HRWiki talk:Projects/SBEmail Production History

From Homestar Runner Wiki

Contents 1 Date Headers 2 Quick Discussions 3 Missing interviews? 4 sbemail focus & bifurcated structure

[edit] Date Headers

I noticed that the format for the date headers was changed from having the year(s) in the front, sort of similar to how Hiatuses has it, to the years at the end. I actually kind of like the new format (is this how wikipedia does it), but I think that formatting of years stuff like that should be consistent across the wiki. That said, other than the Hiatus page I haven't found other examples. For example, Timeline of Homestar Runner and H*R.com updates 2024 have their own formatting concerns that don't line up with the formatting of the section in question. --Stux 15:54, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

The impetus for switching it here was that I'm organizing the information by events, some of which share a year (the weekly schedule pausing in late 2008, or the sbemail hiatus technically beginning in late 2009). By comparison, the Hiatuses article actually does go year-by-year; that being said, since (afaik) that's the only other place this formatting appears I'll switch it to match.

I'm not particularly surprised there aren't that many year sections — H*R is so short-form that a "long term" project means it took more than one week, big projects usually take months (SBSaOTH, SBCG4AP) rather than spanning many years and even those that do don't need years in headers (Trogdor!! The Board Game). In general I've noticed the wiki tends to be pretty light on encyclopedically documenting real-world info, for example, the Matt Chapman article was mostly just a random assortment of trivia that barely mentioned H*R up until a couple years ago (this is adjacent to my general bugbear that the wiki has historically leaned too hard on in-universe rationalizations at the expense of remembering it's just a show, but that's a comment for another thread). Off the top of my head, Homestar Runner (body of work)#History is the only other article that could (someday) have these date headers... though rewriting and beefing it up would probably be its own HRWiki project. Although we have an impressively exhaustive collection of interviews and articles to reference, the lack of Extension:Cite does make it difficult to cleanly implement them into an article (but again, that's more of a comment for another thread). -- Bleu Ninja 18:10, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

[edit] Quick Discussions

To be discussed:

• At what point in the article should this be added? -- User:Bleu Ninja
  • My vote is for "Strong Bad Emails" - "History" - "Production" - "Releases"
  • I'm okay with this but see my notes about "Milestones" below --Stux 11:49, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

• Are there any extant subsections and fun facts can be integrated into these new sections? -- User:Bleu Ninja
  • So far I'm only planning to pull the "emails that get deleted" list out of "Trivia" and into "Production".
  • The only other item that may be included in this is the "Milestones" section. But I think the section is fine the way it is for the most part, but it could be moved up, closer to these sections, maybe even made as a subsection of History. --Stux 11:49, 15 January 2025 (UTC)
    • Oops! I was mistaken, the notes emails #22 and 206 (the tweeting thing) could also be brought into the history section.
      • Email_22 is a good idea. I'm a little split on the milestones, they sure could be fit into the history section but I like how punchy and straightforward they are as a bulleted list now. -- Bleu Ninja 18:23, 15 January 2025 (UTC)
        • For the record, I did mean that Milestones should, for the most, remain intact. Just moved and possibly have the header demoted to go under history, nothing more than that. --Stux 05:15, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

Great suggestion, I think that's working well. It both beefs up the tiny "He answered 50 emails. He also answered 50 more" paragraph and makes a more natural transition to where the next section begins with #200. -- Bleu Ninja 00:23, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

• Do we make mention of SBCG4AP? Production of the game didn't lead to pausing sbemails, but the game uses Strong Bad Emails as a framing device throughout. -- User:Bleu Ninja
  • I'm not sure about that. But I didn't get around to buying the game and now I may never get the chance to! :( Perhaps history of the game should go there? There's already a remark about emails being used as a framing device for the game. Did the game influence emails in any way? (Directly or indirectly, perhaps being a contributing factor to a hiatus?) --Stux 11:49, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

From what I can tell there doesn't seem to be a direct influence, and according to TBC game production didn't influence the sbemail hiatus. Since SBCG4AP is pretty well-documented (on its own page and on the Telltale Games article), we can just minimally touch on it here. I think the sbemail framing makes it relevant, and the fact that the emails aren't genuine is a good chance to reiterate that they're all from real fans. -- Bleu Ninja 18:23, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

• Also noting that I haven't tracked down a "here's why we decided to have Strong Bad start checking emails..." story or quote, which is why the writeup is an awkwardly implicit "Strong Bad was very popular... fans were emailing TBC... you can see where I'm going with this, right?" -- User:Bleu Ninja
  • I always thought that was how it happened... And now I don't remember where I read it but I found the bit about emails originally meant to be kind of like "teasers" in between regular toons interesting. If there's no information out there explaining "why" then it's likely it hasn't been published? Or we missed it. --Stux 11:49, 15 January 2025 (UTC)
    • After reviewing a ton of interviews, the "problem" might be that 2001-2002 interviews were usually really informal and done by people who were already fans, more likely to ask "how many emails do you get? I'm still hoping Strong Bad will answer me" rather than high-level probing "why emails?"... then by 2003-2004 when bigger platforms began interviewing TBC, sbemails were so dug in as a cornerstone of the site that an interviewer would just ask "how did the site begin?" and skip over the 18 months pre-sbemails. I think the implicit statement is enough (a few alternate additional quotes: "in the middle of 2001 we started doing Strong Bad emails. He had already sort of become everyone's favorite character.", "Strong Bad started out as just the antagonist and he was kind of two-dimensional. Everybody likes the bad guy more, usually, anyway, and eventually we decided to give him his own little feature. It's called Strong Bad Email, where we would ask people to send Strong Bad an email and he would pick a real email from a fan and then answer it."), even as it does irk me that there's no quote bridging the gap from "we decided to give Strong Bad his own feature" to "we decided to have Strong Bad respond to emails from fans, and use a comically old computer to do so"... but, as the Stones said, you can't always get what you want. -- Bleu Ninja 18:23, 15 January 2025 (UTC)
      • I just wanted to mention that all these responses are so well-researched that I've learned a lot of new information from them! When I started watching this site, Strong Bad Emails were already popular (and were likely the vehicle by which I was introduced to H*R!) It's unfortunate there's no further information on this but it is what it is for now. Maybe if some well-connected reporter could ask them these questions? :D --Stux 05:15, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

