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Tom wrote:And no one said it was going to last a half hour... I don't know where anyone got the impression it would.

The livestream as booked for a half-hour gap.

Though as I said many times, making assumptions is dangerous, so whoever didn't actually look into how these things work to know that you have a minimum time-frame to actually schedule a stream probably assumed "Whoo! 30 min showdown with Cthulhu!"

I and a few others mentioned that the schedule of 30 min didn't obligatorily mean 30 min worth of video. So I imagine that if there were people expecting a longer video, they probably didn't get the chance to see these messages before watching it.

As to the Cthulhu video quality... I'd rather not comment. I've stated my opinion elsewhere and it laconics to "Frikkin' Awesome." So I politely disagree with Endless there.

Tom wrote:The only one of these I'm gonna say anything about is Cthulhu, which we made in eight days for $0. And no one said it was going to last a half hour... I don't know where anyone got the impression it would.

In retrospect, I don't think I ever really expected a full half hour of substance, but two minutes still seemed a bit of a letdown. We got the impression from the livestream page itself- right under the title, it lists a timeframe of six o'clock to six-thirty EST.

On a different note, sounds like the whole thing was a lot more last-minute than I thought it'd be. Kinda feel bad about complaining now. :\ At any rate, thanks for the info!

narrativedilettante wrote:

Endless Sea wrote:Also, I was fairly annoyed when it turned out that the deaths of Adam's dates were entirely his fault, to say nothing of how they were played for comedy. That first post about the deaths actually got me pretty concerned- quite a feat, considering by then I'd resigned myself to off-topic content- and then the comic page comes out and it's all "silly Adam, you so clumsy" despite the fact that an innocent dies every two or three panels or something. Hypocritical this may sound, but the whole thing felt kind of insensitive to me.

I didn't get the impression that the deaths were his fault. It's not clear why the first one died. The second one is arguably Adam's fault because he probably chose the food to which she had an allergic reaction, but that's the kind of thing that any reasonable person might do. Who thinks to check for all possible allergies before offering food to someone? And if someone has a life-threatening allergy, you'd expect them to check before eating something to be sure it won't kill them. And the third one seems entirely unrelated to Adam's presence. She had a seizure and died.

I could be wrong; there's not much information to go off of. But I don't think "Adam caused it all" is a reasonable conclusion.

That's only half the problem. The other half, the one I'm certain isn't based on potentially faulty memories of a comic page I haven't seen in a while, is how the deaths were treated- humorously. That's the bit I take the most issue with.

Endless Sea wrote:part because of how the special effects turned out.

Surely you can give a bit more detail than that?

Endless Sea wrote:And now for the one that everyone's gonna try to kill me about- I didn't like Quixote. Everyone else thought he was Crazy Awesome, but I thought he was just plain crazy. And not in the good way, if there actually is one. Point is, to me, he wasn't a very likable character, just a stupid one with delusions of grandeur. (Then again, I wasn't really as involved with his storyline as everyone else, so you might want to take my criticism with a grain of salt.)

I'm going to back Endless up on this one, but only partly. I did enjoy the Quixote storyline a lot, until close to the very end. I enjoyed meeting him for the first time and trying to help him get used to the modern world and keeping him away from any windmills. I enjoyed watching him try different things to become a hero, including slaying a troll. I really got interested when Tara's life was in danger and Quixote tried to save her life. I liked him more after he got shot the first time and then he tried to avenge Tara. But then he got shot the second time, and then he started to annoy me. I think it was the moment he solved a Rubik's Cube in a matter of seconds that I first realized that I really just wanted to send this guy home already. From that moment, his storyline involved nothing but seeing him do one impossible feat after another without breaking a sweat. It was kind of boring and broke my suspension of disbelief. However, to be a bit more positive, I did enjoy Brad just a bit more during this period.

Alexander Moser wrote:

Endless Sea wrote:part because of how the special effects turned out.

Surely you can give a bit more detail than that?

Well, mostly, it was how ol' squid-head himself looked kinda goofy, what with the extending extra-bulbous face-tentacle-mandible-mouth thingamajigs. Also, from my perspective, his/its/whatever attack on Morgana seemed rather blatanly edited in- it was mostly the way the offending appendages moved, and how Morgana's actress fell down in a manner that didn't make sense considering the way she was hit (at first I thought she'd just fainted or something).

Endless Sea wrote:In retrospect, I don't think I ever really expected a full half hour of substance, but two minutes still seemed a bit of a letdown. We got the impression from the livestream page itself- right under the title, it lists a timeframe of six o'clock to six-thirty EST.

To be fair, Adell didn't know how long the battle would last

It was almost literally the only bit of realism we could get in for that.

Endless Sea wrote:From my perspective, his/its/whatever attack on Morgana seemed rather blatanly edited in- it was mostly the way the offending appendages moved, and how Morgana's actress fell down in a manner that didn't make sense considering the way she was hit (at first I thought she'd just fainted or something).

This I agree with completely. We shot this segment in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, which cannot be made to look like the New Jersey pinelands even with clever editing. My biggest complaint about the final video is this, the part that I personally helped create. Ultimately, there was no way we could make it work.

But I haven't seen anyone notice that the sky was shot in Pittsburgh, so Alex fooled everyone with at least one change of location.

I think slices of this video will make a nice demo reel for Alex someday, as long as they're edited together with other things, and I wouldn't use the clip of the Cabal in that, personally. (Despite the fact that my costume matched the comic's down to the red scarf and the curved sword.)

narrativedilettante wrote:I didn't get the impression that the deaths were his fault. It's not clear why the first one died. The second one is arguably Adam's fault because he probably chose the food to which she had an allergic reaction, but that's the kind of thing that any reasonable person might do. Who thinks to check for all possible allergies before offering food to someone? And if someone has a life-threatening allergy, you'd expect them to check before eating something to be sure it won't kill them. And the third one seems entirely unrelated to Adam's presence. She had a seizure and died.

