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Yeah, nobody foresaw season box sets becoming practical. Probably because they had been so expensive and impractical for VHS. It was a big problem for MTV shows in general, since obviously they had all the music rights they could want when airing it. Daria's had some fan attempts to restore the original soundtrack, but they're incomplete and not great.
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Jun 8, 2020 11:06
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Yeah, nobody foresaw season box sets becoming practical. Probably because they had been so expensive and impractical for VHS. Or even look at something like Supernatural- IIRC they got the rights for DVD, but then, surprise! There’s this new streaming thing and the rights situation for that are completely separate!
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Jun 8, 2020 11:13
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Ugly In The Morning posted:Or even look at something like Supernatural- IIRC they got the rights for DVD, but then, surprise! There’s this new streaming thing and the rights situation for that are completely separate! And then you have something that is in such a rights hell knot in the US that it'll never get a release agin* but is readily available on disc in some other region or regions. *) Until the rights-owners of everything get gobbled up by Disney
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Jun 8, 2020 11:17
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Ugly In The Morning posted:I think Beavis and Butthead would do fairly well if they were able to actually air the drat episodes but sadly it was made before considerations for music rights lasting longer than a few years was really a thing. Owning seasons of TV shows that weren’t Star Trek wasn’t really a popular thing until what, DVD took off in the early 2000’s? There were a few British shows out in the US as VHS box set collections in the 1990s. I have one of Fawlty Towers, which was easy to compile in that form, but Monty Python and a few other longer British shows also had VHS box sets during the decade. I'm trying to think of any other examples of shows in complete form, but can't. Besides the bulkiness of VHS tapes, any sets sold would have been incredibly expensive and probably not worth it to even advertise.
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Jun 8, 2020 14:42
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RC and Moon Pie posted:There were a few British shows out in the US as VHS box set collections in the 1990s. I have one of Fawlty Towers, which was easy to compile in that form, but Monty Python and a few other longer British shows also had VHS box sets during the decade. Red Dwarf and Blackadder.
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Jun 8, 2020 15:45
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RC and Moon Pie posted:There were a few British shows out in the US as VHS box set collections in the 1990s. I have one of Fawlty Towers, which was easy to compile in that form, but Monty Python and a few other longer British shows also had VHS box sets during the decade. Prior to DVD, it was more common just to have “Greatest Hits” or themed compilations put out. I know shows like The Simpsons and South Park would have tapes with 3-4 episodes back in the late 90’s/early 00’s before full season DVDs were a thing. You’d also get the same thing with a lot of older shows and shorts, as I know my dad still has tapes somewhere of stuff like The Three Stooges, the Little Rascals, and such where it’d be a few random shorts (Which were basically tv episode length anyway) per tape. At least in the US, the only stuff that seemed to get full series releases on tape were imported things. Aside from some British shows, I know a few anime shows got full releases on VHS. Offhand, Gundam Wing (Which is like 50 episodes) and the first three UC OVAs (Which were like 6, 12, and 13 episodes each) all got released on VHS, but basically everything that came over from Japan after 2001 was usually DVD only.
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Jun 8, 2020 16:05
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Even DVD box sets could be impractical and expensive. I had a few seasons of The Simpsons on DVD, but for something like The X Files buying the series box set was around 350 God drat Dollars in 2005 (around 460 bucks in 2020 money). Shows that were currently running were easier to get since you were more likely to find single season collections on discount.
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Jun 8, 2020 16:08
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fartknocker posted:Prior to DVD, it was more common just to have “Greatest Hits” or themed compilations put out. I can't think of any examples right now, but there were shows where they'd take say 6 episodes out of ~20, splice them together, and edit it down into a standalone 2hr movie to release on VHS. So you'd only get the broad plot of a few episodes and none of the side plots, character development, standalone eps, etc.
