24 TERRIBLE HOURS

[Dawnswalker]

I had to leave before the finale because of a house showing, which also meant that I couldn't take a nap after the stream.

So went for a long, long walk, went grocery shopping, cooked and ate a pile of curry, and fell asleep until noon today.

So in summation I think the true heroes are MMBOP BA DOOBA DOP DO WOP I DOOOOO

[Mix]

You mean this?

Aaaaaagh. Please, no, I need to sleep tonight.

[Deep 13]

Glad that Boots survived. Man, 24 hours up would mess with me for a week, minimum, I'm sure. I know everyone else didn't have to stay up all 24 hours, but are all the other Ridiculists and artists okay?

Also curious, how much did you guys expect to raise when you thought up the idea? Was it anywhere near the ballpark of $5420?

[Shigan]

Are there any plans to put together some kind of highlight reel? I'm sure it'd be a lot of work though.

[Lemon]

Are there any plans to put together some kind of highlight reel?

I'm not editing that.

[One Of The Crappy Pokemon That Nobody Likes]

Are there any plans to put together some kind of highlight reel?

I'm not editing that.

If people use Twitch to make clips of their favorite parts, I could maybe do it, assuming my software doesn't vomit itself to death as it loves to do. I've done it for way longer events so I'm willing to try, but no promises. If anyone wants to make clips, you all have to do it before the VOD is deleted (I think it's 2 weeks from the broadcast). I can try to download the sections from there.

[Neal]

Would it be easier to just take the audio stream and cut it into 24 slices, from intermission to intermission, rather than taking the time to edit it down for content? There's something appealing about having the whole thing available in all its flawed glory.

[Boots Raingear]

Not making any promises about how the final archived version will turn out, but the visual components of the event turned out to be so much more important than we realized during the planning of this. Releasing an audio-only version of this would be a disservice to the amazing artists we had throughout the stream.

[montrith]

Just flag every bit where you can hear my voice so I can avoid listening to those. I've been silently screaming at myself ever since I had a good night's sleep and remembered all the stupid shit I said and did while working on 2 h of sleep for 24 h.

At least I got a cool new avatar out of it.

[Zekka]

Just flag every bit where you can hear my voice so I can avoid listening to those. I've been silently screaming at myself ever since I had a good night's sleep and remembered all the stupid shit I said and did while working on 2 h of sleep for 24 h.

At least I got a cool new avatar out of it.

Poor pitiful montrith, the only person who said stupid shit while sleep-deprived

[dijon du jour]

I don't think the issue was so much what came out of the mouth as what went in it.



(I also went went ahead and clipped that segment for possible best-ofing https://clips.twitch.tv/WonderfulSlickTruffleTebowing )

[Mique]

It would be easy enough for me to cut the video into hour-long chunks if I had the video file.
I'm not gonna try to download it from twitch though. Someone would have to send it to me.

[EYE OF ZA]

What I learned from this full 24-hour day is that no matter what joke you make, it can always show up as the next sentence you're about to read.  I'm listening back through it while I work and there's been like six times where someone's riff turns out to be actually the thing that's in the text.

[Lemon]

It's been over a week now, so

Some reflections on 24 Terrible Hours

• It's weird that it occured to neither Boots nor myself to load test The F Plus' server to see if it could handle the traffic. We spent a not-inconsequential amount of time building an interface for people to watch the stream from, and tweaked that interface several times. I never thought "Oh hey, what if this blows up the server?" The only thought was "Well, what if people go to watch the stream on Twitch because they're big dummy dumbheads."
• Starting a 24 Hour Stream at 5PM is a strange prospect, because you're already gonna be awake for a bunch of hours before then. Oh, you can tell yourself "I'll just sleep all day", but that won't happen. I mean, that's assuming you're me. But if you're me, why am I explaining this shit to you anyway? You already know all this.
• Also, it's good to double check what hour the whole thing starts. For some fucking reason I had it in my head that the stream started at 6PM my time. Boots texts me like 5 minutes before we're supposed to go live and he sounds like he's in a panic for some reason. I saunter upstairs to add a sound effect from "Roses" to use everytime somebody says the word "Caroline" and all the sudden Boots tells me we're about to go live.
• For those of you who aren't aware, I was gone for a sizeable chunk in the middle. It started with a scheduled break, but I couldn't get my strength back. I missed everything from JJ Thompson (Hour 13) thru Superman TV (Hour 19). It was a whole mess and I was doing very poorly and I don't really want to talk about it. However I do want to say that the Marathon was even more taxing than I was expecting and those who soldiered thru (Boots, Jimmyfranks and Frank West especially) deserve a lot of respect
• We did this for a couple reasons. Yes, the SPLC could use some money, but also we had all these great docs we weren't getting to and when Boots brought up the idea (please remember this was always his idea) it seemed like a fun catastrophe and an experience we'd remember. It was that.
• We eventually raised $5,420.00, which is a number we should all be proud of.
• Also, except for that middle bit, I thought the whole thing was a lot of fun. I like that we have enough of a structure that we can do this in such an asinine volume and yet can still be surprised by it. There was lots of genuinely lovely moments I was experiencing in that moment, like Bunnybread doing all of his lines of dialogue in the style of Lil Jon doing "Yeah", every single dumbassed idea from IdeaDash, enjoying Zarla enjoying CreepyPastas,  and of course that fucking wikiHow article about how to start a wolf pack.
• I said it in the close of the stream, but I fully expected chat to be horrible. Chat was not horrible! I don't exactly know what chat was saying most of the time because I had other things to look at, but every time I glanced at it everyone was making jokes and those jokes were not of the "sexism but ironic" category, so back pats all around.
• We also weren't exactly locked in appropriately on the structure of the featured artists. We thought it would be a nice thing, but I guess we weren't imagining our illustrators all treating the subject with such verve and aplomb and other smart people words that I totally use all the time. I scheduled the illustrators at every other hour and then when the stream actually started I just asked them all do double up and nobody had a problem with that. It went great, I was so happy they were there, and the illustrations were a huge high point for the marathon.
• Would we do it again? I dunno, we don't need to discuss that right now. It's about time to start thinking of the next F Plus Live anyway.

In short, my feelings are basically this scene from Barfly.

Boots has told me he'll be getting the marathon videos up on YouTube soon-ish, at which point I'll be building a page on thefpl.us that will have all the videos (hopefully split one-per-hour) and as many of the drawings as the illustrators saved, and also direct links to all 24 documents read. We need to preserve this thing to be remembered, because I currently cannot.

[Emperor Jack Chick]

I thought the event was a huge amount of fun, and I'm really impressed that we had people who managed to stay through the whole thing. I was pretty exhausted from my (admittedly late night) shift. It was also a great way to get a lot of the docs we realistically weren't going to get around to some love.

In my opinion we should try to do it again (perhaps even as an annual thing, since this was about 6 months opposed from when F+ live is), but with the structure setup so that we don't have people staying up through the whole thing unless they actually want to. Obviously that would be a topic for a broader discussion. The format worked really well for what we do and I would love to see us repeat it.