The lesson I learned today is I can only wait until 10:30 pm to consider updating my blog for about 11 days before I run out of topics that I can write about sufficiently in under an hour. So, I've decided to talk about fans who are less fortunate and have content providers who are less committed to updating their material (such as my fans, March 2008-April 2011). Here's my list of great websites that update less than I do.
1. Homestar Runner
Yeah, pretty much everyone who went to high school with a computer lab knows about the superlative comedy of Strong Bad E-mails, Teen Girl Squad, and the rest of the hijinks of Homestar Runner. I can honestly say that Teen Girl Squad is the most influential and inspiring series of doodles in my life. But what you might not know is that there have only been two new videos over the past 16 months. This is a sad day for the internet at large, because Homestar Runner is pretty much the only comedy site on the internet that is not only funny for all ages but also has the broadest appeal of comedy out there. The good news is I realize there were about 5 Strong Bad Emails that I somehow overlooked from 2009. So at least it's new to me. In fairness, they have a decent excuse because one of the brothers had a baby in 2010. I suspect his wife may have been involved in that process as well. Anyways, that's a pretty legitimate excuse to decrease production.
2. Freeman's Mind
This is my favorite non-Red vs. Blue machinima (that is to say, using video game engines as the filming engine rather than other forms of media). The premise is the videos are about the thoughts of the character Gordon Freeman as the events of the 1998 game Half Life unfold. But, here's the twist: Gordon Freeman never says anything during Half Life. He's a blank slate. All you know is he works at a science facility in Black Mesa. I think the series does a great job of humanizing the events of a video game and never gets bogged down in the endless killing (like I do when I play shooters). Unlike Homestar Runner, this series got derailed for much less legitimate reasons.
Back in the fall of 2009, the guy behind the series (I forget his name, so I'll call him Steve) got hired by Machinima.com to make more episodes of the series. This is hitting the internet jackpot because it means a company was willing to pay him legitimate wages to do videos Steve was making for fun beforehand. As a result, there was an astonishing increase in the number of Freeman's Minds that came out. I believe there were 8 in one month at one point. Unfortunately, Steve had another series: Civil Protection. You can check it out, but I wouldn't recommend it. They're generally longer and less funny than Freeman's Mind. Unsurprisingly, those videos were also much less popular. Furthermore, the process for filming that series is much more complicated and takes longer to produce. Reasonably, Machinima.com wanted him to focus his efforts on making the much more popular and simpler to produce Freeman's Mind. Steve wanted to focus on this one episode of Civil Protection and didn't like the way other people were working on it. So Steve decided to stick to his principles and quit his job making funny videos so he could make the funny videos he felt like.
The problem was the episode of Civil Protection he was working on was waaaaay too ambitious for its own good. I haven't seen it yet, because I had given up hope on it ever being done. However, I know that he left Machinima.com to work more on this one episode in October 2009. It finally got posted in late March 2011. In the meantime, this created a gigantic bottleneck for Freeman's Mind. Not only did Steve not have as much time to produce new episodes (since he left his paid job as a producer of funny videos), but what time he did have was going to a pet project. That's to say nothing of moving back and forth between places and transitioning into a new job.
I would go on with this list, but it's almost midnight and I won't stop the blogathon just yet!
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