One of the three (3) people backing the Homestuck Kickstarter at the US$5000 has canceled the pledge, leaving two (2) people there.

This is apparently because said person upgraded their pledge to the US$10,000 level. Canon, baby!

It too a little longer than the 18 – 20 hours that my original projections indicated but the Homestuck Kickstarter campaign just rolled over its goal of US$700,000 in approximately 32 hours, 6 minutes. There was a sprint there as quite a bit of money came in a quick burst, as (I suspect) people tried to be the one to put the whole thing over the top.

The numbers:

• Backers: 7701
• Total raised: $700,049
• Dollars per backer: $90.95
• Dollars per hour: $21,819.60

Just as interesting were the breakdowns in the support levels:

• $15 and up: 2118
• $25 and up: 1693
• $55 and up: 794
• $80 and up: 280
• $105 and up (unlimited): 579
• $105 and up (limited reward #1): 671 of 1000
• $105 and up (limited reward #2): 132 of 1000
• $180 and up: 84
• $255 and up (unlimited): 141
• $255 and up (limited reward): 600 of 600
• $405 and up (limited reward): 458 of 1000
• $5000 and up (limited reward): 3 of 25
• $10,000 and up (limited reward): 0 of 10
• No reports of God Tier rewards 2 ($100K) through 6 ($1B) yet

Interestingly, if you add up those numbers, it comes to 7553 (if I’ve got my sums right), which means 148 people have donated less than $15, with no hopes of tangible reward — they just want to see the project succeed.

Regarding the bits in bold, this campaign is completely screwing with my earlier analysis of successful webcomics Kickstarts, which said that the high-dollar values aren’t going to make up a significant number of backers. Here, Andrew Hussie has 1202 people (15.6% of his total backers) ponying up at least $250 each¹, accounting for a total of $389,445 (55.6% of total money raised), giving me a big enough outlier that all my prior conclusions now have to have a footnote attached².

Oh, and in the time it’s taken me to type this up, it’s up to 7890 backers and $714,964. That’s going to lead to a non-stop cycle of not being able to type numbers in quickly enough to keep up, so do your own calculations from there.

One last note: the trending predictions at Kicktraq only get graphed once per day, so while today’s point is going to be down from yesterday’s by several million dollars, that graph isn’t going to show the changes in trend that took place during today. When I first checked Kicktraq this morning, Homestuck was trending toward US$8.3 million; by the time of meeting goal, it was up to more than US$10 million.

As I write this (and Kicktraq only recalculates once per hour, so this is for 11:01pm EDT), it’s up to US$11.1 million. I have not ever seen a Kicktraq trend go up that much in the early part of a campaign, when there tends to be a huge dropoff. Even in the frenzy of the last days of an exciting campaign, trend delta tends to be downwards, flat, or very slightly up; a 33% uptick in the course of a day is (once again) Not Something That Happens. We’re officially into uncharted territory. It’s going to take the combined math skills of Randall Munroe and Zach Weinersmith to make sense of this one.
_______________
¹ I’m pretty sure the 458 people at $405 is unprecedented.

² Namely, All predictions are moot if your name is Andrew Hussie, but it probably isn’t.

Let me tell you a little bit about Andrew Hussie and Homestuck: I have been struggling to read it, because it’s damn voluminous, dense, stuffed silly with music and interaction and games and self- and forward- and back-references and completely, utterly not for me.

It is the opening shot of the native culture of the second generation of internet users — the ones that have always lived there, not those of us that immigrated from the Old (nondigital) Country within our living memory. And here’s a hint for everybody that still remembers the Old (nondigital) Country: there’s more of them and fewer of us every day, so maybe if your livelihood depends on putting content in front of eyeballs in some fashion, you ought to be paying all the attention you can muster to Mr Hussie and the fans whose brains he lives in.

The Homestuck Kickstarter campaign is — to my mind, somewhat arbitrarily — categorized as a videogame, but that doesn’t really describe what’s being built, I don’t think. MS Paint Adventures as a whole (and Homestuck especially) has always been equal parts comic, interactive, animation, music (how many soundtrack albums has Hussie released so far?), and amalgam that couldn’t exist in its full form anywhere except online.