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Jun 8, 2020 16:23
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Ugly In The Morning posted:Even DVD box sets could be impractical and expensive. I had a few seasons of The Simpsons on DVD, but for something like The X Files buying the series box set was around 350 God drat Dollars in 2005 (around 460 bucks in 2020 money). Shows that were currently running were easier to get since you were more likely to find single season collections on discount. It also helped for shorter shows. I know for a while, the two best selling TV shows on DVD were Chappelle's Show (2 seasons and like 25 episodes) and the initial run Family Guy (3 seasons, maybe 50 episodes?), the latter of which helped get that show revived by Fox. For longer shows, or complete series, yeah, the box sets were usually very expensive. Sweevo posted:I can't think of any examples right now, but there were shows where they'd take say 6 episodes out of ~20, splice them together, and edit it down into a standalone 2hr movie to release on VHS. So you'd only get the broad plot of a few episodes and none of the side plots, character development, standalone eps, etc. I know that's a semi-common thing in anime, where a series that tops out around 50 episodes will get complied into 2-3 movies. The original 1979 Gundam series is a good example, where they took 43 episodes and reedited it (And by the third one, reanimated a big chunk of it) into three very cohesive movies in the early 80's and it had a big impact on getting that franchise going.
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Jun 8, 2020 17:10
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fartknocker posted:Prior to DVD, it was more common just to have “Greatest Hits” or themed compilations put out. I know shows like The Simpsons and South Park would have tapes with 3-4 episodes back in the late 90’s/early 00’s before full season DVDs were a thing. You’d also get the same thing with a lot of older shows and shorts, as I know my dad still has tapes somewhere of stuff like The Three Stooges, the Little Rascals, and such where it’d be a few random shorts (Which were basically tv episode length anyway) per tape. When I was a little kid I had a tape like this based on that 50 greatest cartoons list. Kind of misleading to have "50 Greatest Cartoons!" right on the cover and not even have What's Opera, Doc? On the other hand it did have at least 3 of the Fleischer Superman shorts so that was pretty cool.
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Jun 8, 2020 18:31
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FilthyImp posted:I get that. I mean, I think I made it to a dozen pages trying to read it once when I realized I needed to read the newspost text or something and just lost interest. Homestuck's plot is self-consciously a creation myth: the central conceit is that the universe is dying and the big bang to start the next is generated by a bunch of kids who get the opportunity to bring it into being and influence it by navigating a bunch of adventure game pastiches. What it's about, though, is the experience of growing up and trying to cobble together functional adulthood while being Extremely Online in America.  Vincent caught a probe for being flippant but there's a legitimate point to be made about how it resonates with people on the spectrum in particular, I think, and I say this as someone with a lot of affection for it (IMO it should be considered an Outsider Art masterpiece, which basically by definition makes it art for and by crazy people; the anomaly is that it became popular instead of being discovered years later after the author dies and is eaten by their cats): *Central theme is forming relationships despite difficulty communicating. The main characters are all awkward fandom geeks of various flavors who have no real-life relationships except with their parents/guardians, and generally don't find anything compelling about their physical environment; diving instead into pop-culture obsessions and internet friendships. *Extremely, extremely codified world: the storytelling style of the comic is all about setting out rules and then riffing on all the possible variations of those rules. This mostly springs from the video game pastiche that the early bits in particular hew very close to but pervades everything in the comic: the basic style was entirely "stock" sprites copy-and-pasted into a world made out of a photoshop collage of google image search results; the humor and drama is based around establishing a pattern and then riffing on it endlessly in different context. Why is there such a strong stereotype about autistic people liking trains? It's because the world of trains (or any other hyperfixation, see also unboxing videos and tvtropes) consists of endless but knowable variation on set, codified rules. *The coloring. The author has some academic specialty in color theory (coded Photoshop color plugins or something? idk) and the comic has a really striking and enormously consistent use of color as probably its defining visual trait. It swings wildly through mediums and artistic styles (there's even claymation bits) but the color is always used intentionally for storytelling purposes. This makes it easier & more appealing to follow for people who hate faces. Very similarly, it's the only comic I know of to extensively deploy leitmotif—granted it's one of exceedingly few to use music of any kind, but Homestuck's animatics use character and location themes really well. *Update style. This is something you had to be there for, man, but oh boy was Homestuck a wild ride to follow live, and probably no small part of the fandom dropping off is in the impossibility of bottling that lightning. When the comic was updating, it would often post over a dozen new pages a day at variable intervals, some of which might be hugely dramatic upheavals to the ongoing story. The F5 Skinner box was so, so real, particularly during the halloween of... 2015? where characters were getting killed off left and right. 
HookedOnChthonics has a new favorite as of 00:19 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 8, 2020 22:29
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When people talk about it like this it sounds so interesting and fun. İ had trouble following it when it was coming out, is it worth going back through the archive? Assume as a starting point an inordinate amount of free time and the tendency to get good at stuff i don't understand out of spite.
