Maybe obvious but worth making explicit: there are potential spoilers in the fine details below.

MS Paint Adventures: Statistics

There is a (MATHS) % chance of deriving far too many numbers about MSPA.

• Visualizations
• Space: a breakdown across spacial structure
• Serious Busy-ness: days with the most updates
• Antsiest Hiatus: longest times between updates
• oh my god so many words: days with the most text
• Movie time: longest linear [S] Flashes
• Act Fast: highest production rates
• 16 Year 9 Month Break
• how big is it like the size of texas: Homestuck compared to other works
• FAQ

Visualizations

Space

A breakdown across spacial structure.

Superlatives

Some records I dragged from the data in response to various conversations.

Serious Busy-ness

The ten days with the most updates.

Antsiest Hiatus

Counting a hiatus as a stretch of complete days with no updates, these have been the ten longest.

oh my god so many words

The ten days with the highest word counts.

Movie time

Given my subjective rules for timing and inclusion (see the FAQ), these are the longest linear [S]s.

Huss: Act Fast

These are the ten pre-Gigapause/multi-day Homestuck Act(ActAct)s with the highest rates of production

(The average across all of Homestuck is 2.5 pages per day.)

Problem Sleuth saw some action back in his day, too.

(The average across all of Problem Sleuth is 4.2 pages per day.)

16 Year 9 Month Break

Using the method employed by Andrew Hussie in an old Formspring post, given that MSPA started full production on 09 Mar 2008, then to produce the 9807 pages since at the perfectly fine rate of one page per day would take until 15 Jan 2035, earning him a 16 year 9 month break starting from today.

Here's a graph if you want to see how it has changed over time.

Ninja

So I looked around for prior art before I started coding this up, but shortly thereafter notEgbert published an absolutely marvellous and comprehensive "Measuring Homestuck" report that meets and surpasses many of the plans that I had. You should definitely check out this statistically significant result!

how big is it like the size of texas

Homestuck is about 282% the size of the Lord of the Rings, 176% the size of the King James Bible, 125% the size of the Harry Potter series, or 77% the size of A Song Of Ice And Fire (the five books so far)

…OK, that needs some context and justification. notEgbert has constructed and refined a measure that attempts to squash the multi-median aspects of the works of Hussie down into an adjusted word count so that story size can be compared against that of other plain text works. Briefly, we count (9 + 0.6 * size/KB) words for each image, and (20 + 0.1 * size/KB) words for each swf. Combining this with my figures and existing word count, the adjusted count for Homestuck is currently 1358808 words.

For more detail and discussion of the comparison method, please see the "Measuring Homestuck" thread, where notEgbert explains:

…the parameters and methods used for word-count equivalence are very subjective and estimated, but are all intended to be conservative estimates and measures, based at least in-part on common standards, where available.

FAQ

How did you derive these numbers?

From code running over my offline archive

What's a panel?

An image, a Flash, a section of text, or a pesterlog, including images that are linked out to from the regular numbered pages.

What's a "day"?

Time has zones. I have found that to overlap best with a typical Hussie waking/working day, it works best to have a twenty-four hour day begin and end at 10:00 a.m. in the Boston time zone. And that for days of Homestuck to tie up best with those called out in the story, the first day is known as day zero rather than one.

What does "about N% of" mean? It looks wrong, because...

There are a bunch of different ways to measure the size of this multimedia thing. The reported proportions average the three stats reported here - pages, panels and words. (I used to also include days, but Gigapausing the update stream broke that.)

Which words do you count?

I consider the actual text, and also text I have transcribed from image etc. panels. I apply a bunch of little rules in code to decide exactly what is a word, but none of them alter the count very much. Here are more details and an illustrative example.

How long is a piece of [S]tring?

I count the start of a Flash as when it has loaded, and the end as when both the visual and audio content have ended; in turn this means they have ceased, or they have almost completely slowly faded, or they have started repeating. YMMV. I didn't time walkarounds or other Flashes that are interactive enough that there is no set linear path through them; merely having to (read and) click through is OK though. I appreciate that our subjective boundaries may differ: maybe you wouldn't count [S][A6I3] MINISTRIFE!!! the same, or at all. (Pretty sure the 3m10s "official" version on YouTube is unreadably fast, though!)

If I add up pages in A1, A2, A3, I1 and A4, why is it less than the pages in Part 1? (etc.)

I don't count every page as being part of an Act. The pages that come between the End of Act N page after the curtains close and the Act N+1 page where they open again — not part of either Act. You could insert prologues and epilogues, but to me it seems unnecessary arbitrary editorializing so I just go with WordCurtains Of God. The pages are still counted in the next layer up.

The last page in Homestuck is story/8130 (or s=6&p=010030 on the old site) so why are you claiming a different page count? (And similar questions for other stories.)

There are some missing/extra page (and image) numbers.

HSA6A5A1 is the same number of days as HSA6A5?

Well, the act structure is weird! A6A5A1 wraps around the sides of A6A5A2. Subtracting the days of the inner act seemed just as arbitrary a choice to make.

Also, you should count two pages rather than one during the x2 part of that act!

That's good, because I do! The pages are represented separately by the data that drives MSPA, so my existing stats machinery automatically counted them up that way.

No, you should count each pair as a single page!

Well, I can't please both of you.

Why don't JB or RQ show days?

I'm using the timestamps on the text files that drive the official site to reporting how many days pages were published across. RQ doesn't have any timestamps. JB has some that are misleading because it was bulk imported from a web forum that preceded the MSPA site.

Where are the PS extras? Where is SB&HJ?

They are missing at least for now, apart from SB&HJ panels directly linked from HS.

Generated on: Sat Apr 07 17:27:08 -0400 2018.