Quote:Bob Schroeck wrote:They do. It's just that episode numbers aren't a remotely reliable guide to how many episodes there are or when they were posted. In fact, the episode number is almost guaranteed to grow much faster than the actual episode count, by the nature of the format.
That'll teach me to assume the episode numbers started at 1.
To demonstrate, look at episode 1. There are six links at the bottom. So when that first episode was posted, the numbers 2 through 7 were reserved for future episodes that might be created through those links. And you can see that those six links go to episodes numbered 2 through 7.
The third link goes to episode 4. This was the second episode created, the first of those six options picked to expand the story. It has three options, so the numbers 8 through 10 are now reserved. Bast! opts to write an episode in the "10" slot, which has six more options, and now the numbers 11 through 16 are reserved for them. And so on. (To this day, episodes 14 and 15 have never been written.)
Jumping back to the present day, the "reserved episode number" counter currently goes up to 266266, looking at the last link on the latest episode, even though there are only 44258 episodes written -- roughly a 6:1 ratio. What this means is that on average, each episode written has five options underneath it that haven't been filled. There are about 222,000 unfilled options on the site -- places where you could add an episode and nobody has yet. This is a natural consequence of the format -- when you write an episode, you're expected to add several options for continuation, which means that the "episode number" inevitably increases much faster than the "number of episodes".
Add an episode with 6 options underneath. Episode number goes up by 6, episode count goes up by 1. If everyone does that (and most do), you get a 6:1 ratio.
It'd be far stranger if there wasn't a big difference.
As for Mr. Sharp... for a while I've had an idle fantasy of doing an oral history project on 1990s anime fanfic culture. Nothing that I would've actually been able to pull off, just an idea. He's one of the people I would've liked to interview, if I had any skill for interviewing. From the way he talks, I'm starting to wonder how much longer that'll be even a theoretical possibility.
Pronounced "shy guy."