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Jun 9, 2020 21:42
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Bomrek posted:When people talk about it like this it sounds so interesting and fun. İ had trouble following it when it was coming out, is it worth going back through the archive? Probably not. A big problem with going back and reading through Homestuck is leans extremely hard on its universe and canon, and there's tons of jokes/plot beats/etc that are callbacks to something that happened thousands of pages ago. Even though that could represent years when reading it as it was updating, it wasn't nearly as bad because there was a very active community that highlighted and brought up all the loose ends or hints or small jokes as speculation for what might happen in the future, so the bits getting called back to were a lot more fresh on the mind. This is from someone who dropped out around Act 5, way before it got really crazy/stupid, so take that as you will 
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Jun 9, 2020 22:28
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All I can remember from Homestuck is Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff. Maybe that’s for the best, I think reading through the entire thing again would take several weeks 
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Jun 9, 2020 22:43
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HOLY gently caress posted:All I can remember from Homestuck is Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff. Maybe that’s for the best, I think reading through the entire thing again would take several weeks That is the greatest book ever. The 20 foot long ribbon alone cracks me up every single time.
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Jun 9, 2020 22:50
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Bomrek posted:When people talk about it like this it sounds so interesting and fun. İ had trouble following it when it was coming out, is it worth going back through the archive? ... I mean, how much free time are we talking? Because outside of anything else, Homestuck is long. According to Wikipedia, it's the longest novel ever written in English. The validity of that corresponds exactly to your respect for rando Wikipedia editors, ofc, but like.... it's long. Reading Homestuck is an endeavor pretty equivalent to reading Proust (approximately as long; approximately as gay; more jokes tho). It's also currently broken as gently caress: the animatics are all Flash-based and best watched by switching tabs to youtube, and the comic that exists on the web now is literally not the same one that was posted originally. But something worth calling out as genuinely genius about it is how it is a total, all-encompassing masterclass in utilizing a medium—it's the first/only webcomic to really fulfill the Scott McCloud Infinite Canvas thing, totally realizing the potential of browser-based storytelling. It is at the absolute pinnacle of web-specific entertainment—in form and content perfectly attuned to the internet; impossible to adapt to any other medium—a plateau shared by probably only Homestar Runner as far as stuff from a discrete creative team goes (RIP to another dead-as-gently caress masterpiece ruined by the obsoleting of Flash). Homestuck takes full and total advantage of its format in a way that probably only live theater can speak to. As mentioned above, what's on the web now is not the Homestuck you would have read keeping up with it live, because some characters' time-travel abilities are illustrated by the author going back and permanently editing old panels, among other ways that the conventions and possibilities of the internet are deployed—like, at one point, an auto-URL-redirect embedded in a Flash serves as a genuinely crucial storytelling device. The actual plot is honestly probably the weakest part of the whole thing and definitely what drove a lot of people away—the early stages definitely imply an overarching mystery plot in what is really more of a coming-of-age drama. It's also worth talking a little bit more about the SBaHJ hardcopy that's been mentioned a little bit above, because I think it encapsulates the ethos of the whole thing pretty perfectly: *It has a drink stain and "woopps" in comic sans laminated onto the cover. *The back is plastered with Doritos Nachos scratch-and-sniff stickers, and the words "NEVER FOARGET" genuinely embossed, also in comic sans. *As mentioned, the bookmark ribbon is 4 feet long. *There's perforated tearout Subway job application forms. *It comes with a "pocket edition:" a folded poster tucked into a pocket in the back cover that's just a printout of every page's galley proof, tiled together an inch high each. This all has a legit ISBN number. It's in the library of congress, forever, and that's honestly the whole point of the thing. Books are over after this. Like, imagine what people who can do this with a book do with the internet. That's actually Homestuck. Don't read it (at least until some insane cultural anthropology postgrad 50 years from now releases a Homestuck emulator that replicates Flash and doles out updates at the exact same pace they were released originally). Anyway everybpdy should definitely read Problem Sleuth and here's some helpful annotations if you do dive into HS.
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Jun 10, 2020 04:27
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I found a copy of the SBAHJ book at Half-Price for $5, and while it didn't come with any of the doodads, it is still one of my favorite used-book purchases. Apparently the printers exchanged multiple emails with Andrew Hussie about "are you sure these proofs are right?"
