How 'Homestar Runner' Re-Emerged After the End of Flash

Wikipedia describes Homestar Runner as "a blend of surreal humour, self-parody, and references to popular culture, in particular video games, classic television, and popular music." But after launching in 2000, the web-based cartoon became a cultural phenomenon, co-creator Mike Chapman remembered in 2017: On the same day we received a demo of a song that John Linnell from They Might Be Giants recorded for a Strong Bad Email and a full-size working Tom Servo puppet from Jim Mallon from Mystery Science Theater 3000.... The Homestar references in the Buffy and Angel finales forever ago were huge. And there was this picture of Joss Whedon in a Strong Bad shirt from around that time that someone sent us that we couldn't believe. Years later, a photo of Geddy Lee from Rush wearing a Strong Bad hat on stage circulated which similarly freaked us out. We have no idea if he knew what Strong Bad was, but our dumb animal character was on his head while he probably shredded 'Working Man' so I'll take it!
After a mutli-year hiatus starting around 2009, the site has only been updating sporadically — and some worried that the end of Flash also meant the end of the Flash-based cartoon and its web site altogether. But on the day Flash Player was officially discontinued — December 31st, 2020 — a "post-Flash update" appeared at HomestarRunner.com: What happened our website? Flash is finally dead-dead-dead so something drastic had to be done so people could still watch their favorite cartoons and sbemails with super-compressed mp3 audio and hidden clicky-clicky easter eggs...!

[O]nce you click "come on in," you'll find yourself in familiar territory thanks to the Ruffle Project. It emulates Flash in such a way that all browsers and devices can finally play our cartoons and even some games.... Your favorite easter eggs are still hidden and now you can even choose to watch a YouTube version if there is one.

Keep in mind, Ruffle is still in development so not everything works perfectly. Games made after, say 2007, will probably be pretty janky but Ruffle plans on ulitmately supporting those too one day. And any cartoons with video elements in them (Puppet Jams, death metal) will just show you an empy box where the video should be. But hang in there and one day everything will be just like it was that summer when we got free cable somehow and Grandma still lived in the spare bedroom.
And since then, new content has quietly been appearing at HomestarRunner.com. (Most recently, Thursday the site added a teaser for an upcoming Halloween video.)

The Homestar Runner wiki is tracking this year's new content, which includes:

• Strong Bad livestreaming his play of a text adventure (titled "Disk 4 of 12 — Vampire's Castle") on September 19th
• Strong Sad streaming a demo of the expando deck for Trogdor!! The Board Game (July 2)
• A Twitch parody in which Strong Bad livestreams a speedrun on a horrific beef-themed game (titled "Strong-Play: Marzipan Beef Reverser") on April 25th
• A new Strong Bad Email on April 1st

And past videos are now also being uploaded on the site's official YouTube channel.

Trogdor was a man...

[ozmartian]

And lets put a beefy arm over here

Re:

[Chris Mattern]

And some consummate vees.

Re:

[Stormwatch]

Incorrect. He was a dragon-man.

Re: Trogdor was a man...

[sizerth]

Or maybe he was just, a dragon

Re:

[Stormwatch]

Regardless of matters upon which we can only speculate, the fact is that he was still Trogdor.

Never heard of this...

[blahbooboo]

Never heard of this web site. Am i missing anything?

Re:

[ozmartian]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

Re:Never heard of this...

[EditorDavid]

False.

Back in 2016 when Timothy was training the new crop of Slashdot editors, he said sometimes stories should appear in "abbreviated" form if they're just a minor follow-up on an earlier story. (Today it was following up on the HBO Max story which had also mentioned Homestar Runner.) I'm guessing a lot of Slashdot readers don't actually know what the reason is behind "abbreviated" and "non-abbreviated" stories. Hope this helps clear things up.

(Looking forward to reading all the comments about Homestar Runner....)

Re:

[DrMrLordX]

Was that when they were training the editors to post dupes?

(not that this story is a dupe, but your current editors are notorious for posting them)

Re:

[thegarbz]

To be fair, many Slashdotters don't understand why Slashdot tends to run multiple Microsoft stories during the annual hardware event, multiple Apple stories during WWDC, multiple game / publisher stories during E3 etc.

It's all a mind control conspiracy, mainly targeted at the feeble minds which are that easy to manipulate :-)

Re:

[ozmartian]

WTF are you talking about?

Re:

[muh_freeze_peach]

I feel this way: If you have to ask "am I missing something" about some pop culture drivel, the answer is always "No, you're not missing anything"

Strong Bad livestream

[algaeman]

Is that going to be Twatch? I assume Twatch is a multimedia conglomerate put together by the Cheat and TFG (I know, redundant) to monetize QAnon gamer's eyeballs.

Re:

[arglebargle_xiv]

Onlyfans. Then you'll get to see Trogdor's other large appendage.

HOMESTAR.

[kellin]

Clearly you weren't a proper geek in the early 2000s if you didnt know what homestar runner was.. Man this brings back some memories. maybe i'll pull up the site at work tomorow and kill some time..

Re:

[muh_freeze_peach]

People who easily succumb to social pressures are an ammusing bunch. BAAAAA!

Kind of sad that HTML5 transition never worked out

[DrMrLordX]

Ruffle seems like a good solution, but converting the site to HTML5 might have been better. Sadly it seems like the Brothers Chaps were too busy being successful as creatives to want to mess with all that crap. That kind of highlights what was lost when Flash died: Flash was easy to use.

Re:

[sg_oneill]

Theres a *LOT* of content on that thing. For what sounds like its back to one or a few people maintaining it, likely creative types, its unlikely they'd have resources to redo literally decades of work.

Re:

[DrMrLordX]

They needed either a conversion tool or a team to help them out.

Re:

[sg_oneill]

Well thats kinda what Ruffle.js is, a conversion tool of *sorts*. Thats as likely good as your gonna get for converting flash to html5 (Unless I guess adobe has some sort of tools, but I doubt they have much of the source files for the older stuff)

Re:

[Waccoon]

That's an all-too-common reaction to old technology these days. Don't worry about legacy support or emulation -- just get the whole world to rewrite 25 years of content! LOL!

I'm pissed about what happened to Flash and the deal with the killswitch. No matter what kind of politics are going on and how much the neckbeards are screaming about security issues, it should be my choice whether to use something or not. All this situation really did is highlight how terrible modern OSes really are at containing a

That's great but...

[FChicken]

What about all the other works of art?

I would say they are not dead, not re-emerged

[jellomizer]

Shortly after "Cool Games for Attractive People" they just kinda stopped with content. Where we had weekly updates, it came monthly then just fully stopped. Well before Flash was going out. Those delays moved it from a site that I would check every day to see if there is something new, to something I would go... Hmm I haven't been there in a while, I wonder if anything happened (usually nope). Then to a point if there was something new, I would just kinda pass on it, because my time and attention has mo

Why didn't Adobe re-release Flash in JavaScript?

[kriston]

Why didn't Adobe re-release Flash in client-side JavaScript/ECMAScript/LiveScript/etc.? It doesn't seem like a bridge too far.