Offline MSPA

What is MS Paint Adventures?

MS Paint Adventures is an epic sprawling online webcomics creation by Andrew Hussie and supporting artists. Here are Andrew's notes for new readers and FAQs.

I thought this thing was called Homestuck?

Homestuck is the largest, most popular MS Paint Adventures story. Here it is.

Why are some links colored red?

They point to pages outside of the offline archive, which you'll need an internet connection to see.

How did this archive come about?

I originally compiled an offline archive for my personal use. I had a long bus journey to work without any internet connection, and wanted to be able to re-read Homestuck. Also I figured it would be a fun project! And it has been a great platform for building statistics about the size and cadence of MSPA.

But others told me they had a use for such a thing too. So on a case-by-case basis I have shared it with some other folk when they had a good enough excuse.

The best reason is to share this work with someone who couldn't otherwise practically enjoy it — to give it to a friend who is stuck offline and ripe for recruitment as a reader. (Is this you? Hello, offline friend-of-a-friend! We love this story and so we have pushed it at you, quite possibly against your will. But you will love it too and then we'll be all "told you so".)

But I also take pity on existing fans who are going to get cut off from the Net for a long while (months) and want to take their MSPA with them. Similarly I like to support fan projects, such as Let's Read Homestuck

Is this archive legal?

No. "What is taking place here is almost certainly illegal."

I'd argue it was quite within the bounds of copyright law for me to download and modify a copy of the website for my personal use — the space-shifting and time-shifting of art still gets some protection.

But when I package it up and distribute it to other folk, that is definitely against copyright.

(Ironically, distributing a program that let people make their own copy directly would not be illegal — but since that would mean lots of people pulling tens of thousands of individual files from the official site it seems much more evil.)

Well then, "How could this atrocity be floating out here unnoticed all this time?"

So long as the offline archive does good rather than harm, there's a (completely unofficial) policy of tolerance.

As was said in the forum:

We can turn a blind eye to very minor distribution of such an archive, since in cases like [this] it's really more like advertising, but any sort of publicly available downloadable archive would definitely fall outside fair use laws.

I'd hate to see this shut down, since experience so far has been that people respect its intent. Friends become fans, people spend money on official merchandise, no-one puts the archive on a file-sharing site, and I don't get into trouble. Please let's keep it that way! If there's someone offline you'd like to pass this onto, ask me for a fresh copy.

What web browsers and computers does the archive work on?

I use it in the Firefox browser on an Ubuntu Linux box. In theory any part of it might be completely broken on anything else. Hell, it could be broken for me too, I'm always messing around with it and I don't have any formal procedure for testing it.

In practice it ought to work fine on any halfway recent web browser on any halfway decent operating system. In March 2012 I did some clean up to make it work OK on Internet Explorer, but if you run into issues I do recommend trying Firefox or Chrome.

Flash is vital, parts of the story are told that way. You probably have it installed already, though. Also to playback some linked videos ripped from YouTube, you'll need support for QuickTime

Unlike the original site (where pesterlogs can't be read) the archive can be used without Javascript enabled. But you won't get any menus or funky reading options.

Finally, in August 2012 the storytelling for Homestuck started dancing on the cutting edge and relying on some quite fancy HTML5/Javascript features for certain specific segments (the OpenBound engine used for walkaround games from page 007163 onwards.) These caused some troubles even in contemporary browsers, and squashing them into this archive introduces further complications. So good luck! If all else fails you can read transcripts of these sections instead.

So will it work on my smart phone / tablet?

Sort of.

MS Paint Adventures was designed to work on a desktop computer — maybe even an old-school Microsoft Win XP desktop computer with a screen resolution a bit less than what is typical these days. Homestuck in particular went on to make some assumptions about you having a real keyboard and mouse too, rather than a touch screen. It also assumes your operating system isn't having some kind of philosophical dispute with Adobe Flash.

The archive helps you out with some of these things, but mostly accidentally, and only a bit. Additionally it adds a new complication: it assumes that as well as external websites you can use your web browser to open up local files that are stored on the device. (Like you can do on a real computer, you know, the one your grandfather has.)

So whether this will all work out kind of depends on exact details of your device, what hoops you jump through, and what you are willing to put up with when reading the story. Let's go through the main problem areas.

Your screen is a bit small, especially when you turn it sideways.

A problem for many phones. The default page layout expects you to have around 1024 pixels widthways, and for you to be able to see each of those pixels. It stubbornly makes you scroll horizontally if you have less room (which is awful for reading the text), and conversely you may have to squint a bit on a retina-style pixel display.

The archive accidentally helps you here. It has a reading mode option to "Fit screen width", which was designed for blowing things up bigger, but helps out some with squashing them too.

You can't run Flash.

Apple declared war on Flash early on so iPhones and iPads are affected. Later versions of Android have had to drop support for the format too. You may be able to find alternative web browser apps for your phone with special support for the format. Some of them may need you to unlock the device. Go searching. If you're technical or know someone technical, you may well be able to figure it all out.

