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Update: it's twelve years now.
Computer. Define "Earth." ...Define "Sea." ........ Define "Hoedown."
Picture the scene. You're just idly surfing the web. You find a webcomic and read the most recent one. You laugh. You decide to read the previous one. That's funny as well. You read a week's worth and laugh at all of them. You feel the urge well up inside you. It's time to go on... an Archive Binge.
The systematic read-through is a common larval stage of more-than-casual fans of a webcomic. Such comics progress very slowly by most standards but online archives make back issue availability unparalleled. Even if reading a single installment takes seconds, a person coming across a new strip finds dozens, hundreds or even thousands of times as much new content.
So he'll sample a few... then a few more... then, if things are really working out, all of them.
The depth of the resulting addiction can be estimated from the disruption of daily life caused and from the degree of withdrawal symptoms once the reader finishes and has to follow the update schedule from then on. More sensible people time themselves and read up a little at a time. These are the people that can eat only one potato chip.
Firefox extensions like Autopager can help by automatically adding the next page as you scroll, so you don't have to click on links. For some of them you need to be quite technically minded, though.
The site Archive Binge lets you subscribe to a webcomic's archive via an RSS feed at a rate you choose, allowing you to binge at your own pace.
Archive Binge is common for first timers of this wiki, (and the other one) as XKCD has pointed out. It is also an increasingly common phenomenon with regard to TV shows, now that it is possible to buy whole seasons of a Long Runner on DVD.
It is not unusual for fans who have already been following a series to undertake several more archive binges, often initiated by an Archive Trawl.
Contrast with Archive Panic. Compare Browser Narcotic for the non-linear equivalent.
Webcomics Long Runners for a list of especially binge-worthy comics.
Examples:
- Newcomers to anime often fall victim to this, due to the sheer amount of (fansubbed) material readily available on the Internet.
- Archive Binging makes reading long arcs easier, cutting down on Arc Fatigue and eliminating the need to wait a week for the next installment.
- Using OneManga, Mangafox, or other online hosts of scanlated mangas has a very good chance of turning into an Archive Binge.
- twowords: detective conan.
- It's Walky! as shown by the picture up there. It's especially bad because It's Walky has a rather detailed plot.
- MS Paint Adventures will take days to read since it is often updated with 10-15 individual pages of actions every day, with only few breaks.
- Older Webcomics that had 5-7 comics a week fall into this category.
- Pity on the one who decides to just now get into Sluggy Freelance. Usually a comic a day for over ten years. It will be a long time before you see the sun.
- Girl Genius is a rather interesting example. Initially, the comic was split into two sections: the 101 beginner's section, which started from the beginning, and the "Advanced" class, for those who had been following the comic since it was originally released in print. Both sections were updated three times a week. In July 2007, the 101 section finally caught up to the beginning of the "Advanced" section, which resulted in a mass simultaneous Archive Trawl/Binge by those, such as this editor, who had been reading the 101 comics. This both exceeded the site's monthly bandwidth and caused the server to crash.
- Lampshaded in F@NB0Y$.
- Charby the vampirate forces you to do this, so cancerously numerous are the characters... and unlike some amateurs, the author will keep track of every single one of them correctly and will give us time to be emotionally attached before she gets around to killing them off so the archive binge is as necessary as it is recommended purely to get full emotional stress when the killing begins!
- Irregular Webcomic shows how to do it wrong. (At this point, newcomers to Irregular Webcomic can expect to go through multiple Archive Binges—they'll find a theme they like, start reading the archive and then realize that in order to understand it you have to read this other them too and then to understand that one you have to read this one and...)
- Schlock Mercenary has been running like clockwork 7 days a week, 365 days a year for over NINE YEARS. Go on, you know you want to.
- The only time updates were halted was when the servers hosting the site were flood-damaged. The comics for those particular days were hosted on an emergency server, and were posted only a few hours late. Mr. Tayler has a record to uphold, after all.
- Schlock Mercenary makes it unnecessarily easy for even experienced Schlockers to do this, as the sidebar contains a 'random strip' button that throws you back into the archives.
- User Friendly has been running for over TWELVE years (anniversary was November 17 2009) and been doing 7 comics a week (Sundays usually larger than the Mon-Sat & in colour), 365 days a year. Those who REALLY want an archive binge can start here.
- Count Your Sheep has a strip almost every day, starting in early June of 2003 and continuing today. Not only that, Adis, the author, has at least two other strips that he also updates in addition to CYS. What a dynamo...
- Misfile is only (only?) a thousand pages or so at this point, but more than a few people who have lost sleep due to this trope.
- Good luck trying to Archive Binge at mezzacotta. It might take a while, with comics for every day back to 1st January, 9999999999999 BC (according to the proleptic Gregorian calendar).