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Jun 10, 2020 05:38
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Antivehicular posted:I found a copy of the SBAHJ book at Half-Price for $5, and while it didn't come with any of the doodads, it is still one of my favorite used-book purchases. Apparently the printers exchanged multiple emails with Andrew Hussie about "are you sure these proofs are right?" the fake water stain. the & side being sideways on the spine. the bar code that's shiny and can't scan and if it does, scans the book as doritoes
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Jun 10, 2020 05:42
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Truly, a masterpiece  I’ll have to see if I can track down a copy somewhere
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Jun 10, 2020 05:54
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Bomrek posted:When people talk about it like this it sounds so interesting and fun. İ had trouble following it when it was coming out, is it worth going back through the archive? Dude, I was so into Homestuck when it was big. It was the first shared interest my now-fiance and I had. I genuinely think it's one of the greatest works of art in the internet medium. And I'm giving it my first full reread right now and I have to say it absolutely holds up. And with regard to HookedOnChthonics saying earlier that it's kind of broken now: I had seen people saying similar things but reading it currently in an up-to-date version of Firefox, it's been perfectly functional except for when I had to head over to YouTube to watch "[S] Cascade", the twenty-minute end of Act 5 whose Flash file was so big it couldn't be hosted on mspaintadventures.com at the time and had to link to Newgrounds's hosting for it to be playable from there. edit: Oh and w/r/t SBaHJ I have both the insane masterpiece collection mentioned here as well as the weirdly-not-as-popular later book that dril co-wrote.
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Jun 10, 2020 06:31
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actually one of my favorite details is the spine actually reads "Sweet Bro & Helpful Jeff" I never read Homestuck (I read Problem Sleuth!) but sweet bro and hella jeff is gold in its own right.
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Jun 10, 2020 06:39
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Homestuck is a high-water mark in creative use of the web as a storytelling medium. If you have ever thought that the concept of "hyperfiction" was neat, then you'll probably find it worthwhile to read for its formal aspects, regardless of whether the content holds much appeal for you.
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Jun 10, 2020 08:23
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HookedOnChthonics posted:... I mean, how much free time are we talking? That wikipedia editor must not be a fan of The Subspace Emissary.
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Jun 10, 2020 10:29
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HookedOnChthonics posted:But something worth calling out as genuinely genius about it is how it is a total, all-encompassing masterclass in utilizing a medium—it's the first/only webcomic to really fulfill the Scott McCloud Infinite Canvas thing, totally realizing the potential of browser-based storytelling. It is at the absolute pinnacle of web-specific entertainment—in form and content perfectly attuned to the internet; impossible to adapt to any other medium—a plateau shared by probably only Homestar Runner as far as stuff from a discrete creative team goes (RIP to another dead-as-gently caress masterpiece ruined by the obsoleting of Flash). I'd point at the earlier Kid Radd, myself, similarly hosed by browser updates that changed how animated gifs loaded. It's not the big, wild thing that Homestuck became, but I always thought it was pretty cool.
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Jun 10, 2020 10:42
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Considering Homestuck 2 is ongoing, is the fandom dead? Its... weird.
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Jun 10, 2020 15:58
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xanthan posted:Considering Homestuck 2 is ongoing, is the fandom dead? Its... weird. Considering you couldn’t go anywhere online in 2012 without running into homestuck stuff, and I just learned homestuck 2 was a thing now... kinda, yeah.
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Jun 10, 2020 16:45
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You know, i think I'm going to give it a go. Regardless of all the ways in which reading it now isn't the same experience as following it as it was coming out was, it's still sounding more interesting than unreadable. Also my degree is literally in archaeology; this is basically a practical application of it
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Jun 10, 2020 19:22
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Homestuck back in the day is basically its own language. It also might feel timely in some ways.
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Jun 11, 2020 12:07
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I never got into Homestuck but I enjoyed Problem Sleuth. It’s kind of near to hear that it was a multimedia experience though, I always figured it was just a webcomic with a billion fans. My only real-life interaction with people into Homestuck was seeing people at the Renaissance Faire dressed as those trolls.
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Jun 11, 2020 15:40
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I followed Homestuck for the first couple years on the strength of Problem Sleuth, still have one of the music tracks as a ringtone on my phone, but this is still my favorite thing to come out of it:
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Jun 11, 2020 17:24
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They even got the font right 
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Jun 11, 2020 18:31
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I feel like I've read thousands of words about Homestuck but have very little actual idea what it is.