It's a real shame if you can't see Flash. Some key sections of the Homestuck story require it. When they involve lots of text then I've transcribed them and you can read them either on the search pages or by enabling the "Display transcripts" reading option. But at time of writing I have not tried supplying text descriptions or other (e.g. video) replacements for over a hundred other Flash pages, and in any case Homestuck without its Flashes in their true form is simply a lesser experience.

You don't have a real keyboard.

Some of the Flashes (and a few Javascript/HTML5 counterparts) are interactive, and they require a keyboard to control that interaction. Whatever virtual keyboard your device has is unlikely to do the job, because Flash won't understand it.

Most of these sections do have a text transcription in this archive, as discussed above — but again it is a poor substitute for actually interacting.

You don't have a mouse. You do have a touch screen.

This one doesn't come up often, but there are a few places where Homestuck expects you to hover a cursor over something and read the tool-tip style text that pops up.

Again the search pages in the archive have all the text transcribed as a last resort.

You need to open up the archive in the first place.

(If you got here in the offline archive then we're done here, but perhaps you're reading this elsewhere…)

So, you've unzipped the archive onto device. Now you want to open up the top-level offline_mspa.html in your web browser. On a regular computer you would use some kind of built-in file explorer to find it. But if you're on a phone or tablet, you probably don't have one by default. It likes to pretend everything is out there on the web, and that there is nothing stored locally.

Two main options here. You can install a file explorer app of some kind. Or you may be able to open up a file:///some/device-specific/path/offline_mspa.html URL directly in your web browser. Fun!

Something is broken!

If you run into any issues viewing the archive, please let me know! I'd love to try to fix any problems that you have.

In the mean time, you might recover by zapping the reading options, or as a last resort switching off Javascript altogether.

What is in the archive?

Those familiar with the MSPA oeuvre may be wondering just how complete it could be given that the original is a linky web thing. Well, pretty complete, really…

• All of MSPA (as of time of writing) is in here. As well as the main stories there's all the extras, Homestuck Beta, SB&HJ, heck even RyanQuest made it in.
• Any single page elsewhere on the web that was linked to directly from one of the stories has been copied. Sometimes I managed to use the Wayback Machine to attempt to grab it as it was when the story was first published. Clicking more links on the copied pages will send you back online, of course.
• YouTube is a special case: I ripped the videos to QuickTime and embedded them in copies of their hosting page.
• Homestuck Flashes were run through swfmill just enough to make their links and assets local. They all Work On My Machine, at least. (Hmmm, apart from the captcha-code maker.)
• The original site lets you apply special styles like scratch.php to any page. This copy is static so I just switch them in for the relevant portions of the story.
• I rejigged the search. There's a version that puts all of Homestuck on one page rather than the usual three, and all search pages include transcriptions of all of the text found within images and Flashes throughout the stories.
• I also include statistics generated about the stories. Be aware that some of the finer details will be spoilerish.

What are the "options" for reading?

The way I built the archive involved organizing all the text and art assets and reassembling them. So, I've been able to add a few other presentation styles. I'd been playing with them in my personal copy for a while, and as of June 2012 I've made them public. So if an orange glow didn't already entice you, check out the reading options.

'Classic' mode is there for those who want it. But I recommend the 'Reading' mode, which is classic in style but smoother to read (basically, you can just keep hitting the PageDown key) and will also do things like give you translations of Serenity's morse code, which is handy when you are offline without Google. Or especially if you're doing a re-read, you can try consuming MSPA like I do: in a glorious 'Full Screen' mode where every individual panel is huge and friendly.

I already read Homestuck. I understand all of its intangible plotholes, and I'm wondering what you did about the arms?

This one is definitely something of a spoiler if you are reading the story for the first time. But if you are re-reading…

…then you are probably wondering how the archive handles the retcons - the arms and Johns and oil patches that got retroactively edited into various images (and Flashes, etc.) whenever John used the treasure / juju / intangible Sburb house logo "plothole" discovered at the end of A6I5.

Basically, when you first read through the archive, you see the original images (no arms, etc.) When you get to a page (such as page 008000) that "reaches back" to retcon some earlier pages, then a hidden flag gets set. From then on if you go back to the earlier pages, they will appear changed. (Archive: Retrieve Arms From Plothole.) There are several different sets of changes.

This matches the original experience of reading the story live on the website. I may be wrong, but I like to think Andrew Hussie would have done the same if he had more time / certainty about all the ways the website might be accessed - it was easier for me here in the archive where I have more control.

For the password branches after much inner angst I did choose to display the [??????] links before the retcons occur.

Some fine details: if you visit the first page of the story, I assume you're starting from scratch and reset all the images again. And if you are reading without Javascript enabled, you will always see the retconned images - fancy code and flags are used to change images back from retcons to originals, not vice versa. And I don't expose a switch for this behavior in the reading options because I don't want to risk spoiling first-time readers!

Can I get the archive to update?

No. But, you can contact me to ask for an updated copy.

In more detail: I do have some programs that I run to keep my personal copy of the archive in sync with new updates on the official website. But they rely on my particular local set up, and I often have to make changes to them in response to new story-telling methods that Andrew Hussie comes up with. So it wouldn't be practical for anyone else to run them.