Homestuck started (and for a year, continued) with a user-participation component that was key to its aims — to make something that was a comic, but more. One could could argue that the game isn’t really a spin-off of Homestuck, it’s just more of Homestuck; it’s always been a participatory community (and when the explicit reader participation portion came to and end for logistical reasons, it merely shifted to a galaxy of blogs and tumblrs and fora), and while the description of the game on the Kickstarter page doesn’t explicitly say so, I’ll wager that multiplayer/social capabilities will be key. What’s the point of having your own fan troll if you can’t mess with your friends on Pesterchum? This is just the next form of the community, and however tight the new, self-contained story will be, I believe it will be hacked and mutated by the players until they’re living the SBURB life.

I speculate, of course, but here’s things that we know about the Homestuck Kickstarter Campaign as of this moment: It hasn’t broken into the wider culture yet; the major comics sites haven’t yet discussed the campaign with their readers, it’s only starting to filter into the videogame news sphere, and it certainly hasn’t been picked up as a quirky story by major media. It is still building mindshare and still:

• In one day, it made just about the same amount of money as a major studio motion picture with a production and marketing budget of US$60 million that was released in more than 2000 theaters over a long weekend.¹
• In one day, it made more money than all but three comic books released in North America in July, and those three were, respectively, the 100th issue of a comic with a TV tie-in, and the 7th and 8th issues of a crossover between the two superhero teams best-known to the wider culture. Note that people who recognize The Walking Dead, The [adjective] Avengers or The [adjective] X-Men from movies or TV are legion and have never heard of Homestuck. Homestuck beat freaking Batman in a day. It’ll be above the third of those comics within minutes; Edit: calculation error, my apologies, but the remainder of this sentence holds true before the end of tomorrow, it’ll be above all of them.
• It is a very real possibility that Homestuck will displace the current (all-time; best-funded) Kickstarter projects; what those super-top-funded projects have in common is an unusually high per-backer average (#1 had a ratio of $149.95; #2: $135.57; compare the Order of the Stick ratio at $83.88). In a day, Homestuck has a ratio flirting with the $100 level, I don’t think it’s dropping anytime soon. If the current funding rates hold for the entire 30 days (and they won’t, but if they did), Homestuck would be looking at the vicinity of eighteen million dollars.

I won’t post this until 2:26pm EDT, as that will be 24 hours since the Homestuck Kickstarter campaign launched, and I want very much to see how much money he’s raised in that time and make sure that the following numbers are up to date:

6217 backers
$593,044 raised
$95.39 dollars per backer
383 pledging $405 or more
2 pledging $5000 or more
average rate: $24,710 per hour

All
the
attention
you
can
muster.

Because this? This is when the game changed.

_______________
¹ Okay, anybody could have told you that something called The Oogieloves was going to lose a mountain of cash, but seriously, a return of $600K on a $60M investment? That is literally a return of one cent on the dollar. You have to have been trying to lose that much money.

Andrew Hussie launched a Homestuck videogame Kickstarter approximately 1 hour and 53 mins ago as I’m finishing this. In that time, the following landmarks have been met:

• 20 minutes in: 163 backers, $13,145 raised
• 30 minutes in: 300 backers, $24,573 raised
  NB: within that time, 14 people had pledged $405 or more
• 40 minutes in: 450 backers, $38,573 raised
• 60 minutes in: 721 backers, $64,129 raised
• 90 minutes in: 1,054 backers, $95,017 raised

If these rates hold, the desired $700,000 will be raised in between 18 and 20 hours; please note that as the word of this campaign spreads, the dollars/backer ratio is actually increasing and presently sits at just over $90.

Here are some pictures for you (slightly out of date as in the time it took me to create them, Hussie has raised approximately $17,000 more.

Total raised and backer count:

Just the money:

Dollars per backer ratio:

Note also that Hussie has also announced “God Tier” rewards at $10,000, $100,000, $1,000,000, $10,000,000, $100,000,000, and $1,000,000,000 (that’s a cool billion dollars); at this point, it’s even odds that he gets at least one person to go for Tier One. It all depends on how many of the Homestucks that flock to him at shows have trust funds; alternately, they might all chip in together and choose one of their number by lot to be canonized (however temporarily).

Update: two hours, 1378 backers, $122,143 raised, $88.64/backer, 65 people pledging $405 or more.

