MS Paint Adventures

[Alfador]

http://www.mspaintadventures.com

I hesitate to refer to this as a webcomic, since it is so much more. For the most part, each page consists of a single panel... but over the course of the two most recent, most polished stories, updates went from the consistency of a single static frame, to involving some color and animations, to now often involving full Flash animations with some seriously EPIC music.

The only complete story is Problem Sleuth, the previous two installments being abortive attempts at a "Choose Your Own Adventure" style interactive story. Commands are still given as if typed in to an adventure game, but the overall stories are now linear. Problem Sleuth has none of the epic music of Homestuck, but it is incredibly long and awesome in its own right.

It has a tendency of taking things up to 11, and then reindexing the old 11 to the new 1... and doing it again. And again. Homestuck started out as a simple adventure where a boy plays an immersive game with a friend making virtual changes to his house that actually happen... and has expanded out to include over sixteen main characters and at least FOUR UNIVERSES.

It's distilled awesome. I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned here before (based on the search function).

[mwchase]

I think I'd assumed it'd already come up.

By the way, I'm not sure we're counting "universes" the same way. Outside of the human universe and the troll universe, cosmology gets more than a little wonky.

I'm not sure what else to say... This entire month has been a blur, and I'm not sure if I had a point. Aaanyway... Have fun discussing, and maybe I'll have something more to say in a week-and-a-half.

[Alfador]

By the way, I'm not sure we're counting "universes" the same way. Outside of the human universe and the troll universe, cosmology gets more than a little wonky.

I'm counting as separate human universe, troll universe, human instance of Skaia/incipisphere, and troll instance of Skaia/incipisphere all as separate universes. If you count each regular universe and its associated incipisphere as a single universe, then the number does indeed drop to two. Given how they seem to be as desynchronized in time as the human/troll universes are from one another, due to the Skaian defense portals and Jade's grandfather somehow showing up in the Medium long before she did, I'd say it's a fair assessment. YMMV, of course.

[mwchase]

I thought that, given that the Incipispheres blur together out at the Furthest Ring, or whatever happens, if you count them, all of them, ever, would be like one universe with weird connectivity. So that's three, maybe.

Yes, everyone who hasn't heard of this, this is, in fact, a webcomic that will spark disagreements about how to count to four.

[Sparksol]

I quite enjoyed Problem Sleuth, I did indeed.

I caught a glimpse of Homestuck some while later, and read it up to that point, early on, he bit a blue apple that an appeared device had brought into being, as he watched the meteorite-to-be bear down on him.

Then I lost track of it for a while.

I'm catching up with it now, and I think I'm about halfway through, and Dimensional Causality, I can't believe I've been missing out on this. (Actually, I can believe it all too easily. I'll just berate myself a little for missing out on it as it arrived thus far, and get on with enjoying that what I've been missing out until now.)

[Plasman]

...I'd found MSPaint Adventures on my own about four months ago, and had just barely started reading Homestuck. I hadn't got in very far - I think I got as far as Zoosm- sorry, John wandering around his house, trying to get a package out of his Dad's car - but didn't think much of it at the time.

Then I read your posts (and looked over my sister's shoulder as she read the same comic) and, well, let's just say it was not what I was expecting. And I mean that in a good way!
The only disappointing part was when I hit the time barrier - ie. read through the archive, got deep into the story, and got stuck at the latest update... What, is that all for now? Oh well, at least it updates frequently...
Problem Sleuth was fun too. Still don't know why the weapons kept changing to keys, but never mind.

If there's anyone out there who still hasn't read this, or any of the other MSP comics, please do so now!

Start reading Homestuck.

[mwchase]

If anyone wants to go meta, someone tried to work out the plot of Homestuck using nothing but fanart and discussions on /co/. The result was so amazing, and also different from canon, that it inspired people to ask for fanfic, which anonymous has delivered. Still pretty short at the moment (mid-late July).

[mwchase]

Coda caught up.

We have been devising elaborate crossover fanfiction, inspired by Coda disagreeing with me when I said that such fanfiction wouldn't make any sense. Not sure if anything will come of it.