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Jun 11, 2020 18:40
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Rick posted:I feel like I've read thousands of words about Homestuck but have very little actual idea what it is. The joke here is that 'so you're a typical Homestuck reader'. Though the gist is basically that a bunch of nerd acquaintances over the internet get a new video game, and then the apocalypse happens and destroys everything in the world except their houses (hence the name) and they have to try to play the video game... mostly because there's nothing really else to do. Also the video game is in real life. And then they contact some aliens who are also playing the video game. And then it goes kinda right up its own rear end, and random celebrity cameos including Nicholas Cage, Betty Crocker and the Insane Clown Posse are involved.
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Jun 11, 2020 19:23
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I tried to read Homestuck a couple of times but it's just too long. If I had that type of attention span I'd finish The Brothers Karamazov.
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Jun 12, 2020 02:17
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HookedOnChthonics posted:But something worth calling out as genuinely genius about it is how it is a total, all-encompassing masterclass in utilizing a medium—it's the first/only webcomic to really fulfill the Scott McCloud Infinite Canvas thing, totally realizing the potential of browser-based storytelling. It is at the absolute pinnacle of web-specific entertainment—in form and content perfectly attuned to the internet; impossible to adapt to any other medium—a plateau shared by probably only Homestar Runner as far as stuff from a discrete creative team goes (RIP to another dead-as-gently caress masterpiece ruined by the obsoleting of Flash). I would also put forth 17776 by Jon Bois (yes, he of Pretty Good) as an example of very well realized browser-based storytelling. Some of the Homestuck people on tumblr got very into 17776 while it was posting because it has the same sort of feel to it.
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Jun 12, 2020 04:15
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HelloIAmYourHeart posted:I would also put forth 17776 by Jon Bois (yes, he of Pretty Good) as an example of very well realized browser-based storytelling. Some of the Homestuck people on tumblr got very into 17776 while it was posting because it has the same sort of feel to it. İ read this when it came out and i keep coming back to it. İt's one of those things that's so fun to experience the first time that it's worth going back to just to appreciate how much work went into the final project. Jon Bois works hard on his output and it shows; i can never get enough of that guy.
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Jun 12, 2020 15:55
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HelloIAmYourHeart posted:I would also put forth 17776 by Jon Bois (yes, he of Pretty Good) as an example of very well realized browser-based storytelling. Some of the Homestuck people on tumblr got very into 17776 while it was posting because it has the same sort of feel to it. aegof posted:I'd point at the earlier Kid Radd, myself, similarly hosed by browser updates that changed how animated gifs loaded. It's not the big, wild thing that Homestuck became, but I always thought it was pretty cool.  Awful Hospital is also worth mentioning; and I think Marble Hornets as well (shoutout to a hometown hero). Related to 17776 though, sports fandom is a pretty interesting subject—like in the sense of there being an overwhelming number of sports fans, of course, but relatively little fandom in the Tumblr way—with two big exceptions that I know of in hockey and soccer. As an anecdotal measure, there are 14,000 soccer and 12,000 hockey fanfics listed on AO3 compared to 1,000 for baseball, 300 for basketball, and 300 for American football. Why are internet weirds seemingly entranced by puckslappers and ballkickers more than any other genre of sports personality? (Though Formula 1 also has a fair degree of interest, clocking a solid 4,500 on the AO3-meter).
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Jun 13, 2020 20:15
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HookedOnChthonics posted:Related to 17776 though, sports fandom is a pretty interesting subject—like in the sense of there being an overwhelming number of sports fans, of course, but relatively little fandom in the Tumblr way—with two big exceptions that I know of in hockey and soccer. As an anecdotal measure, there are 14,000 soccer and 12,000 hockey fanfics listed on AO3 compared to 1,000 for baseball, 300 for basketball, and 300 for American football. Why are internet weirds seemingly entranced by puckslappers and ballkickers more than any other genre of sports personality? (Though Formula 1 also has a fair degree of interest, clocking a solid 4,500 on the AO3-meter). Football/soccer is the most popular team sport of the world so it’s probably simple math working for it there. Hockey is a mystery unless it’s the hyper aggressive stereotype getting some play.
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Jun 13, 2020 21:43
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There are NASCAR romance novels.
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Jun 13, 2020 22:11
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My (maybe uncharitable) theory about hockey fandom is that hockey is the US professional sport with the highest proportion of white players, and fandom is largely about making generic cute white boys kiss, so the whitest sport is going to get the most attention.
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Jun 13, 2020 22:45
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