Much appreciated! Sbemails were well-established when I found the site as well (and I definitely wasn't trawling the front page of Fark back in 2001), but in recent years I've gotten the bug for researching and organizing more of the real-world stuff about H*R that was much less well-presented on here. And as time passes we get further away from "everybody knows that a new sbemail will be out on Monday" and closer to "explaining historical context of toons that 20 years old" (gulp)! Though some of the details are still vague, what we have is certainly very substantial (and, as fun as it would be to conduct a nerdily-helpful "can you clarify things for the wiki?" interview, it's probably unlikely) and it's rewarding to see articles like this coming together. -- Bleu Ninja 00:23, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

[edit] Missing interviews?

I just noticed, looking at the reference list that there are some links to H*R-related interview articles (I think 5, including the daily emerald link) that don't have a wiki page associated with them? Should there be a page for each of these? Or have a single page for these "miscellaneous" articles? And, while they probably are, how do we know they're legit? Mind you I haven't taken the time to read these carefully to get a sense for them, but still, this might also be content that should be documented, I think. --Stux 06:01, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

Links#Articles is that "single page for these miscellaneous articles". I don't recall when/how I found that page because it's not really prominently, repeatedly linked to (unlike, say, Interviews and Public Appearances)... anyways, once I was aware of that page I started to drop in links to articles that were referenced in wiki pages but didn't have a wiki page of their own (for instance, AWN.com from Strong Bad Email). I also found this LiveJournal entry (specifically, the subhead "Homestar Runner around the Web") useful for finding sources. A lot of these are just sightings, but many are publications that have link-rotted away over 20 years so it's useful to have the original URL to reference (for example, this is how I got the author's name for the Sentinel article, which is excluded from the live version). I have no reason to suspect these sources aren't reliable. Some may be college newspapers that write "Strongbad" as one word, sure, but every wiki-page-less article I'm citing is written and published in a formal, professional style often for a print publication that has run for decades. There's no "Joe Schmo's Geofire blog"-type sources (at least, none that weren't already documented).

I myself am a little loath to add individual wiki pages for a lot of these. Sure, for an informal indie webzone that went under 10+ years ago I'll just copy the text over from archive.org in an "ask forgiveness rather than permission, I doubt they'll ever notice or particularly mind if they do" sort of way (for instance, making the Legion Studios Interviews article based on old links from Matt Chapman; see this Standards discussion). But for active big names like, say, The Orlando Sentinel I know they're not going to let us rehost an article indefinitely for free and I don't consider an HRWiki page that only consists of "The Brothers Chaps were interviewed by [author] for [publication] on [date]. EXTERNAL LINKS: Read the article" to be particularly valuable — especially with the wiki's slowdowns, it's easier for me to just have an MLA citation with a direct/archive.org link to read the article. Buuut if any other contributor wants to document these interviews, I won't stand in your waaaaaay. -- Bleu Ninja 18:33, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

[edit] sbemail focus & bifurcated structure

Over on the Discord, Gfd suggested that "some of [the article] is less relevant to sbemails and more H*R in general," something that I had felt as well as I worked through "Production". A lot of this is simply due to the content of interviews and public appearances — sbemails were making up 60-70% of their output, and were really the only thing with a set schedule (compare how H'ween and D'ween toons don't always come out on the same day of the year) so it's natural that "what's your process?" discussions would focus on them (to be fair, my research process was to ctrl+f "mail" and reading the relevant paragraphs, so it's possible there were discussions about the development of other toons I overlooked (apart from "we do sbemails Sunday night and everything else on other days of the week" circa 2002)); then post-hiatus toons are so rare that interviews from after 2014 make no differentiation between sbemails and other toons generally.

When I was first planning out this article I split up "History" and "Production", at least partially because it was easier to organize facts and quotes that way. I'm tempted to reevaluate if "Production" could be reworked to be subsections of "Weekly schedule (2002–2008)" (with the final quote and paragraph moved to "Modern era"), because dividing the content this way means it has to starts having to restate some points like Matt's moves, when the brothers quit their other jobs, or the volume of emails to re-establish context. Some of the finer details — like when they got their office or became family men — may have just been me flexing my insider knowledge and/or coming up with excuses to link more HRWiki articles about real-world subjects. There's also potential to move (or at least copy) some info over to the Homestar Runner (body of work) article... though I feel like that article could use its own dedicated overhaul, too! -- Bleu Ninja 18:57, 24 January 2025 (UTC)