[Coda]

Yeah, probably nothing will come of it, but it is an amusing thing to think about, and it raises some questions about exactly how things work in Trys and Pastel (and Ktlikitkaktl).

Like for example, the rounded-triangular orbits of the day and night Orbs -- how is this triangle oriented relative to the Worldplate?

[mwchase]

For those who can't fill in the blanks, that was because I was wondering if Doc Scratch could live on the Night Orb without falling off. I mean, technically, he's well capable of ignoring linovection and doing whatever he wants, but it would certainly be easier for him if the Orbs didn't rotate with respect to the striations. (Or at least had an axis parallel to them.)

This then, for me, raised the question of the precise details of the motions of the orbs. Not directly relevant to the original subject, but it did make me realize that I'm not really sure how the orbits are physically oriented.

[mwchase]

Okay, so. Anyone who hasn't checked out Homestuck, or taken a look, and dropped it because they didn't get the point, I urge you to take another look. If you're really not sold on the idea, take a look at the high point of the story: [S] Cascade.

This is the animation that took down Newgrounds a few days ago. It's almost a quarter of an hour long, beautifully detailed and scored, and, according to everyone on Newgrounds that hasn't read Homestuck, utterly awesome, even if they do have no idea what's going on. It makes complete sense if you've read the 4108 pages that precede it, though.

The rest of the story is, of course, completely worth it. [S] Cascade. is just a wonderful capstone to Act 5 (of 7).

[Coda]

It makes complete sense if you've read the 4108 pages that precede it, though.

Does it? XD I had questions, although AH's new tumblr addressed most of them.

[Verreaux]

...I have no idea what I just watched.

[Wizard CaT]

Okay, so. Anyone who hasn't checked out Homestuck, or taken a look, and dropped it because they didn't get the point, I urge you to take another look. If you're really not sold on the idea, take a look at the high point of the story: [S] Cascade.

This is the animation that took down Newgrounds a few days ago. It's almost a quarter of an hour long, beautifully detailed and scored, and, according to everyone on Newgrounds that hasn't read Homestuck, utterly awesome, even if they do have no idea what's going on. It makes complete sense if you've read the 4108 pages that precede it, though.

The rest of the story is, of course, completely worth it. [S] Cascade. is just a wonderful capstone to Act 5 (of 7).

Well it's a music video, it doesn't have to make sense. Though not all the comments are so positive. Was still pretty cool.

[Alfador]

It is indeed glorious, to the degree that the word "glorious" and all its synonyms do not do it justice.

[Plasman]

I LOL'd when I heard that [S] Cascade managed to break Newgrounds of all places! It's quite something to see when an eager fanbase turns into a DDOS! (I was lucky and forgot about the update until the next day, so I didn't have to worry about refreshing a non-loading flash.)

That flash was definitely worth the wait. Only sad part? Apparently that's the most grandiose part of the series; everything else will fail to reach that standard... (well, it'll still be awesome, just not as epic.)

[mwchase]

at least FOUR UNIVERSES.

Currently at ten. We've seen residents of nine of them, and events occurring in eight of them.

(The Furthest Ring, Hussieverse, the Alternias and Earths, and their respective sessions. The only two we haven't seen are pre-Scratch Alternia and its session (which is where the Troll Ancestors that we have seen came from).)

[Brilliand]

Since Sburb is a universe-creating machine, counting universes may be a pointless exercise at this point. However, I wouldn't consider the Furthest Ring a universe; it's stated to be the area around the actual universes, and hence is more akin to Jenni's "multiverse" than to an actual universe.

Going a bit further, the Sburb sessions are similar enough that they might be considered separate "splays" of the same universe; likewise, the pre/post-Scratch divisions are also closer to splay divisions than full universe divisions. The Sburb universe, with all of its splays, is of course the universe factory. That brings the universe count back down to four. Note that the pre-Scratch Earth and Alternia (I assume) have the distinction of being formed by a proper Sburb playthrough; the rest of those splays are merely game constructs.

Going in the completely opposite direction, every separate dream could be considered a separate universe, since they are all separate bubbles in the Furthest Ring. That would make the universe count completely unmanageable.