Morgan Wick

I THINK I caught everything in the flash this time. Naturally, I’ll probably turn out to have missed something really obvious.

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(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized aquatic dwellings.)

Andrew Hussie seems to be making a habit out of ending each sub-act of this act by making it look like the protagonists of this act are complete red herrings when it comes to the main plot of the comic.

This time, though, I’m not sure how he can get out of it. Jane didn’t manage to prototype her Sprite, no thanks to God Cat, and doesn’t even seem to have entered the Medium (though she does appear to be transported somewhere). At that point, a massive invasion force descends upon the planet bearing familiar markings, interspersed confusingly with “years in the future” flash forwards showing the planet being flooded. The only way I can see to get out of this is either time travel, or a psycheout – in some way indicating that most of the events of this flash didn’t actually happen. I suppose he could get all four kids into the Medium while avoiding the invading or occupying forces, but there’s a certain finality to this flash, like anything following up on it directly would have to take place after the invasion already succeeded, and certainly not moments after it starts. (Maybe it’s the subliminal messages towards the end.)

(Incidentially, this invasion force suggests to me that this universe’s Betty Crocker is not the Condesce from the troll universe we’re familiar with, if only because it’s hard to see how she could have acquired such an invasion force unless she and that force were native to this universe. She certainly couldn’t have brought it with her from the old troll universe – she’s the last survivor of that universe’s troll race, other than the twelve we’re most familiar with.)

One question this flash raises for me is the role of the two-person session being planned by the two trolls who have been keeping contact with this new group of kids. Are they, in fact, of this universe, agents of the invasion out to mislead our heroes (and the readers) into thinking they’d be successful? Conversely, might that session represent the actual session that John and company will find themselves placed into, for good or ill?

Another thing I’m thinking about that suggests that almost all of Act 6-2 could be rendered non-canon if these kids aren’t red herrings is that, re-reading parts of the comic earlier, the notion that Roxy would be Jane’s server player seems to have been predestined, even though the events of Act 6-2 seemed to swap Roxy out for Dirk (and later his auto-responder). Perhaps the chain that would have led to Jane entering the session in this sub-act was always meant to fail. Perhaps the copy Roxy hacked from Crockercorp was defective, and this was their real plot against Jane.

Also, would it be possible to look back over the events of the past sub-act and find a plan in God Cat’s actions that might hint at the events to come, if we do continue from the end of this flash?

The Sports TV Wars: Looking to Canada and the America’s Cup

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Good for them, I guess? I’m happy the America’s Cup is back on television, but I don’t have much to say about it other than what I said in my CAA post. Well, that, and that I guess NBC isn’t entirely losing the battle for smaller events to ESPN.

There may be bigger news brewing north of the border, where there are three major media companies; one decided to opt out of the bidding for the Olympics, while the other two, CBC and Bell (which owns the broadcast network CTV and works with ESPN on TSN), have joined forces and repeatedly low-balled the IOC, rightfully not seeing the need to bid high with no competitors and no guarantee that NHL players will attend future Olympics. That could open the door for Yahoo to force Canadians to go to their site to see the Games. It’s still a middleman, but considering what I said not that long ago about sports entities potentially seeing the future on the Internet, it’s still a development to watch, especially considering the conviction of the blog mentioned therein that Yahoo may be the best positioned of anyone to take on ESPN.

Sport-Specific Networks
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Who called it in the title of his post on the previous comic?

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(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized karma.)

As much as I’ve complained about the OOTS comics that I’ve read in real time since I started reading it as such, I’d have to say Vaarsuvius has probably been the best part of the comic in that span, for the ongoing tragedy of her moment of weakness.

V may well have regretted signing her deal-with-the-devil before, but until now she could at least claim the problems with it related entirely to her and her own hubris. She accepted a deal from fiends that was, in fact, successful at saving her family, but then destroyed her relationship with that family so she could use the same power for whatever plot-furthering purposes she could, except she never could. She accepted it because she was desperate to prove that arcane magic could solve all her problems, and she came out of it learning of the value of other people’s contributions, as well as knowing what her own role is.