- Just for sake of simplicity, the amount of strips that are there is 3650000000732555 strips ((9999999999999+2008)*365) without including leap years, and assuming ideal condition that you can read 1 strip per second, which makes it 31536000 strips per year (no leap year, still). The amount of time to finish the whole archive is 115 million years! Yep, that 10^8 years you need to read to finish it. (Did you like the shading on the strip 1.546 X 10^5 series? My brother worked on those).
- Newshounds started in 1997 and is running in the form of the creatively named Newshounds II. Needless to say, it takes a while to wade through it.
- Funny Farm has just ended. It has lasted for 9.5 years. And it updated every, single day. There were only a few months in which he didn't update every day. Instead he updated 4 days a week for a month or two, then 5 days a week for a month or two, and then back to every day.
- Worse, the entire archive has been removed so he can post the 9.5 years worth of 7 days a week over 5 days with commentary. So the weekend strips tend to rest on weekdays now. It's no longer an archive binge, more an archive wait.
- What's great though is that in deleting them all it disrupted people who WERE doing an archive binge and now they have to wait to find out what happens..
- The Class Menagerie had ran for a little while, and the archive binge doesn't take as much as some strips like Newshounds and Funny Farm (Which it has crossed over with). Unfortunately, the strips are listed in the archive out of order so it's rather odd to see the "introductory" strips right after you finished several notable-sized story arcs. To make matters worse, some of the strips are even repeated. (The crossover with Newshounds shows up twice if one reads the archive from the beginning)
- Sinfest is another 7 days a week 365 days a year strip, that has been running for just over eight years (with some gaps). However, Tatsuya Ishida seems to be fond of occasionally going back to earlier one-shot comics and giving them sequels (the Politically Incorrect Fringe Rangers are probably the best example; now up to their sixth iteration, often over a year apart). This inevitably leads to the reader going "wait, what, when was the first one?", and heading backwards a couple of years to refresh whose memory. Then remembering how much who loved the arc after that, and continuing from there. Recursive archive binging. Not pretty.
- Many new fans of Yu Me Dream have Archive Binged the 500+ page comic in one night.
- And Shine Heaven Now has been going up six days a week since 2003; even the author's hiati use Guest Strip filler. New readers have been known to lose a weekend there.
- Worse yet is that it uses Hellsing TV series and Read or Die continuity.
- Zelda Comic has 306 strips that are all fairly funny and can take a few hours to get through. Then you discover that it has an updating schedule that makes erosion look like the Road Runner. In fact by now it appears to have stopped entirely.
- Tally Road ran 7 days a week for much of its first year, and dropped back to weekdays without a break—at nearly 400 strips all of which are part of a continuing story loaded with Chekhovs Gun, it is a prime candidate for this trope, partly because it continues at the 5-a-week pace, and partly because the site offers numerous widgets for skipping back to a previous weekday or story arc.
- Sequential Art has an interesting page... it starts on the page after the last one you read every time you go to it. This makes it much easier to get through the 500+ strips in an Archive Trawl instead of one big Archive Binge.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal hands down. Then there's the "Classic Smbc"...
- SMBC is the worst. With its addicting humor and a DAILY UPDATE you're in for a binge that could last a week.
- The Cyantian Chronicles: Archive Binge gets paired with its sister trope, Archive Panic. Akaelae alone is up to 1100+ individual updates. Thankfully, there's a monthly archive which condenses everything into proper pages instead of the individual updates.
- Sam And Fuzzy took this experienced webcomic binger several days to read through. To put this into perspective, she also read the 1200+ archives of Misfile in about three hours.
- There's over eight hundred The Book Of Biff comics, and they get updated every weekday.
- Dominic Deegan. Aagh. Ten-hour-straight archive binge only to find out that there's a huge hatedom surrounding the comic.
- Slightly Damned requires a long archive binge. The fact that it's a continuous storyline that references previous happenings frequently makes it worse.
- Acrobat is better when you read the issue(s) as a whole.
- 8-Bit Theater has been running since 2001, and has over 1,100 strips.
- Screencap comics DM Of The Rings and Concerned (based on Lord Of The Rings and Half Life) are mercifully (relatively) short and now complete, making an archive binge relatively painless, meaning the elimination of merely hours of productive time rather than days or weeks. However, Darths And Droids, inspired by the above, looks set to run for many, many years to come, taking over 320 strips just to get a bit over halfway through Episode II. On that basis it'll take well over 1,200 strips to do all six movies.
- You'll find yourself doing this from time to time with Acrobat.
- www.bzpower.com 's The Editorialist made a series called Psycho Dogs and Carbonated Beverages. It has over 300 strips. They even lampshaded this trope in one comic.
- American Elf, an autobiographical webcomic by and about James Kochalka, began in October of 1998 and as of 2010 it is still updating every single day of the year. To put this into perspective, Kochalka has a five-year-old son. The archives of this comic are longer than his son's entire life.
- Order Of The Stick has 701 comics in it's archive as of this writing - hefty, but not gigantic. But... each strip is the size of a standard comic book page (sometimes two). So with each strip 3-8 times as long as with most webcomics... Well, you're gonna be a while.