I could be wrong; there's not much information to go off of. But I don't think "Adam caused it all" is a reasonable conclusion.

The first one choked on her food. You were right about the others.

Tom wrote:The only one of these I'm gonna say anything about is Cthulhu, which we made in eight days for $0. And no one said it was going to last a half hour... I don't know where anyone got the impression it would.

I do. When I made the event for the Livestream, I put in that it lasted for half an hour. I did this because I expected that Adell would talk to us for longer than he did. I didn't expect Cthulhu to be dealt with as quickly as he was. Adell is awesome.

Sophira wrote:

Tom wrote:The only one of these I'm gonna say anything about is Cthulhu, which we made in eight days for $0. And no one said it was going to last a half hour... I don't know where anyone got the impression it would.

I do. When I made the event for the Livestream, I put in that it lasted for half an hour. I did this because I expected that Adell would talk to us for longer than he did. I didn't expect Cthulhu to be dealt with as quickly as he was. Adell is awesome.

I'm used to livestreams being, well, live... streams...

So I was expecting a half hour of live chat-type stuff with Adell before he headed off to slay the foul beast and save the prince-- worl-- unive-- METAVERSE.

BlackWolfe wrote:I'm used to livestreams being, well, live... streams...

So I was expecting a half hour of live chat-type stuff with Adell before he headed off to slay the foul beast and save the prince-- worl-- unive-- METAVERSE.

Tell me about it, I spent like, hours panicking and freaking out and debating whether or not the singing was a good idea and then it started and there were a few moments of tearjerkiness, thirty seconds of drama, cthuhu and then it was OVER as quickly as it began.

It was really really slow at times. Also, I missed out on the reveal of the post-mortem, mostly to me being out of school and unable to use my laptop.

Some ARG's only update once a week, or even once a month. Almost all use only American 9am-5pm working hours to update. If we were slow, it was only slow compared to the pace we'd set for ourselves.

Tom wrote:Some ARG's only update once a week, or even once a month. Almost all use only American 9am-5pm working hours to update. If we were slow, it was only slow compared to the pace we'd set for ourselves.

Yeah honestly I thought you guys had a really fast paced ARG going compared to others I had witnessed (The one for LOST was incredibly slow in comparison but also had a humongous player base.) I think we just got so use to your pacing that when things did slow down, it just got noticeable. Honestly though, if it moved any quicker we probably would have felt overwhelmed.

Adell wrote:Honestly though, if it moved any quicker we probably would have felt overwhelmed.

We actually noted several cases where players were talking about being overwhelmed with the pace we did have as it was.

I think, push comes to shove, there are many ways you could split this hair. Was slowing down the pace at a couple points causing folks to get bored, or did it give folks time to catch up and get on even footing? Were the high-paced sections too overwhelming for folks, or was it an attention-grabbing tour de force that kept people hooked?

For better or for worse, I think we told the story that we were hoping to tell, in broad strokes at the very least. There are a couple points in which each person could say that it should be slower or faster... but to be honest, I can't even say if the puppet masters, let alone the audience at large, would all agree on what specific points would be better slower or faster.

Rick Healey wrote:I think, push comes to shove, there are many ways you could split this hair. Was slowing down the pace at a couple points causing folks to get bored, or did it give folks time to catch up and get on even footing? Were the high-paced sections too overwhelming for folks, or was it an attention-grabbing tour de force that kept people hooked?

For better or for worse, I think we told the story that we were hoping to tell, in broad strokes at the very least. There are a couple points in which each person could say that it should be slower or faster... but to be honest, I can't even say if the puppet masters, let alone the audience at large, would all agree on what specific points would be better slower or faster.

Well, actually deciding on a specific pace would be kind of difficult, considering that we all have different schedules and that some of us live on different timezones than the others. Is like that thing Cosby said: "The key to failure is trying to please everybody." I think the pace was fine, though it kind of felt a bit slow on the last days, but that's okay seeing that most of us were busy writing refics... or working through projects

Blurred_9L wrote:Well, actually deciding on a specific pace would be kind of difficult, considering that we all have different schedules and that some of us live on different timezones than the others.

The flip side is, maybe we would have had a completely different set of players with a different pace, and one of them would have said the same thing. It's easy to simply say, "oh, what if...", but the logistics make it impossible to accurately answer.

The most I can really say is that I did map out various projections of certain aspects of the game at certain times. I'm actually surprised that none of the other puppet masters ever got annoyed with my discussions of said projections, because it honestly did sound like Light Yagami at his most fatuous at points. Probably the worst was my suspected endpoint versus the plotted endpoint; pointing out what I suspected would have resulted in the Observer Effect coming into play, but I knew that the suspected endpoint from early plotting was too liberal, and the actual endpoint was in the range (the earlier end of the range, truth be told) that I was predicting.

Is like that thing Cosby said: "The key to failure is trying to please everybody."

Hmm... wonder where you got THAT tidbit...

I actually almost repeated that quote myself, but then I thought, "Nah, don't do it; saying it yourself would be as subtle as this." So instead, I waited for someone else to say it, so I could link to one of my favorite cartoons instead.

Rick Healey wrote:
Hmm... wonder where you got THAT tidbit...

Yeah... that's a good question

I actually almost repeated that quote myself, but then I thought, "Nah, don't do it; saying it yourself would be as subtle as this." So instead, I waited for someone else to say it, so I could link to one of my favorite cartoons instead.

So basically... some anvils need to be dropped? I think I'm missing something here >.>