But she also accomplished one major, though entirely unnecessary, thing, and curiously, despite it being the pinnacle of her time under the Splice, she never seemed to be too broken up about it until now. She regretted the Soul Splice, not the Familicide. The forumites knew what it said about her, the fiends knew what it said about her, but curiously enough, V himself doesn’t seem to have grasped the enormity of what he’d done until he realizes that humans were killed. One-quarter of the black dragon population? Their scales aren’t all shiny, so their destruction was just and necessary. For all the lessons she’s learned, V hasn’t yet learned the lesson she hasn’t had reason to, but that lies at the heart of the entire comic, regarding the arbitrary nature of the alignment system.

Regardless, now we can continue the story of her time under the Splice I started when she accepted it. The Splice may have started as a typical Faustian deal, though for unusual reasons, but Rich managed to turn it into something entirely his own. V almost lost sight of why she accepted the deal in the first place, becoming drunk with power and heedless of the consequences of his actions, manipulated by the spliced souls to be sure, but still entirely in control. Everything that happened in the second paragraph happened, but V is now learning the flip side of those lessons: that ultimate arcane power, wielded without caution, can have unintended consequences. Immeasurable innocent blood is now on his hands, and she may never be able to repay the debt from that moment of weakness.

On the other hand, the bill may soon be coming due on the debt from the Splice itself…

The OOTS Effect, Part III

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  • Ladies and gentlemen, meet the most direct beneficiary of the Double Fine effect yet: FTL. It’s a game that attracted a considerable amount of attention even before coming to Kickstarter, which means it shouldn’t have been surprising that it doubled its $10,000 goal within a day. Less than a week later, it may be past $70,000 by the time you read this, with most of a month to go.
  • I didn’t talk about the LowLine project last week because it was barely a weekend old, and it took a full week to meet its lofty $100,000 goal, but with five weeks left at that point it could climb into rarified air. FrackNation has been going for most of a month and only just recently met its goal, but when that goal is $150,000 (already in the top ten listed projects in the Film and Video category) and it has another month still to run, that project could hit rarified air as well. A project that had already hit that territory but had seemed to have stalled at around $155,000 is the Second Class Citizens Documentary, which received an unexpected jolt last week of a nature I haven’t been able to determine, other than being named a Kickstarter Staff Pick but I suspect that might be older. Also keep an eye on the David Lynch Documentary that raised nearly $50,000 in its first of six weeks.
  • Double Fine itself enters its final week at $2.4 million. The HuMn Wallet is over $142,000 with a full month to go, but some projects featured in this space in the past seem to be having trouble maintaining their momentum; MATTER seems to have slowed down considerably, barely topping $100,000 – still the first listed Publishing project to do so. Idle Thumbs has lost almost all its momentum and sits at around $115,000, as has the Ramos alarm clock, which is even more barely over $100,000 than MATTER.
  • What impressed me about the Double Fine project as much as anything else is that, even now, it sits at only six times its $400,000 goal. It’s amazing enough that Tim Schaefer and Co. set a goal that would put them in the top ten all-time Kickstarters, even more so that they would still blow through that goal in substantially less than 24 hours. I’m pretty sure that’s the highest goal to be successfully reached in Kickstarter history. Instaprint has set an even more lofty goal of $500,000, and their progress is probably more realistic for projects with that high a goal – they raised over $30,000 over the weekend, but that’s only 6% of the goal. But they did do their research and gave themselves a long time span to raise their money, through close to the end of April.
  • Another webcomics project benefits from the OOTS effect! Well, an animation based on a comic by a guy who used to do a webcomic, anyway! Atomic Robo: Last Stop raised nearly $45,000 in its first week, blowing through its $12,000 bare minimum goal, and it still has five more weeks to go. In actual webcomic project news, Diesel Sweeties has officially made it four of the top five comics projects that are webcomics-related projects from this year, while Erfworld has a chance to pass Benign Kingdom for the (relatively) prestigious spot in its last week. That would mean, when you go to Kickstarter and look at the overall “Most Funded” page, under Comics, two of the three projects displayed will come from webcomics that are or were once hosted on the Giant in the Playground site.
  • Speaking of which: By my reckoning, nearly 70% and probably more of all the people who pledged to the OOTS drive should have received surveys by now (the 70% figure should have gotten them by Thursday). The first rewards should start shipping by the end of the week, while Rich has begun working on artwork for the coloring book, and the final tally of reward stories stands at: at least partial backstories for O-Chul, Therkla, Elan, and Belkar, two follow-up stories to the limited-edition book, a parody of a D&D setting, AND another (likely-to-be) parody starring the Cliffport Cops.