- Questionable Content has snared a few newcomers into this with the loveable characters and indie references. Not that I read from #1 to #1100 over two nights or anything...
- This is ridiculously easy with Let's Plays. Screenshots aren't too bad, but the long video ones...
- The 10-minute video time limit of You Tube, the most commonly used host for Let's Plays, doesn't particularly help either. This is how two hours of gameplay gets spread across 12 videos, and how veteran LP uploaders can rack of ridiculous statistics like having on average a new video uploaded every 10 minutes.
- Speaking of Youtube.. The Amazing Atheist's videos are an example of this. He does on average 1 video a day and has 664 videos.
- Subverted with NES game Let's Plays. Most of these games are incredibly short, and last for a short time. One Youtube user managed to complete Super Mario Bros. in 5 minutes, another played Megaman 2 and completed it in a week (submitting 1 video a day).
- TV Tropes, of course.
- The Cracked.com Photoshop Contest Archive, there goes your afternoon, and your evening, and your night, and your morning, and your noon,... and your afternoon.
- Even websites about comics succumb to this, such as The Comics Curmudgeon. C'mon, I dare you to not keep flipping back through the archives of commentary.
- The Anime Motivational Posters thread at Crunchyroll. First you see an anime you recognize, then you see one that's really smart, then you start to notice the hilarious banter between the moderator and the regulars, and before you know it, you've gone 200 pages. The fact that it grows around 5 to 10 pages a day does not help.
- This is frequently caused by Survival Of The Fittest: over one hundred characters, each with their own unique storyline spanning almost a year of RPing. That's a hell of a lot of archive to get through, and the hours can be quickly whiled away reading the stories of a few characters you like, let alone the whole lot.
- Half the point in Board Hunting on Game FA Qs.
- The Whateley Universe site tends to cause this in some... which can be frustrating, or enlightening, when one reads five variations on the same story from different viewpoints.
- Archive binges can get ludicrous when applied to text-heavy mediums, like blogs. Long-running, text-heavy, frequently-updated blogs can easily take your free time for a week to properly binge. Of course, this also applies to series of novels, newspaper columns, and other similar media, but blogs tend to be the easiest to access.
- Strategically keying up all nine-plus hours of Red Vs Blue so it can be watched in one marathon session. A bandwidth-intensive mission though.
- Loading Ready Run can easily qualify. Over 300 videos (most of season 1 is unavailable, but the bonus vids easily make up the difference), averaging, oh say, 6 minutes a piece. That's over 30 hours folks.
- SCP Foundation.
- Similar to the "alien binges on human encyclopedia" examples but on a much much larger scale: You upload absolutely everything humanity knows into Planet in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri in order to make it not kill off the entire species.
Websites
- ZME Science may be a fairly sensationalistic website, but they are quite good at linking to existing articles on the site that are interesting, and before you know it you've got 30 tabs on the go from topics from sex to jellyfish.
- TED, a yearly conference, places most of the recorded presentations on its website under the Creative Commons license—and has over 500 listed as of this writing. Good luck getting through them all in under a month.
- Not Always Right has thousands of stupid customer quotes.
- The Daily Coyote has updated every day and includes archives back from when Shreve Stockton first started to take care of the coyote we know as Charlie.
- Retail Hell Underground likewise has a rather funny archive binge.
Newspaper Comics
- Thanks to online archives of traditional print comics on comics.com and gocomics.com, the websites of the two biggest newspaper comic syndicates in the United States, you can put traditional pre-Web favorites like Peanuts and Garfield on there too. Bonus points awarded, since many of these comics and their archives stretch back decades.
- Got bored once and wrote a script that downloaded every single Doonesbury. That strip has existed since 1970 (though there was a 22 month hiatus in The Eighties). Took me ages to get through it, but my constant research on the Other Wiki to get the jokes means that I am probably technically qualified as a political scientist now.
- If you start reading with a vague idea of what was happening at the time, the jokes are somewhat accessible. For example, I had vague knowledge of Watergate but the names Mark rattled off on his radio show never fazed me (in spite of being unfamiliar) because I knew why they were funny. In fact, I've learned more about the '70s and '80s from archive-binging Doonesbury than I have from school.
- And such a well-balanced political education, too...
- Blondie has been running since 1930.
- Adam@Home featured this when Adam stumbled upon Lostpedia
Fan Fic
- Undocumented Features. This fic started in early 1992, is still going strong today, and has several hundred stories with over 20 megs of text.
- The Mad Scientist Wars has been going on for over a year and a half now, and has managed a huge number of pages with several highly complicated plots, and character backgrounds, and running gags... not even *counting* the Lounge (where the creators talk), The mad sci Tales (short pieces to do with MSW), and... so on. To the point where a summary has been worked on.
- Gaedhal's "Queer Theories" has been going for almost a decade now.
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