Okay, screw it: twelve hours, 5244 backers, $501,755 raised, $95.68/backer, 307 people pledging $405 or more. That’s as close to an even half million in twelve hours as you could hope to get, and it’s middle of the night for a lot of the people who would be backing this thing. If this campaign follows the usual trend of the final days outpacing the beginning, we could be looking at seven digits to the left of the decimal by the time it’s done. More on this around the 24 hour mark.

Let’s start with a quick clarification from yesterday, wherein I conflated my concerns for Java (in general and particularly browser plugins) with my separate concerns for JavaScript in such a way that it would be possible to read them as being the same thing. They aren’t, and thanks to alert reader Rsty, who made that point in the comments. We at Fleen apologize for any confusion that may have resulted.

• So end of last week, I noticed that It’s Willis! has got a new site set up, ready to go with a day-for-day re-presentation of the Its Universe! comics, in the best reading order, on account of next Monday marks the fifteenth anniversary of his various comickin’ endeavours.

  Along those lines, next Monday also marks the second anniversary of Dumbing of Age. If I’m following the story’s chronology correctly, there have been two weekends since, which means we’ve got a rate of approximately one week (story time) per year (real time). At this rate, we can expect the DoA characters to hit midterms in around 2018, finish up the first semester and head out for Christmas break around 2024, and to graduate (assuming that Willis! only focuses on in-school time and everybody gets the classes they need on their schedules) sometime around SDCC 2138.

  That is gonna be one monster of a collected-strip omnibus edition, with a cost estimated upwards of US$14,000 (in 2138 dollars; adjusting for inflation, you ought to be okay if you set twenty or thirty bucks aside in a savings account and let the miracle of compound interest do its thing¹).

• There’s one less webcomic hanging about this morning² as Jason Viola’s Herman the Manatee flaps his flippers one last time. It’s actually been a long time coming, with the final story arc starting last year, getting interrupted by the vagaries of life, reaching a formal finish to the storyline last month, and finishing up on a rather sweet little coda today. Having an oft-interrupted strip finally reach an end ordinarily wouldn’t be enough for me to post about it, but Viola’s valedictory post caught my eye:
  

  Herman the Manatee began four years ago as a joke among friends. It has, of course, remained a joke among friends, but there are now many more of them. Still just the one joke, though. I had no idea I would be drawing it for this long; in my mind, I’ve always been six months away from ending the strip.

  The sixth month has finally arrived. I’m sad to say goodbye to Herman but relieved as well – he has always made it difficult when I want to work on new things. I have more stories I’m excited to tell and I’m looking forward to having the time and space to draw them.

  It’s that bit about feeling held back by a creation, wanting to tell new stories and finding an existing work getting in the way; it’s a larger version of the writer’s dictum to kill your darlings, and I expect that being willing to send Herman off to that tropical lagoon in the sky means that what we see next from Viola will be the better for it. Le lamantin est mort, vive le comique prochaine.

_______________
¹ Predictions may need to be adjusted due to intervening global monetary collapses, Mayan apocalypses, Ragnaroks, alien invasions, or societal evolutions into a more enlightened politico-economic model that no longer predicates itself on the accumulation of wealth from a basis of scarcity. Consult a qualified financial advisor for any questions regarding the tax implications of the DOGSTORM.

² Let’s be realistic — there’s probably anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand webcomics that have ceased updating today; if you want an approximation of how many there might actually be, feel free to hit up Randall Munroe with that particular puzzler but don’t expect a satisfying answer as webcomics are well known to defy the laws of physics. In any event, we are for the moment talking about webcomics that had a regular, ongoing update history and an audience that would come out to shows and such.

I was going to be enjoying a lazy, no-pants day but some people had to go and do significant things so fine, I’m writing. Still no pants, though.

• Ursula Vernon became the first person not named Foglio to take a Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story, for Digger (presumably for volume six, which released last year following the wrapping-up of the story). At press time, Ms Vernon was reportedly in an alleyway delivering a vicious beating to Neil Gaiman. So much for her plan to lose with dignity.

  Lord knows that I’ve written a lot about how much I dig¹ Vernon’s work, so I’m utterly thrilled for her and feel it’s recognition well deserved. At the same time, let us take a moment to acknowledge Howard Tayler, who is one of only two creators² to be nominated in the Best Graphic Story category a mind-bending four times. There is the matter of going 0-for-4 but hey, could be worse³, right?, Along those lines, I have already decided what to get Tayler for his birthday the next time it comes around in 2016.