The war for TV sports supremacy, one year in

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About one year ago, the first shots were fired in the great push to dethrone ESPN from its perch as the undisputed king of the sports hill. NBC finalized its merger with Comcast, CBS removed the “College” from the CBS College Sports Network, and Fox decided it would be a good time to bring sports back to FX. While the past year has seen some high-profile contracts for them to fight over, from the Olympics to the World Cup, it’s nothing compared to the contracts coming up for bid this year, with MLB, NASCAR, the BCS, and the Big East all coming up for bid. Nonetheless, one year in, let’s take a look at how all the combatants are shaping up.

ESPN: The Worldwide Leader did a decent job defending its title, and seeing the threats on the horizon, making an enemy-of-my-enemy deal with Fox to keep NBC from picking up Pac-12 rights – though one wonders if it reconsidered that move when Fox stole the World Cup rights away from them. Other than Wimbledon, though, ESPN’s only real victories tended to be things no one cared about or things where they were the incumbent, usually with no one else caring. Probably the most notable victory other than the Pac-12 or Wimbledon involved keeping the Indy 500 on ABC rather than let the IndyCar series become an all-NBC affair. ESPN is still the king of the hill and still the ones to beat for any contract, but the fact that the biggest contract to come up for bid this year where ESPN was the incumbent other than Monday Night Football was the World Cup, which ESPN lost, could be foreboding. Grade: C.

NBC: Comcast’s efforts to dethrone ESPN from their perch is off to a rocky start, largely because of how strong Fox has come onto the scene. NBC did win the big fights over the NHL and Olympics, but they were the incumbents in both cases. They did win a slate of MLS games previously held by Fox Soccer Channel, but Fox probably feels that’s a fair trade-off for World Cup rights. They did become the beneficiary of ESPN’s decision to effectively leave the horse racing market, but they were boxed out by ESPN and Fox for Pac-12 rights and lost Wimbledon when ESPN could promise to show more matches live sooner than they could.

The Network Formerly Known as Versus did add a piece of NBC’s Olympic pie, but that will only attract viewers to the network for two weeks every two years, and they added no other games that will attract more viewers than the NHL already does. And the now-NBC Sports Network did add “NBC SportsTalk”, “NFL Turning Point”, and “Costas Tonight” to its repertoire, but the latter two shows aren’t getting any more viewers than Versus’ much-maligned “T.Ocho Show”, and “SportsTalk” is doing far worse than that. A combination of conference realignment, potential changes to the BCS, and the long-term nature of many recent contracts, means that the Big Ten in a few years will be NBC’s last best hope to add truly marquee college football to NBCSN’s slate for a long, long time, and the NFL’s decision to pull Thursday Night Football off the market hurts NBC more than anyone else, requiring them to get something on the scale of MLB or NASCAR to have any hope of challenging ESPN. Grade: C-.

Fox: NBC may have started this fight, but if anyone other than ESPN is winning it it’s definitely Fox. With three different college conferences, the UFC, and the shocker of the past year, the World Cup, Fox got right to work re-establishing sports on FX and making their networks as much of a destination for sports as anyone outside ESPN. Most notably, Fox’s family of networks is fast gaining ground on ESPN as a home for college sports. Fox doesn’t have an all-sports network like ESPN or NBCSN, but they’ve still made clear that this is going to be a three-way fight. Grade: B+.

CBS: Realizing that the CBS Sports Network is a looooong way from challenging for any serious sports rights, CBS stayed largely out of the fray, instead focusing on brands that will build an audience another way: through CBSSN’s non-game programming. To that end, adding Jim Rome to their stable was a shrewd move. The loudmouthed radio host will start a replacement for his old ESPN show “Jim Rome is Burning” on CBSSN in April, instantly bringing a sizable contingent of fans who only ever would have watched CBSSN for the occasional Mountain West or Atlantic-10 game. “ROME” should instantly become CBSSN’s most popular program, and for the moment, it certainly looks to be a faster route to relevance than picking up rights like Major League Lacrosse. Grade: C+.

