Squiddles!". She then went about defacing this shirt to make it look mean!
We get a bit of flavor on the kids' symbol shirts. This newspost predates Jade's introduction by several months, so we finally have an answer for where the name originally came from, which I was wondering about earlier.
A familiar refrain with pages like this I have found is something like: "Is that all? Can I do anything else? Can I kill the imp? Is there an objective I'm missing?" The answer is, what you see is what you get! These are not really fully functional mini-games with the sort of objectives you would expect to see from such things. They are partially interactive pages in a story, leaning on certian traditional elements of gameplay to convey the story-purpose of the page.
Bit of commentary here about the 'playable' pages. They're intended to be interactive cutscenes, rather than actual games. There isn't going to be any 'hidden' content, just obvious beats that progress the story in a format that looks like a videogame.
We get a hint that there's a secret in Jaspers' flash, which apparently is no longer clickable on the website version of this animation. This pretty much immediately destroys my assumption above that these things won't have any hidden content in them.
It's not any secret lore or anything, though, just a cute little animation giving us a look into Rose's head. She really is an animal lover, isn't she?
This archive link to a poll on what items John should have alchemized no longer works, which breaks my heart :'( I'll see about finding it later, I guess...
Anyway, I'll be back here later, when there's more to read.
Someone remind me to check out the Blogspot later, too. It looks super wordy, and I wanna get back to the comic!
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