• Meanwhile, about 2050 miles west of Chicago and the Hugos, news was coming out of PAX Prime during the Q&A with Mike and Jerry (helpfully streamed live to the world) that PAX is going abroad as PAX Prime, PAX Dev, and PAX East are joined by PAX Very South. For those of you that can’t travel to the Far Antipodes, 2013 will also see the launch of a new Scott Kurtz comic, of which details are presently thin on the ground.
• Okay, time to get serious, as one more thing smacked webcomics well in the face over the weekend — the sites hosted by Blind Ferret Entertainment, which include Looking for Group, Least I Could Do, Girls With Slingshots, Something*Positive, Reptilis Rex, Goblins, and PvP [no links, about which more momentarily] were hit by somebody with nothing better to do than to distribute malware. It’s been a long weekend of repairing both damage and reputations (malware warnings are likely to persist from Google and Firefox for some time), and as of this writing, the various sites remain down.

  Combine that with a story that’s been percolating around the tech sphere for the past week that the Java language has a critical flaw that’s been zero-day exploited, and the ultra-rare out-of-sequence patch issued by Oracle has not fixed the problem.

  I’ve written before about my general level of paranoia in browsing — how I do not enable JavaScript on a global basis, and only individually-trusted sites get it enabled; I’ve now turned off all Java plug-in functionality in every browser within my control, and I’m seriously considering removing Java entirely from my computers. I will lose some functionality (fancier presentations, comment ability, etc) in my day-to-day computer use, but maybe it’s not on me to be paranoid.

  Hate to say it, guys, but maybe we don’t need as elaborate, feature-rich layouts for our comics. Trimmed down, more simply-presented sites could be easier to build, faster to load, and generally more secure. It’s going to make some things more complex (including, most likely, the easy slotting-in of ads), but it’s time to start thinking in that direction. I know that nobody’s going to rebuild their websites overnight (and most of you aren’t going to change your browser settings either), but if you should happen to do a redesign, maybe security/reader safety needs to become more of a criterion that it has been in the past.

_______________
¹ I’m so very, very sorry. I blame it on my ever-worsening Guigar Syndrome.

² Technically, a creator team: the writer/artist combo of Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham have been nominated for the current Fables collection four times; various other artists have been on the nominations, but only the *inghams have been on all four ballots.

³ Much worse.

After all, we’ll all be spending the day reflecting on the experiences and history of the labor movement, right? Right!

But that doesn’t mean I can’t take the time to point you all at a funding campaign for the weirdest, most Freudian of all webcomics, Power Nap. What happens when you’re the one guy allergic to stay-awake pills in a world that runs 24/7? You get shunned as a freak, and your dreams start coming to life, smashin’ stuff like there’s no tomorrow. Then you get sucked into those dreams and you have no idea what the hell’s going on and nobody’s telling you anything and maybe you’re about to die because the cruel authors of your fate ¹ find all of this amusing — but this bizarre, disturbing existence you lead looks great in eye-popping color.

Thus, funding campaign. Power Nap Vol 1 will be a Euro-sized digest, 70+ pages, full color (and yowza, do they use a lot of colors), and contain the first three chapters of the ongoing story (including the one that’s presently unspooling before us). Feast your eyes on the comic if you haven’t previously, and if it’s the sort of thing you think deserves support², see if you can’t find some room on your shelf for a physical copy.

_______________
¹ That would be Maritza Campos and Bachan.

² Hint: it is.

Events that you may find of interest:

• Note to self: wear the T-Rex Stompin’ shirt tomorrow.
• Note to self: if you improbably find yourself in Seattle this weekend, drop by PAX, where one may find Kris Straub doing things, or Wil Wheaton doing things. I’m pretty sure that Mike, Jerry, and Scott doing things, but I haven’t found specific, concise posts by them yet.
• Note to self: if you future-technologically find yourself in Chicago this weekend, drop by Chicon 7/Worldcon, where one may find Howard Tayler doing things or David Malki ! doing things. Again, I’m certain that Los Foglios and Ursula Vernon will be doing things, but not much specificity given by them either.
• Note to self: if you magically find yourself in Atlanta this weekend, drop by Dragon*Con and you know exactly what Jennie Breeden will be doing — blowin’ Old Spice dudes¹ in front of a crowd of screamin’ ladies. Last time, she got a marriage proposal.
• Okay, promised you booze, let’s talk booze. Kristen Siebecker may not be a name that you recognize, but you should; aside from being married to indy comics creator Alex Robinson, she was the one responsible for organizing the first iteration of MoCCA Fest, which was a massive success and became a showcase for webcomickers for years afterwards.