Turner: Turner was making noise about adding more sports to truTV to build on their NCAA Tournament games, but their only real efforts towards that end seemed to involve the NHL. They were considered the other favorites for Thursday Night Football rights besides Comcast, and now face a very real chance of losing MLB games from TBS and NASCAR from TNT, where both packages are fairly forgotten. This year may be as critical for them as for anyone. Grade: D+.

What does it say that I originally read his threat to kill them all as a prophecy of something that will have already happened, before remembering that the original trolls’ attempt to derail events ended up contributing to them?

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(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized puzzlemurders.)

No sooner do I put up my post on the growing troll presence in this session than we get introduced to quite possibly the weirdest character ever to appear in pesterlogs, simply because of his shortened trolltag alone. I’d actually thought Hussie had created his symbol out of whole cloth, but it turns out that his symbol actually has more to do with Ophiuchus than the one we’d seen previously.

This character comes across as almost the bizarro version of the “thirteenth troll” we’d previously been introduced to, which given what she’s been like, makes him much closer to the trolls we’re already familiar with. In fact, it strikes me that the two are almost flip sides of Karkat’s personality. Karkat simply wanted to derail the kids’ session so it didn’t ruin the trolls’ own; I don’t recall him ever threatening to kill them all the way this character does, and he certainly did come to the point of assisting the kids, however begrudgingly. Giving credence to this, compare the colors of the three’s respective text.

There’s not much more to say at this point, other than that I certainly appreciate Hussie’s ability to make fun of his own long-windedness when he wants to. That’s the sort of metahumor I normally associate more with The Order of the Stick.

Would it be too much of a stretch to connect this to Penelope’s death?

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(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized fatal family tree.)

The chickens, they are coming home to roost.

Much to my chagrin, Rich has once again confirmed a wild forum theory, though this one at least seemed vaguely plausible at the time. Because as it turns out, V’s pride and shortsightedness has completely screwed over the Order of the Stick, or at least the world. (For the record, it’s doubtful that the IFCC planned on this in any way.) Funnily enough, in my last OOTS post I scratched my head at V’s willingness to allow Belkar to use Yukyuk for his own purposes; perhaps this is the universe’s way of reminding her where that path leads.

If the primary theme of this book has been “family”, a secondary one might be “secrets”, namely those of Haley and her father (the latter of which I’ll talk about if and when he turns up again). Up to this point, V was probably willing to try to forget about that whole episode, and had no reason to divulge anything about it to anyone. Now, does he decide to fess up to her culpability in this matter? Doing so could sow distrust, but not doing so will cause this to haunt her for the entire battle, maybe the entire rest of the comic.

This also keeps us from meeting any former Scribblers “in the flesh” at this gate, and thus from getting any further insight into that group’s breakup, and it suggests that the reason Rich seemed to float the possibility of Girard still being alive, as unlikely as it would ordinarily seem, was to make the point hit that much harder here, the guilt weigh that much more heavily on V’s shoulders. (On the plus side, at least the illusion the Order triggered a while back turned out not to lead to any confrontation with anybody!)

Ultimately, the end result of this is to clear the battlefield, wiping out the forces that were already set up to guard the Gate, as well as most of the magical defenses surrounding it. The Gate is more vulnerable than it was ever intended to be, its only defense now consisting of the Order of the Stick themselves. The stage has been set for the showdown for the Gate, and I fully expect the first shots to be fired imminently.

I can’t help but wonder if Roxy’s had an encounter with her before…wouldn’t that explain a lot?

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(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized woolb-easts.)

The constant, overpowering troll presence in this session continues to get curiouser and curiouser.