  She’s also a fully-qualified sommelier and is starting a new series of wine-appreciation classes, so if you’ve ever wanted to learn exactly what it was you were drinking and why you liked (or didn’t like) it, you could do a hell of a lot worse than checking out her class.

  Popping Your Cork: Tips For New Wine Drinkers starts at 6:15pm and runs for an hour and a half or so on Wednesday, 12 September at Simple Studios, 134 West 29th Street (2nd floor) in Manhattan. It’ll set you back twenty bucks, for which you’ll get tasted on three wines, learn some useful stuff, and maybe if this becomes a regular event, it’ll take on a comics-maker overtone.

______________
¹ … who are wearing kilts, with a leafblower.

Okay, seriously webcomics — time to get back to doing stuff; summer’s nearly over, kids are going back to school. Chop, chop.

• Great idea or the greatest idea? PAX is just around the corner, and a beer blogger has put together a guide to where to find the greatest of civilization’s accomplishments¹ in and around the show. The bit that caught my eye was for a bar that’s got a reputation for both beer and mixed drinks where, if I were attending PAX, I would take the following recipe (developed by my bartender² last weekend) and see if they could mix it up because it’s delicious. I share it now with you:
  

  The Violet Knight³
  1/2 oz Laird’s bonded applejack
  1/2 oz Suze
  1/2 oz fresh lemon juice
  1/2 oz cinnamon syrup
  1 1/2 oz ginger beer

  Combine in a fizz glass, carefully top with G’Knight Imperial Red, grate nutmeg on top.

Quick notes:

• TopatoCo continues to bring the awesome.
• Ryan North does not like FedEx very much.
• People really like Dig Dug, holy crap. Thirty-four updates (some multi-paged) and counting.

_______________
¹ Hyperbole? No. The oldest recipe known to exist is for beer, current thinking holds that agriculture was invented to ensure a steady supply of grain for brewing, beer sustained untold generations of people when the local water would have killed them, and provided a compact way to store calories for the winter that otherwise would have rotted away.

² Chris Stanley, holding down the bar at Catherine Lombardi; his blog may be a bit out of date, but there’s a zillion recipes for drinks and ingredients there, which you should check out. Seriously, the dude is an improvisational genius — I’ve watched him whip up custom drinks on the fly for parties of up to six, for five rounds without repeating himself. Tell him Gary sent you and he’ll treat you right; tell him Gary sent you and that you want “a Bishop Brûlée” and he’ll make you a drink that uses fire as a main ingredient.

³ This drink was tentatively named Work’s Not For Another Eleven Hours (a bit unwieldy), and there have been objections raised to the current moniker because it’s not violet colored (gentian, the main ingredient of Suze and a prominent flavor in this drink, inspired the name of gentian violet dye). Any suggestions for a better name will be much appreciated.

The rumo[u]rs are making the rounds regarding Jim Zub’s Skullkickers #17, available tomorrow in fine comic shops everywhere; actually, I’m not sure you can call it a “rumo[u]r”, when you come right out and say it in the solicitation:

Somebody DIES! Or, everyone DIES! There’s lots of DYING! Oh man, it’s some kind of DEATH-fest goin’ around. It’s all epic and brutal and a major character DIES so you better order a ho-jillion copies. No, seriously, someone DIES. Big DEADING in the house. Also: The end of our incredible third story arc. Sweet.

I would have put some emphasis in there, but I think it’s pretty apparent that the takeaway is “major character dies”. Now this being comics, death is a temporary condition, the result of an imaginary story or retconned immediately so that you can have drama but still put things back the way they were. But not if you name is Zub, Sparky. There’s a for-real shocking conclusion, a cliffhanger, and a stack of questions that amount to How the hell is he going to keep the story going for another three arcs after that? Do not doubt the Zub, he will find a way.

(more…)