We’d already been graced by the presence of the “thirteenth troll” and Roxy’s still-unexplained “wriggling day” reference, but some more surprise appearances in recent updates have made it quite apparent that the new session has their own batch of trolls to contend with. Said troll’s appearances with Dirk gave us a better glimpse at her than ever before, but that’s nothing compared to what’s happened since. First there was the appearance of not-Vriska in Jake’s dreams. Now, after God Cat causes Roxy’s fenstrated-plane connection to be cut off, we find out just where she’s connected those planes through: evidently, whatever planet these new trolls call home, where she’s accosted by someone who most definitely is not Feferi.

There’s a considerable case to be made that these are either the trolls’ ancestors in their youth, or the universe where said ancestors were the ones to play the game. This seems like too easy of an explanation, though, especially if we think this new group of trolls includes the aforementioned “thirteenth troll”; the closest existing troll she’s likely to approximate to is Karkat, but aside from the gender shift and unique typing quirk, the horn pattern is very unique. Another explanation may relate to the numerous hints in this act that Kanaya will, ultimately, be able to recreate the Matriorb and revive the troll race.

However, there are a couple of factors that lead me to question the entire nature of what we’re seeing. The first is the fact that Jake was able to see one of these new trolls by blacking out after his robo-fight (notably, after his dreamself had already been killed). The second is what Roxy saw when she successfully moved through the plane in the other direction: her own dreamself. Take these two factors together, and I can’t help but wonder if what we’re seeing is going on in the Medium, or someplace even weirder.

Of course, that raises its own questions regarding what these trolls are doing here and interacting with our heroes…

The OOTS Effect, Part II

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I’m probably going to drop the “OOTS Effect” name next week:

  • We have a new candidate for the next big thing to come out of Kickstarter: MATTER, which met its $50,000 goal within 38 hours and blew through that to $82,204 by now, becoming the second-most funded project in the history of the Publishing category, and might hold the top spot by the time you read this. It slowed down considerably upon reaching its goal and probably can’t reach a million dollars, but a quarter of a million isn’t out of the question, which would be good for the top twenty at the moment. (The same disclaimer from last week about not all projects being listed with their categories applies.)
  • The HuMn Wallet raised only half of its goal in its first 48 hours, but take a look at that end time: the creators gave themselves 40 days to get the job done, meaning if they can sustain the same momentum throughout the project (a big if), the top ten is very possible. In the last day or two, it’s blown past its goal to nearly $82,000.
  • In the end, Code Hero finished just short of the category record. On the other hand, Benign Kingdom finished with more than $13,000 more than the previous third place in the Comics category, while Erfworld Year of the Dwagon has already moved into third itself. Once it finishes, the entire top three and four of the top seven (counting the Diesel Sweeties eBook-Stravaganza) will have something to do with webcomics. The previous record for a webcomic-related project before OOTS came along, to the best of my knowledge, was Girly: The Complete Collection, at less than $30,000. Again, now you know why Rich Burlew was skeptical he’d even meet his goal.
  • Idle Thumbs has crossed the $100,000 barrier, while the Ramos alarm clock may have lost some momentum and is sitting at $93,710. It should cross $100,000 by the end of the week, but the top ten may be more questionable now.
  • Finally, we must address the strange case of A Show with Ze Frank, which blew through its $50,000 goal in seven hours, making it a very good candidate to become the next million-dollar project… if it weren’t for the fact that Mr. Frank only gave his project ten days to raise its money. It’s still got an excellent shot at the top ten if it maintains that pace, but I wonder: was he paying attention to the recent spate of wildly successful drives and decided that, with his pre-existing audience, the short time span was worth the risk?
  • Oh, and as for the OOTS drive that started it all, I got my shipping survey for that, so the first steps are being taken towards fulfiling the tens of thousands of rewards people pledged for there.

Because when I got on Twitter, I said that thoughts too long for it would go here:

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It is currently the 1 PM hour on the West Coast (4 PM ET), and Fuse is showing a “sneak peek” of the top 10 of its “Sexy Beats” countdown, with the “real” premiere coming later at 8 PM ET.

What’s crazier: that, the fact that Fuse is still advertising the “real” premiere during the “sneak peek” of the same hour that’s being advertised, or that my cable company’s guide lists the “real” premiere as “new”… and this airing as a “repeat”?

The only way this makes sense is if they hold off on revealing until the “real” premiere, but I don’t know how they could do that…